On 20 February 1957, a grim-faced Dwight D. Eisenhower told a national television audience that America would support United Nations sanctions unless Israel pulled out of Gaza and all other Egyptian territory seized during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Stunned by this diplomatic thunderbolt, the Israelis quickly agreed to withdraw their forces. Yet ten years later, when a preemptive war against the Arabs brought Israel not only Gaza but also Jordan's West Bank and Syria's Golan Heights, the United States acquiesced. For two decades, this reversal of U.S. policy has usually been regarded as the handiwork of one man—Lyndon B. Johnson. Observers as diverse as Edward Tivnan, Cheryl Rubenberg, and I. L. Kenen, for example, have contended that Washington's tilt toward Tel Aviv during the mid-1960s stemmed in large measure from deepening ties between the Johnson White House and what many have come to call “the Israel lobby.” Scholars such as Ethan Nadelmann and William Quandt, on the other hand, have downplayed Johnson's preoccupation with interest-group politics and emphasized instead his admiration for Israel's muscular doctrine of self-defense. Rare is the author who, like Donald Neff, has been able to capture the blend of domestic and diplomatic considerations that prompted Johnson to cement the special relationship with Israel. Rarer still is someone like Steven Spiegel, who has linked Johnson's pro-Israel policies to initiatives launched by his two predecessors in the Oval Office.

Historians of Muslim societies have observed that, in principle, the strict application of the Islamic rules of inheritance would result in the progressive fragmentation of capital. Although technically correct, the observation fails to take into account the fact that the Islamic inheritance rules are but part of a larger and flexible Islamic inheritance system that also includes bequests, gifts inter vivos, family endowments, dowries, fictitious sales, and other modes for the devolution of property. This larger system has served Muslims, rich and poor, for over 1,400 years, although it operates differently in different places. The most important component of the Islamic inheritance system arguably has been the family endowment, known among the Malikis as ḥabs (popularly, habous) and elsewhere as waqf ahlī. This institution came into existence in the first Islamic century, in part because the Islamic inheritance rules proved too constraining, and soon became an integral component of the Islamic legal system. It allows a proprietor to transform immovable property such as a house or field into a perpetual endowment for one or more beneficiaries and subsequent generations of descendants; the property thereafter may not be bought, sold, or inherited. The founder designates the initial beneficiaries and defines the strategy according to which usufructory rights pass from one generation to the next. Thus, the founder may control the devolution ofendowment revenues for many generations after his or her death.

During the last three or four decades, modern scholarship has increasingly come to recognize Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafiʿi (d. 820) as having played a most central role in the early development of Islamic jurisprudence. It was Joseph Schacht who, more than anyone else, demonstrated Shafiʿi's remarkable success in anchoring the entire edifice of the law not only in the Qurʾan, which by his time was taken for granted, but mainly, and more importantly, in the traditions of the Prophet. Shafiʿi's prominent status has been further bolstered by the fact that he was the first Muslim jurist ever to articulate his legal theory in writing, in what has commonly become known as al-Risāla.

The history and development of land tenure in Iran have been affected by many factors, including climatic conditions, scarcity of water, lack of security, widespread tribalism, and legal and administrative confusion. In addition to limitations in resources, political instability in the premodern period molded systems of land tenure in Iran. Changes of dynasty were frequent and usually followed by the confiscation and redistribution of land. The Qajar dynasty (1788–1925), which came to power after a long period of anarchy and civil war, continued that general pattern. There were three classes of land ownership in Iran in this period: waqfs (religious endowments), arbābī (land owned by large landlords), and khāliṣah (state-owned lands). This last category was composed of lands confiscated by the government as punishment for rebellion or failure to pay taxes. As land was often the only form of wealth landlords had, the threat of government confiscation was an instrument of control as well as a source of revenue for the state. The khāliṣah were usually rented out on long-term leases or were granted as ṭuyul, that is in lieu of services rendered or salaries deferred. The khāliṣah were also in some instances farmed directly by the government. These lands were cultivated by peasants under conditions similar to those of the arbābī lands. They were scattered throughout the country and were also subject to various local and regional variations in agricultural taxes.

In the first half of the 1970s, Egypt turned away from the Soviet Union and initiated an economic open-door policy. Since then, the United States, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank have encouraged comprehensive reforms that would make Egypt an outward-looking market-oriented capitalist economy in which the private sector plays a dominant role. While the Egyptian economy had gone in that direction between 1974 and 1990, it had fallen far short of what they were looking for. In lengthy negotiations with the IMF, Egypt had, in spite of strong pressure, remained unwilling to implement many elements in this orthodox reform package. At the same time, most observers agreed that the government's own policies were not successful: living standards declined while the foreign debt grew rapidly, undermining the country's political independence. Analysts attributed this resistance to reform in the face of foreign pressure to a mix of domestic and foreign factors.

On a bright day in January 1987, my host in the Awlad ʿAli bedouin community in Egypt in which I had been doing research invited me to accompany him on a con dolence call. He knew how enthusiastic I was about visiting people who stillcamped in traditional tents in the desert, and this set of families, he assured me, lived in a beautiful area. The group's patriarch had died twenty days ago, but my host had been too busy to go so only his younger brothers had paid their respects. He had just heard, though, that the bereaved family was upset he had not come himself. So we drove off in his car, with his two cowives in the back seat, stop ping at the market town nearby to buy a fat sheep to take with us. As they loaded the beast into his car, my host complained about how expensive sheep had be come. The sound of its bleating in the trunk reminded me of trips to weddings, when sheep are also obligatory gifts.

When commentators discuss the Israeli political system, they invariably single it out as the exception in a region otherwise lacking in democratic and representative regimes. Although political philosophers and theorists remind us that the test of de mocracy hinges on, among other things, the way a society treats its minorities and guarantees them civil and political rights in the face of majority opposition, the de bate over what constitutes justice, equality, and freedom is unlikely to be resolved in a discussion centered on abstract principles and their absolute meanings. It is one thing for a society to profess egalitarian values and another to measure the extent to which these values are perceived and experienced by those immediately affected by them. This does not mean that there are no universal standards of justice against which to measure performance of the law. Our point is that the experiential dimen sion of the law is equally relevant, for it mediates between the meaning of the law as derived from abstract principles and the way it is implemented in daily life.

In several Middle Eastern countries, bedouin law, which exists only in an oral tradition, is today applied alongsidethe increasingly used shariʿa and civil law. Jurisdiction among these three judicial systems is compartmentalized, but sometimes categorizing of individual cases is difficult. Bedouin law also differs considerably from one region to another. The bedouin in this study belong to the ʿArab alʿAzazme, the tribe that inhabits the area stretching from Beer-Sheba (Israel) southward. My acquaintance with the southern tribes in the Sde Boqer vicinity dates from 1980. I recorded the first case in 1982, and the second, which helped me substantiate the first, in autumn 1987.

On 8 April 1980, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was executed. His execution arousedno criticism from the West against the Iraqi regime, however, because Sadr had openly supported the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in Iran and because the West was distracted by the turbulence in Iran that followed the revolution. Governments both in the West and in the region were concerned that the Iranian revolution would be “exported,” and they set about eliminating that threat. When Ayatollah Khomeini called upon Muslims in Iraq to follow the example of the Iranian people and rise up against the corrupt secular Baʿthist socialist regime, they interpreted it as the first step in the spread of Islamic radicalism that would eventually lead to the destablization of the whole region.

My interest in the religious lesson (dars) springs from field research on religious life in a Transjordanian village conducted intermittently over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1959 and culminating in a (1989) book on the Muslim preacher and the Islamic sermon (khuṭba). That book did not describe or analyze the dars, but it assumed that its content was distinctive and different from the khuṭba. It expounded practical rather than legal norms of behavior and provided useful information on day-to-day religious obligations, what constituted violations of mores, and the rituals of marriage, birth, and death, rather than conveying meaning through core images and metaphors. The assumption was that the sermon dealt mainly with messages of religious exhortation and the lesson dealt with the legal and ritual aspects of religion. I also assumed that the ethos of the dars allowed ritual freedom and a fair amount of give-and-take between preacher and audience, while the khuṭba was informed by an ethos of ritual order. In terms of rhetoric, I assumed that although the sermon often involved a “transformation of quality [imaginative] space” (the phrase is that of James Fernandez), the lesson did not. Finally, I assumed that the lesson emphasized the preacher's role as “home-town boy” (ibn al-balad) far more than the sermon did, as expressed, for instance, in its dependence on colloquial speech and minimal use of theological themes. The detailed description and analysis below has led me to reconsider these assumptions.

“Does the Arabic novel exist?” With this provocative question, Hilary Kilpatrick begins an article entitled “The Arabic Novel—A Single Tradition?,” in which she makes clear that her question has been inspired both by the established regional approach most critical studies use in dealing with the Arabic novel, and by the absence of a continuous tradition of the novel as a genre in the Arab world. But, while underscoring variety in form, style, and subject, Kilpatrick, keen to provide an answer to her question, concludes in unequivocal terms that the Arabic novel as a single tradition does certainly exist: “It is written in one language, and [has] a shared cultural heritage and recent historical experience common to the whole area [which] providef[s] novelists in different countries with similar material. In this respect the Arabic novel is distinct in its subject matter from the African or German novel, for instance.” Although the conclusion is valid, it is based on his- torical and cultural generalizations rather than on a thorough study of novels from the Arab world. Nor does the platitudinous remark with which the quotation con- cludes help Kilpatrick make her case in a particularly convincing manner. The distinct nature of the Arabic novel, as this study will demonstrate, is best exemplified in what might be called the Arabic Bildungsroman. Its definitive, culturally determined themes and structure, distinctive basic tension, and established literary conventions to my mind suggest the presence in the Arab world of at least this kind of novel.

On 27 February 1958, General Valiollah Qarani, commander of the Iranian army's intelligence staff (G-2), was arrested on charges of engaging in political activity, a practice that was forbidden at the time for all Iranian government employees. Dozens of other Iranians from a variety of political persuasions were also arrested or interrogated by the security forces in connection with Qarani's arrest. In a brief flurry of newspaper stories and official statements, it was alleged that Qarani and his collaborators had been conspiring with an unnamed foreign power—generally understood to be the United States—against the Shah's regime. Qarani was tried in the summer of 1958 and given a three-year prison term. He remained on the margins of Iranian political life until 1979, when he served briefly as chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces in the first postrevolutionary government. He was assassinated in April 1979 by the mysterious Islamic terrorist group Forqan.

Over the past century, most states of the Middle East have attempted to strengthen and centralize their legal systems, often following European models. Egypt undertook one of the first steps in that direction with its mixed-court system. These courts, which had jurisdiction in civil and commercial cases that involved a foreigner, however remotely, operated from 1876 until 1949. That this system could survive the political turmoil of those years, far outliving the circumstances which brought it into being, is remarkable.

As elsewhere in the developing world, the Arabian peninsula has undergone sweeping changes since World War II, with the important difference that the process here has been blessed with unprecedented prosperity and not marred by economic difficulties. To say that the effects of modernization upon the local societies differ as a result from what can be observed in other countries would be to state the obvious. Yet, when it comes to understanding the position and status of contemporary women in the Arabian oil producing countries, prosperity and the particular circumstances around it are rarely considered as crucial variables. The women's situation often is evaluated, mainly if not exclusively, in light of the religious injunctions and traditional norms that govern the female condition in a Middle East that, by the same token, appears curiously monolithic and timeless. There seems to be an assumption that Arabian women are not part of the societies in which they live, and that, by virtue of some unique cultural principle, their condition remains unaffected by the vectors of change that have turned upside down all the other areas of life around them. Hence the general tendency to assess women's opportunities and constraints in terms of what the Qurʾan and Islamic tradition dictate, not in terms of secular and more immediate concerns they may share with the rest of the society. Aside from assuming a spurious dichotomy between the women and their societies, such an approach disregards the historical and material specificity of particular areas in the Muslim world. It also arbitrarily and a priori defines the character of the meeting between “Islamic tradition” and “modernity,” instead of leaving it open to empirical investigation.

In 1918 British and French troops occupied the Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire and by 1920 had expelled the Arab nationalist regime in Damascus and divided the area between themselves as they had agreed to do in the Sykes–Picot treaty signed two years earlier. Out of their share, the French created in 1920 the two Mandates of Syria and Lebanon with their own locally recruited military organization, first called the Syrian Legion and later the Troupes Spéciales, which were combined for both countries.

The Ottomans, after a long period of peace that began in 1740, declared war on Russia in 1768, disputing territory essential to the continued existence of the empire: Moldavia, Wallachia, the Crimea, and Georgia. The war lasted until 1774, during which time the Ottomans proved that they no longer posed a military threat to Europe. The signing of the Küçük Kaynarca treaty of 1774, which granted Tatar independence in the Crimea, was the first instance of an Ottoman cession of a predominantly Muslim territory to a European power, and it provoked an internal crisis and long debate over the future of the empire. The Ottoman administration, especially the scribal bureaucracy, contributed a number of political advice manuals to the debate, which form the core of the following discussion. Four examples have been selected with the purpose of extending the analysis of Ottoman advice literature into the 18th century and testing the assumption of Ottoman inability to accommodate changing political realities.

Any exploration of the wider implications of the 1988 electoral campaign for the Israeli Knesset invites two questions: first, were the surprising conduct and results aberrations? Or were they the effects of underlying forces slowly changing the patterns of Israeli politics? If the latter, then, second, to what extent are such forces controllable by party leaders and at what cost? My contention is that what happened in 1988 did, in fact, herald changes that were not ephemeral but indi cated the beginnings of a shift in the entire Israeli party system.

The year 1844–45 in Damascus province was a dry one, aggravated by a brutal winter frost. Reports of ruined crops and disputes over precious water sources reached the city, where as yet there was still enough to eat. But the city was by no means immune to the drought. It was felt in varying ways, like rising prices and, of all things, a shortage of leeches. Barbers could not get enough of them to meet medical needs, and their prices had risen sharply. So the barbers began smuggling them. An Ottoman market official (mültazim), on noticing that government leech sales for that month had dropped from 45,000 to 7,000, ordered police (tüfenkçi) to confiscate the creatures from barbershops and sold them himself for profit. Conflict between the official and barbers exploded, and each side made its way, as rural peasants and tax collectors had in the crisis, to the ultimate court of appeal in the province, the Majlis Shūrā al-Shām al-ʿAlī, or high advisory council for Damascus province.