Although this issue of the journal goes out with my name on the masthead as editor, all the pre-production editing was in the expert hands of my predecessor, Juan R. I. Cole, and his able assistant, Alissa Surges. I want to take this opportunity to thank them for their years of service to the journal and to the profession. Juan Cole guided the journal for five years with a remarkable blend of energy, vision, and attention to detail. We all profited from the breadth of his scholarly background and research interests, which bridge many of the geographical, disciplinary, and cultural divides of Middle East studies. During his tenure as the editor, the journal flourished and fulfilled its mission as a journal of record for our field. Juan Cole also left his particular stamp of engagement with current theoretical questions coupled with high-quality empirical research, as exemplified in the special issue he co-edited in May 2002 on nationalism and the colonial legacy. Thanks to his management skills, and those of Alissa Surges, the journal also moved into the electronic world of the 21st century under his watch. I am very grateful for the time and effort they put into developing the databases, office procedures, and filing systems that streamlined the editorial process. I am inheriting a healthy and thriving operation because of their skills and commitment.

In the winter of 1910, the Salonikan Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Tribuna Libera published a plebiscite in which it asked its readers to decide where the future of Ottoman Jewry lay: nationalism, assimilation, or Zionism. The paper's appeal was an effort to settle the battle that had raged in the Judeo-Spanish press of the empire in the preceding eighteen months over the growing clash between Ottomanism and Zionism. According to the paper, the situation was “bordering on fratricide,” threatening to engulf Ottoman Jewry entirely.

In spite of many competing views on peasants, their politics, and the state in 19th-century Egypt, the historiography contains certain striking continuities in its understanding of peasant–state political relations. Historians influenced by Marxism, modernization theory, and nationalism alike have usually seen state and peasantry as sharply distinct and conflicting. Peasants have often been depicted as locked in a struggle against the penetration of state agency into a previously autonomous rural domain. Whether seen as a force for benevolent modernization or for the predatory extraction of conscripts and taxes, the state has regularly been viewed as self-propelled and sui generis, reforming or invading the world of an either passive, silently subversive, or violently revolutionary peasantry. The figure of the tradition-bound, submissive, or apathetic peasant simply marks out a terrain for state agency, albeit an agency obstructed by peasant hostility, irrationality, or resentment. The silently subversive peasant, further, who uses James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak,” merely undermines in antagonistic and wordless fashion projects emanating from above. The revolutionary peasant, finally, becomes the self-generating locus of the nationalist or socialist modern and seeks the violent overthrow of the predatory state, transforming the latter into only the negative—albeit treacherous—terrain on which the positive historical agency of peasants and their allies can work. In short, the existing historiography, while varying the historical role, value, and meaning of peasant and state, preserves both as radically distinct, self-creating, and self-defining collective agents involved in zero-sum and often violent antagonism.

Nationalism insists on the uniqueness of each nation. So, too, does the study of nationalism. For example, Ernest Renan, a cheerleader of nationalism, used the imagery of each nation “hold[ing] one note in the concert of humanity.” Elie Kedourie, who abhorred the excesses of nationalism, similarly identified its essence as a commitment to “the excellence of diversity.” Whether focused on political borders or social solidarity, the concept of the nation necessarily marks insiders with a special status, distinct from all others.

The expert is a quintessential figure of modern bureaucratic rule, offering a “protean image of authority and rational knowledge.” Tracing the development of modern rule, Max Weber describes the emergence in European government of a “professional labor force, specialized in expertness through long years of preparatory training…[and] based on the division of labor” as a “gradual development of half a thousand years.” Different fields, Weber suggests, demanded experts at different moments, but in three areas—finance, war, and law—“expert officialdom in the more advanced states was definitely triumphant during the sixteenth century.” For the British civil service, the triumph of the expert has been located in “the nineteenth-century revolution in government” such that the “modern image of the expert, canonised and criticised, was well established by the 1920s.” With this consolidation of the expert's place in modern rule, it has been generally agreed that, whether for good or for ill, “the expert in the civil service is here to stay.”

Iranian agriculture and rural society have undergone profound socioeconomic and political changes over the past four decades. While recognizing the significant impact of urbanization, economic development, and integration of the rural economy in the market, this paper contends that the land-reform program of the 1960s and the 1979 revolution represent the primary turning points in the rural transformation. Land reform, through intense state intervention, dramatically changed the traditional landlord-sharecropping system (nizam-i arbab-rayati). Peasant uprisings, the forcible occupation of large estates, and the agrarian policies of the postrevolutionary regime have led to the demise of the urban agricultural bourgeoisie and the empowerment of the peasants. There has been a disintegration of large-scale public and private agricultural production systems, including agribusinesses, farm corporations, and the agricultural production cooperatives developed under the shah's regime.

An essential principle of health posited by the modern Iranian middle class since its rise at the dawn of the 20th century was a strong link between a healthy body and a sound mind. This thesis was built on a reinterpretation of the maxim, aql-i salīm dar jism-i sālim ast (a sound mind lives in a healthy body), which drew on modern Western biomedical sciences, specially neurophysiology. Rather than mirroring a simple history of transfer of knowledge (from a creative West to a passive East), this maxim tells a fascinating, multifaceted story of acculturation. Indeed, the general thesis at the base of the present text holds that biomedical sciences were adapted in interaction with problems seen to be created by, and conditions believed to be necessary for, Iran's modernization (tajaddud). Shifting the focus of modern Iranian medical history to the intricate interplay between global and internal contexts and forces, this thesis maintains that these interactive patterns were directed at physical, mental, and moral health and disease. They thereby formed a strategy to “medicalize” modernization, addressing its central problem: how to accelerate it without causing social order to collapse, and thus to propel Iran into the ranks of the “civilized nations.” This novel strategy rose in the context of the modern middle class's distress about the chaos surrounding the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and the failure of its political focus to advance progress—that is, the belief that change is conditioned on science-driven sociocultural reforms. It was embedded in international colonial structures of scientific knowledge and political power yet, at the same time, was decisively shaped by internal problems. The content of biomedical sciences and medicine was adopted from Western countries. But their contextual objective—the management of modernization—though drawing on late-19th-century Western “medical model(s) of cultural crisis,” was decisively geared to meet Iran's specific circumstances.

Scarcity of information can present a difficulty for writing a biography. Abundance of information can do the same. As perspectives multiply, a subject sometimes becomes clearer; other times it becomes complicated. In Islamic studies, for example, the more sources that are uncovered on central historical figures such as the Prophet Muhammad, al-Hasan al-Basri, and al-Ghazzali, the more scholars are in dispute over their biographies. Yet historical figures of the second degree—those individuals whose biography has not yet attracted a separate study but who are studied for their role in larger questions—are often portrayed with deceptive simplicity. Scholars tend to stick to the most coherent and simple biography and move on to the question at hand. Such coherence and simplicity, however, often is not found in the sources.

On 15 July 1935, a group of residents in the small port town of Aqaba sent a rough handwritten petition to the prime minister of Transjordan. Its clumsy script betrayed the humble origins of its signatories. Inscribing their destitution in virtually every clause, the petitioners wrote: Because we, the common people and notables of Aqaba and its bedouins (ahālī wa-wujūh al- al-Aqaba wa-urbānuha) are in a state of poverty, our town being very poor, and since our poverty and our wretched conditions are not hidden from Your Eminence, our desire is for the cancellation of the municipality of Aqaba. Our town does not merit a municipality because it is poor and small, and many of its people have migrated over the past two years to Maan for the sake of making a living, and only the very poor remain in it. And the municipal administration of Aqaba has cut off from us the bedouins and others we depend on. Last year, they estimated the municipal budget at £P 60 [Palestine pounds] and it was not collected justly. Therefore we ask the mercy of Your Eminence in cancelling the municipality.

But about this same time, we were exposed to an even stranger kind of rhetoric, the rhetoric of the Middle Eastern world…. This was a rhetoric that seemed to play by none of the rules that had come down to us from a tradition of rhetoric that had been practiced by the reigning nations of the Western World for over 2000 years. And then there is the distinctive rhetoric of the Oriental world…. But those are rhetorics that we still have to study and analyze and codify.

—Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (1990), viii.

Dissent between the clerical establishment and lay followers is not an infrequent phenomenon and has often focused on church appointments, leadership, and political issues. In the Middle East, such tensions are found between churches usually led by European clergy and their predominantly Arab congregations. Here we combine historical and geographical research methods to investigate a neglected source of contention—that of property held by the church. We reconstruct, analyze, and present detailed case studies of long-term disputes over real estate between the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem (its Greek patriarch and clergy), and its lay Arab community, known as Rum Orthodox, Roman Christians, or Greek Orthodox, and which number about 71,000 members.

Between 1936 and 1939, the Egyptian Medical Association held a series of forums on birth control and the population problem; the first full-length book on Egypt's population problem was published; the first life tables for Egypt were calculated; a group of university professors organized under the rubric of the Happy Family Society to discuss the need for planned families; the first fatwa on birth control in the 20th century was issued by the mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Abd al-Majid Salim; and the Ministry of Social Affairs was created, part of its mandate being to study the population problem.

The tribe was the main solidarity group in Transjordan on the eve of the establishment of the modern state in 1921. As in many tribal societies in the Middle East, the creation of the state system in the aftermath of World War I brought about dramatic changes in the lives of tribespeople, and nomads in particular. The emergence of colonial governments with centralizing ambitions; the creation of international borders; rapid economic changes; and the spread of national ideologies were among the factors that threatened the survival of old tribal order and indeed put enormous pressures on tribespeople everywhere. Nevertheless, in the case of Transjordan, twenty-five years after the process of state-formation and modernization had been launched, tribal identities had not disappeared. Rather, tribes remained important social and cultural categories, having adapted to new realities and transformed in the face of them. Moreover, in the course of this process, the tribal population of Transjordan became the backbone of the Hashemite regime and among the most enthusiastic supporters of the kingdom. Even today, tribal identities, though significantly modified since the days of the Mandate, continue to play a major role in Jordanian politics. Scholars of modern Jordan have acknowledged the special relations between the tribes and the Hashemite monarchy. They have also emphasized the centrality of tribes and tribal political culture in contemporary Jordan. The historical roots of these phenomena, however, deserve further exploration.

With the advent of the 20th century, Sufism found itself under increasing attack in many parts of the Muslim world. In previous centuries, mystical movements had played a prominent role in the struggle for the revival of Islam and occasionally, where governments were weak or nonexistent, also in actual resistance to European encroachment. In the wake of the increasing consolidation of the state and the spread of Western rationalism, however, Sufis came to be regarded as a major cause of the so-called decline of Islam and an obstacle to its adaptation. In the Arab world, this anti–Sufi feeling was generally associated with the Salafiyya trend. The Salafi call for a return to the example of the forefathers (al-salaf al-**sdotu**āli**hdotu**) amounted to a discrediting of latter-day tradition, which was described as cherishing mystical superstition as well as scholarly stagnation and political quietism. Under the burden of this critique, and as a response to the general expansion of education and literacy, Sufism has been forced to assimilate new ideas and to make room for a new form of organization; the populist Islamic association. These developments culminated in the establishment of the Society of the Muslim Brothers.

Jihane al-Halafawi's small apartment above a barbershop in Alexandria is exceedingly orderly, a cool oasis on a sweltering summer afternoon. Plant leaves brush up against curtains undulating with the breeze from the nearby Mediterranean. As she walks into the living room with a tray full of cakes and tea, al-Halafawi is the picture of a kindly Egyptian mother, a genuine smile gracing her youthful face. But when this fifty-year-old mother of six and grandmother announced her candidacy for Egypt's parliamentary elections in fall 2000, the state geared up a massive security force outside polling stations; leftists shrugged her off as a “front” for her husband; and state feminists dedicated to the electoral empowerment of women were silent. When Halafawi outperformed her ruling-party rival in the first round, despite rigging, the Interior Ministry promptly stepped in and canceled the results on the pretext of respecting an earlier court ruling postponing the elections.

In the letters he wrote from Aleppo in 1600, the British merchant William Biddulph described the daily life of this dynamic center of the East–West trade, the city where spices and silks from India and Iran were exchanged for English broadcloth and New World silver in one of the world's largest covered bazaars. He also presented Muslim practices and religious beliefs, emphasizing those features that seemed to him most unusual and reprehensible. His contempt fell firmly on a fixture of the early modern Islamic street, the ecstatic, antinomian Muslim saint: They also account fooles, dumbe men, and mad men,…Saints. And whatsoever such mad men say or doe…or strike them, and wound them, yet they take it in good part, and say, that they shall have good lucke after it. And when such mad men die, they Canonize them for Saints, and erect stately Monuments over their graves, as we have here many examples, especially of one (who being mad) went always naked, whose name was Sheh Boubac…they…erected an house over his grave, where…they are Lampes burning night and day, and many idle fellows (whom they call Darvises) there maintained to looke unto his Sepulchre…

For more than a decade, post-Islamism has been at the center of a major debate in French academia regarding the historical evolution of Islamism. The concept was put forth in the early 1990s as an attempt to apprehend the apparent crisis within many Islamic movements of the Middle East. In Iran, the increasingly authoritarian character of the Islamic republic, as well as the predominance of the mullahs' discretionary powers, seemed to undermine the credibility of the Islamist alternative. Elsewhere, as in Egypt and Algeria, the advent of an Islamic order never came to pass and appeared illusory. Islamists were unable to cope with the repression and the containment policies of secular states. Therefore, a number of French scholars argued that Islamism—that is, the holistic, populist, and often revolutionary ideology whose goal is the establishment of an Islamic state and the governance of all aspects of society according to Islamic principles—had reached a dead end. Ruhollah Khomeini, Sayyid Qutb, and Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi were passé. An era of post-Islamism was dawning.

Economic historians have recently made great progress in studying the past by applying the tools and concepts of New Institutional Economics. A fundamental element of this achievement has been to go beyond the narrow confines of previous approaches. Whereas the application of narrow neoclassical economic analysis typically lacked an appreciation for the role of history and focused primarily on the efficiency properties of institutions, the new trend has been to integrate economic and historical approaches for richer and more comprehensive explanations of how and why history mattered. Similarly, whereas unsystematic historical approaches lacked sound theoretical bases and proceeded narrowly by focusing on how previous customs and traditions were responsible for the existence of an institution, the new approach has been also to examine the properties of the institution that ensured its survival.

Two years after naming himself a Black Man as opposed to an American in his 1964 expression of alienation from mainstream, white U.S. society, Muhammad Ali announced, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” In doing so, he powerfully linked his racialized status in the United States to his unwillingness to fight a war against other similarly racialized, marginalized, and disempowered people. He thus embraced a message of Third World solidarity as a First World resident with a similarly subaltern status in “his own” country. The second epigraph shows Ali's effort to articulate his sense of belonging within the United States, thus pushing at the limits of both his “Black” and “American” identities. The two epigraphs demonstrate the contradiction in the way in which African Americans can be identified as both “Black” and “American” in the United States, here in statements by one of Black America's most iconic public figures. This paradox of African American identity will be explored in this article in relation to two Arabic literary texts: Adonis's “Qabr min ajl New York” (“A Grave for New York”) and Radwa Ashour's al-Rihla:ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika (The Journey: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Student in America), both of which are particularly concerned with Black Americans and firmly rooted in the tradition of commitment literature, which sees them as brothers and sisters in solidarity with Third World struggles.

This article aims to explore state–society relations during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) through the filter of a unique conjunction of state and society—that is, various social groups' voluntary activities, especially fund-raising campaigns with philanthropic and patriotic purposes, often initiated by the palace itself. These campaigns offer fruitful case studies for the study of state–society relations and the dispositions of the public sphere in the late Ottoman era. In light of these activities and their importance for understanding late Ottoman society, the public sphere in this context may be best defined as a dynamic political realm where social and political groups pursued their particular interests; at the same time, it was “the public domain where authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular review, both inside and outside the accepted terms of the given discourse.” Within the parameters of this definition, which is descriptive of the multiple agencies and fragmented nature of the public sphere in this period, this article focuses on how the Hamidian regime sought to unify this fragmented social and political space by promoting public participation in voluntary activities in the broader political arena.