Appearing on the back pages of the Cairo daily newspaper al-Muʾayyad in September 1891 and December 1889, respectively, these brief reports, juxtaposed, encapsulate some central arguments of the books under review. They exemplify everyday resort to state apparatuses for individual or collective ends, and invoke consumption practices viewed as inimical to national health and reputation at a time when the new nationalist press was beginning to voice senses of collective pride, political unease, and anticolonial antagonism. They entail perceptions of transgressed boundaries, wayward actions, or gender-inappropriate behaviors impervious to commonly recognized moral and political authority. They illustrate blurrings of “public” and “private” actions and spaces, whether in the name of public good or for ill, that might have threatened Egyptians’ felt values of moral propriety—the disciplining pull of “respectability”—in urban Egyptian society at that time. And the reportage, publication, and circulation of such stories illustrate (and make) an emerging “public sphere” of narrative, commentary, and reader consumption, simultaneously constructing and interrogating an emerging nationalist master-narrative that placed gender-marked acts and sexual practices, transgressive or not, at the center of national/ist efficacy and perceived threats to it.

The loss of Palestine and the resulting dispersal of Palestinian refugees has had a profound impact on the development of Arabic literature. If independence and revolution in most Arab lands served to catapult poets and writers into new literary themes and forms, the psychological jolt of defeat combined with the sudden physical presence of refugees who could not help but witness that defeat helped decisively to move writers away from earlier romantic themes and flowery language in favor of themes and styles considered to be more realistic. The 1950s and 1960s in particular were times of concern for social realism, and among the educated class there was a growing impatience with art that did not treat the important changes that shook the Arabs at the time.

This book addresses an increasingly salient but still under-studied subject: the relationship between Arab states seeking to maintain and expand political hegemony over their populations and minority communities struggling to maintain their identities in the face of this centralizing and homogenizing thrust. Coming as it does at a time when the shifting balance between states and civil societies continues to dominate both the politics of the Arab world and the intellectual agenda of its students, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the region.

This article discusses the modalities through which religious and secular nongovernmental medical organizations frame their work in relation to their constituencies. It argues that their discourses exemplify a differentiated approach to social work that can be explained in the context of massive aid disbursed to the occupied Palestinian territories. To understand how the political economy of aid impacts the framing of socioreligious movements, this article focuses on a case study of health organizations operating in the Hebron district, where a mixed matrix of charitable organizations, Islamic institutions, and zakat committees work along secular nongovernmental organizations. In the past decade, there seems to have been a revival of charitable organizations, which may shed light on current political victories of the Islamic sector. If Islamic socioreligious movements have been successful in promoting discourses of common good that attract more popular support than secular organizations, it is precisely because such discourses are in open (and sometimes conscious) tension with liberal conceptions such as good governance, strong civil society, and democracy promotion that are relayed generally by secular and professionalized nongovernmental organizations

On November 21, 1914, Ahmed Cemal Pasha departed Istanbul's Haydarpaşa railway station for Damascus. A few weeks prior to his departure—after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary on October 29—Enver Pasha, the minister of war, invited Cemal Pasha to his mansion. At this meeting, Enver Pasha requested that Cemal Pasha, who was then minister of the navy, take up the post of governor-general of the Greater Syrian provinces and assume command of the Fourth Army. Cemal Pasha enthusiastically accepted Enver Pasha's offer to, in his words, “prepare for and carry out an attack on the (Suez) Canal, and also to maintain security and internal order in (Greater) Syria.”1 He secured his existing ministerial post in addition to gaining full authority as the commander of the Fourth Army and governor of the Greater Syrian provinces. Before his train departed from Haydarpaşa, Cemal Pasha addressed the crowd who had gathered there to see him, describing his mission as the “divine but extraordinarily difficult” duty of “saving Egypt from British invaders.”2

On 29 April 2022, the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson published “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine” in support of divestment from Israel.1 In it, the editorial board cited the importance of global solidarity and charges leveled by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch against Israel, of “crimes against humanity.”2 The Crimson clearly had changed its position from 2002, when its staff had published “Do Not Divest from Israel,” regarding the comparison between Israel and “Apartheid-era South Africa so fundamentally flawed as to be offensive.” In twenty years, the conversation on college campuses has indeed changed.3

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 has unleashed a flood of books on the causes and consequences of the rise of political Islam and the failure of Western-supported modernizing states. Ervand Abrahamian's new book is important because it is the first detailed academic work that deals with the conditions of the prisons and the horrors of the criminal system—the torture, the forced confessions, and the executions—in the newly established theocratic state. This book is a testimony to the horrors of self-righteous ideological regimes whose ruling elite claims a monopoly on truth and the knowledge of what is best for its citizens. This is a chilling book that should be read by all scholars and non-scholars who care about human rights.

Admission. Scholars wishing to work in the Archive should write directly to the director of the Department of Youth, Sports, and Cultural Affairs, Cyprus Turkish Federated State, Lefkoşa, Cyprus (for the present, at least, c/o Mersin 10, Turkey). They should define the nature of their proposed research clearly and precisely, although not so specifically as to limit their research; a brief statement regarding their academic background should be included. Limited photocopying and microfilming may be permitted by the director of the Archive. Photocopying is available at the Archive, although it is expensive by American standards. Microfilming is also available locally.