SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Singer
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
General Theme ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Common Field

Almost two decades ago, Michael Bonner, Mine Ener, and I organized the first in a series of MESA panels on the general theme of poverty and charity in Middle Eastern contexts. We came to the topic using different chronologies, sources, and approaches but identified a common field of interest in shared questions about how attitudes toward benevolence and poverty affected state and society formation: in early Islamic thought, in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th and 16th centuries, and in khedival Egypt. At that time, we could confidently state that there was very little work in the broad field of Middle East and Islamic studies that focused explicitly on the study of charity and poverty.

Importing Modernity: European Military Missions to Qajar Iran

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Cronin
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
State Building ◽  
New Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Military Organization ◽  
Indirect Control

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the Middle East and North Africa first began to attract the sustained attention of European imperialism and colonialism, Arab, Ottoman Turkish, and Iranian polities began a protracted experiment with army modernization. These decades saw a mania in the Middle East for the import of European methods of military organization and techniques of warfare. Everywhere, in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Egypt, and Iran, nizam-i jadid (new order) regiments sprang up, sometimes on the ruins of older military formations, sometimes alongside them, unleashing a process of military-led modernization that was to characterize state-building projects throughout the region until well into the twentieth century. The ruling dynasties in these regions embarked on army reform in a desperate effort to strengthen their defensive capacity, and to resist growing European hegemony and direct or indirect control by imitating European methods of military organization and warfare. Almost every indigenous ruler who succeeded in evading or warding off direct European control, from the sultans of pre-Protectorate Morocco in the west to the shahs of the Qajar dynasty in Iran in the east, invited European officers, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as formal missions, to assist with building a modern army. With the help of these officers, Middle Eastern rulers thus sought to appropriate the secrets of European power.

EFRAIM KARSH AND INARI KARSH, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Pp. 419. $29.95 cloth.

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-565
Author(s):  
Charles D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Promotional Campaign ◽  
The 19Th Century

The subject of a promotional campaign by Harvard University Press, Empires of the Sand purports to challenge established scholarship with respect to the drawn-out demise of the Ottoman Empire from 1789 to 1923. The Karshes argue that European imperialism was more benevolent than threatening and coexisted with Middle Eastern imperialisms—Ottoman, Egyptian, or Arab. In their view, European imperial powers “shored up” the Ottoman Empire rather than sought to deprive it of territories under its domain during the 19th century. To be sure, there was some European “nibbling at the edges of empire” (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya), but these incursions had little impact on the Ottomans; Cyprus (1878) is ignored. The only true “infringement on Ottoman territorial stability,” the British takeover of Egypt, happened by “chance not design,” with the blame attributed to Sultan Abdul Hamid's mismanagement of the crisis. The same story of Ottoman incompetence and attempts to manipulate European powers explains Ottoman loss of territory in the Balkans.

scholarly journals Family History in the Middle East

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Ikran Eum
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
The Family ◽  
Family And Household ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Middle East Studies

The study of families and their histories opens up a cross-disciplinary dialogueamong anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists, includingarea specialists. The content of Doumani’s edited book, Family Historyin the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, falls convincinglyinto such disciplines as history, anthropology, Middle East studies,women’s/gender studies, and Islamic studies, since the collection of articlesprovides various indepth case studies drawn both from Islam and frompolitical, economic, legal, and social perspectives.The anthology’s main theme suggests that the family is an entity that,along with the progression of history, evolves continuously. By reconstructingthe family histories of elites and ordinary people in the Middle East fromthe seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the book challenges prevailingassumptions about the monolithic “traditional” Middle Eastern familytype. Instead, it argues cogently that the structure and boundaries of thesefamilies have always been flexible and dynamic.The book is divided into four sections that explore issues concerningthe family from the perspective of politics, economics, and law. In the firstsection, “Family and Household,” Philippe Fargues, Tomoki Okawara, andMary Ann Fay analyze the structure of the nineteenth-century family andhousehold and illustrate how its formation was influenced by changes in the ...

Christian Martyrs under Islam

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian C. Sahner
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
Mixed Marriages ◽  
Islamic Empire ◽  
To Come ◽  
Early Islamic

How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? This book explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, the book introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity; high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet; and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. The book argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. The book examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim–Christian relations in the centuries to come.

Greeks as perceived by Greek diplomats in the Russian service (using the examples of A. Mustoxidi and C. Basili)

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
Olga Ye. Petrunina ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Greek Population ◽  
Russian Foreign Policy ◽  
Work Activities ◽  
Russian State ◽  
State And Society ◽  
National Movements

The paper deals with the problem of whether the national feelings of diplomats of foreign origin in the Russian diplomatic service in the nineteenth century influenced their performance of their duties. Two diplomats of Greek origin were selected as subjects of research: Angelo Mustoxidi (1786-1861) and Constantine Bazili (1809-1884), who served for many years as consuls in Macedonia and Syria, which were multi-ethnic areas of the Ottoman Empire, where the interests of the Greek population overlapped with the interests of other peoples. The study of their own impressions of the Greeks, the assessment of their work activities by contemporaries and later researchers suggest how their attitudes towards their compatriots influenced their activities. Striving to do their duty to defend the interests of Russia in their region, they could not overcome quite natural sympathies for their compatriots. This did not contradict the state interests of Russia in the 1830s, since at that time the national movements of the Sultan's other Christian subjects did not compete with the Greeks, and the consuls were supposed to patronize Christians regardless of their ethnicity. However, towards the middle of the century the situation began to change. As the nationalist movements of the Balkan Slavs and Middle Eastern Arabs were gaining strength and were increasingly attracting the attention of the Russian state and society, the national feelings of the Greek consuls began to conflict with the priorities of Russian foreign policy.

The Historical Background of the Highly Critical Perception of Christians by the Turkish Society

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-205
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Haede
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Kemal Ataturk ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Christian Population ◽  
Islamic Society

In Turkey, considered a secular and democratic role model for other countries with a Muslim majority, both state and society perceive Christians very critically. There are historical experiences and ideas that contribute to this surprising finding. In the Qur’an, the Holy Book of Muslims, Christians who do not accept the claim of Muhammad to be God’s prophet, are perceived as rebellious liars. Christians in early Islamic society were widely tolerated, but had a status as second-class-citizens. The Ottoman Empire as the front state against the Christian world and the savior of Sunni Islam widely tolerated Christians; thedhimmistatus of Christians as second-class-citizens however was continued in themillet-system. As the power of the Ottomans decreased and Western ideas of nationalism began to influence the Empire during the nineteenth century, the Muslim majority began a search for identity. Secessions of Christian peoples and interference by “Christian” foreign nations triggered more severe clashes between the remaining Christian population and the state. The wide-ranging activities of Western missionaries in the Ottoman Empire were perceived as a part of Western colonialism. During the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, the leaders of the Young Turk movement were motivated by their desperate battle to save a rest of the Empire as a homeland for the Muslim population. The perception of Christians as the enemy of the new Republic was more firmly established. Though Mustafa Kemal Atatürk gave a revolutionary modern and secular character to Turkey, there was an intentional Turkification of society. A study of Turkish newspapers confirms that these perceptions are widely valid until today. Missiology has to help develop an appropriate response of Christians to the situation inside and outside of Turkey.

“NATIONALISM” AND KURDISH NOTABLES IN THE LATE OTTOMAN–EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakan Özoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
World War ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Hard Data ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Late Ottoman

The era culminating in World War I saw a transition from multinational empires to nation-states. Large empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman searched for ways to cope with the decline of their political control, while peoples in these empires shifted their political loyalties to nation-states. The Ottoman Empire offers a favorable canvas for studying new nationalisms that resulted in many successful and unsuccessful attempts to form nation-states. As an example of successful attempts, Arab nationalism has received the attention that it deserves in the field of Middle Eastern studies.1 Students have engaged in many complex debates on different aspects of Arab nationalism, enjoying a wealth of hard data. Studies on Kurdish nationalism, however, are still in their infancy. Only a very few scholars have addressed the issue in a scholarly manner.2 We still have an inadequate understanding of the nature of early Kurdish nationalism and its consequences for the Middle East in general and Turkish studies in particular. Partly because of the subject's political sensitivity, many scholars shy away from it. However, a consideration of Kurdish nationalism as an example of unsuccessful attempts to form a nation-state can contribute greatly to the study of nationalism in the Middle East.

scholarly journals Transnational Experiences

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lene Kofoed Rasmussen ◽  
Lise Paulsen Galal
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Transnational Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Research Seminar ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Basic Insight

Globalisation, migration and modern technology mean that it is possible to talk about today’s society as stretching beyond the borders of nation states. Is this basic insight of transnational studies also valid if the borders are those of a predominantly Muslim Middle East and an increasingly migrant-hostile Europe? If so, what features does the transnational experience of Middle Eastern migrants in Europe have? A number of scholars set out to investigate these questions in a research seminar in September 2006. Gender negotiations and expectations appeared to be central to the transnational experience and was addressed in most of the papers presented at the seminar. Thus the journal Women, Gender and Research (Kvinder, Køn og Forskning) provides an apt arena for taking these questions further. In this special issue of the journal, transnational experiences of families, individuals, networks and organisations are presented by some of the participants in the seminar and other invited contributors.

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