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This combination of anthropology, history, and postmodern theory examines the changing relation of writing and authority in a Muslim society from the late nineteenth century to the present. The creation and interpretation of texts, from sacred scriptures to administrative and legal contracts, are among the fundamental ways that authority is established and maintained in a complex state. Yet few scholars have explored this process and the ways in which it changes, especially outside the Western world. The book brings together intensive ethnography and textual analysis from a wealth of material: Islamic jurisprudence, Yemeni histories, local documents. In exploring the structure and transformation of literacy, law, and statecraft in Yemen, it raises issues that are of comparative significance for understanding political life in other Muslim and nonwestern states as well.

Drawing on ethnography conducted in Israel since the late 1990s, this book considers how power is produced, reproduced, negotiated, and subverted in the contemporary Israeli culinary sphere. The book explores issues such as the definition of Israeli cuisine (a defining element of which is large portions of “satisfying” dishes made from mediocre ingredients), the ownership of hummus, Israel's Independence Day barbecues, the popularity of Italian food in Israel, the privatization of communal Kibbutz dining rooms, and food at a military prison for Palestinian detainees to show how cooking and eating create ambivalence concerning questions of strength and weakness and how power and victimization are mixed into a sense of self-justification that maintains internal cohesion among Israeli Jews. The book concludes by presenting two culinary trends in contemporary Israel that emerge at the intersection of food and power.

In the electronic age, documents appear to have escaped their paper confinement. But we are still surrounded by flows of paper with enormous consequences. In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. What are the implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes? This book explores this question in the routine yet unpredictable realm of the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps, petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations. The author develops a fresh approach to state governance as a material practice, explaining why writing practices designed during the colonial era to isolate the government from society have become a means of participation in it.

This book narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, the book explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized. A work of both anthropology and history, the book demonstrates how the emerging fields of world history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide groundbreaking ways of studying religion, diaspora, and empire. The book interprets biographies, family histories, chronicles, pilgrimage manuals, and religious law as the unified literary output of a diaspora that hybridizes both texts and persons within a genealogy of Prophetic descent. By using anthropological concepts to read Islamic texts in Arabic and Malay, it demonstrates the existence of a hitherto unidentified canon of diasporic literature. The book's conceptual framework and use of documentary and field evidence are combined to present a vision of this vital world region beyond the histories of trade and European empire.

Much of the political turmoil that has occurred in Afghanistan since the Marxist revolution of 1978 has been attributed to the dispute between Soviet-aligned Marxists and the religious extremists inspired by Egyptian and Pakistani brands of “fundamentalist” Islam. In a significant departure from this view, this book contends that—though Marxism and radical Islam have undoubtedly played a significant role in the conflict—Afghanistan's troubles derive less from foreign forces and the ideological divisions between groups than they do from the moral incoherence of Afghanistan itself. Seeking the historical and cultural roots of the conflict, it examines the lives of three significant figures of the late nineteenth century—a tribal khan, a Muslim saint, and a prince who became king of the newly created state. The book explores the ambiguities and contradictions of these lives and the stories that surround them, arguing that conflicting values within an artificially created state are at the root of Afghanistan's current instability. Building on this foundation, the book examines conflicting narratives of a tribal uprising against the British Raj that broke out in the summer of 1897. Through an analysis of both colonial and native accounts, it investigates the saint's role in this conflict, his relationship to the Afghan state and the tribal groups that followed him, and the larger issue of how Islam traditionally functions as an encompassing framework of political association in frontier society.

Reaching beyond sensational headlines, this book offers a three-dimensional portrait of Afghan women. In a series of wide-ranging, deeply reflective essays, scholars, humanitarian workers, politicians, and journalists—most with extended experience inside Afghanistan—examine the realities of life for women in both urban and rural settings. They address topics including food security, sex work, health, marriage, education, poetry, politics, prisoners, and community development. Eschewing stereotypes about the burqa, the contributors focus instead on women's empowerment and agency, and their struggles for peace and justice in the face of a brutal ongoing war. A fuller picture of Afghanistan's women past and present emerges, leading to social policy suggestions and pragmatic solutions for a peaceful future.

Combining ethnography, film criticism, and extensive knowledge of the Middle East, this book presents an examination of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia. The book is interested in why this epic film has been so compelling for so many people for more than three decades. In seeking an answer, it draws from situations in life, biographies of the film's key participants, and analyses of issues relating to class, gender, colonialism, and cultural differences. The result is a book that poses important questions of ethnographic representation and the discourse of power. The book's approach is dialectical, and readings of the film are situated within different historical periods, from the early 1960s to the present. Among the subjects it highlights are travel and colonialism in fieldwork and filmmaking, orientalism in the representation of the Other, and the film's ambiguous handling of masculinity and homosexuality. The book looks at personal reactions to the film at various stages in a life and offers an account of the film's reception by today's high school and college students.

Offering a diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media are as ubiquitous in Cairo and Karachi as in Los Angeles and Detroit. From Persian popular music in Beverly Hills to Egyptians' reaction to a recent film on Gamal Abdel Nasser; from postmodern Turkish novels to the music of an Israeli transsexual singer, the chapters illustrate the multiple contexts of modern cultural production. The unfolding of modernity in colonial and postcolonial societies has been little analyzed until now. In addressing transnational aspects of Middle Eastern societies, the contributors also challenge conventional assumptions about the region and its relation to the West.

This study of modern Turkey is the result of many years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research. The author combines anthropological and historical methods to examine the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in a major region of the country, the eastern Black Sea coast. His most significant finding is that a state-oriented provincial oligarchy played a key role in successive programs of reform over the course of more than two hundred years of imperial and national history. As the author demonstrates, leading individuals backed by interpersonal networks determined the outcome of the modernizing process, first during the westernizing period of the Empire, then during the revolutionary period of the Republic. To understand how such a state-oriented provincial oligarchy was produced and reproduced along the eastern Black Sea coast, the author integrates a contemporary ethnographic study of public life in towns and villages with a historical study of official documents, consular reports, and travel narratives. The book provides a new understanding of the complexities and contradictions of modern Turkish experience.

This innovative multidisciplinary study considers the concept of green from multiple perspectives—aesthetic, architectural, environmental, political, and social—in the Kingdom of Bahrain, where green has a long and deep history of appearing cooling, productive, and prosperous—a radical contrast to the hot and hostile desert. Although green is often celebrated in cities as a counter to gray urban environments, green has not always been good for cities. Similarly, manifestation of the color green in arid urban environments is often in direct conflict with the practice of green from an environmental point of view. This paradox is at the heart of the book. In arid environments such as Bahrain, the contradiction becomes extreme and even unsustainable. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores the landscapes of Bahrain, where green represents a plethora of implicit human values and exists in dialectical tension with other culturally and environmentally significant colors and hues. Explicit in this book is the argument that concepts of color and object are mutually defining and thus a discussion about green becomes a discussion about the creation of space and place.

Muslim preaching has been central in forming public opinion, building grassroots organizations, and developing leadership cadres for the wider Islamist agenda. Based on in-depth field research in Egypt, this book focuses on the preacher and the sermon as the single most important medium for propounding the message of Islam. The book draws on social history, political commentary, and theological sources to reveal the subtle connections between religious rhetoric and political dissent. Many of the sermons discussed were given during the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the book attempts to describe this militant movement and to compare it with official Islam. Finally, the book presents examples of the sermons, so readers can better understand the full range of contemporary Islamic expression.

The development of mass education and the mass media have transformed the Islamic tradition in contemporary Egypt and the wider Muslim world. This book focuses on the historical interplay of power and public culture, showing how these new forms of communication and a growing state interest in religious instruction have changed the way the Islamic tradition is reproduced. During the twentieth century, new styles of religious education, based not on the recitation of sacred texts but on moral indoctrination, have been harnessed for use in economic, political, and social development programs. More recently they have become part of the Egyptian government's strategy for combating Islamist political opposition. But in the course of this struggle, the western-style educational techniques that were adopted to generate political stability have instead resulted in a rapid Islamization of public space, the undermining of traditional religious-authority structures, and a crisis of political legitimacy. Using historical, textual, and ethnographic evidence, the author demonstrates that today's Islamic resurgence is rooted in new ways of thinking about Islam which are based in the market, the media, and the school.