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This book provides a case study of slavery and its abolition in Ottoman Tunisia, one of the smallest countries in North Africa and the first to abolish the longstanding institution of slavery in the Muslim world during the modern period. The book combines a range of Tunisian and European archival data, travellers' accounts, and Arabic legal documents and source materials, directing much-needed attention not only to the Tunisian elements within slavery and abolition discourses, but also to those in west and central Sudan and Europe, especially in the Mediterranean basin. It argues that the major force driving abolition was Tunisian rulers' pragmatic response to increased European economic and political intervention in North Africa—first with the 1816 prohibition against enslaving Christians for ransom and especially after the French occupation of Algeria in the 1830s. The urgency of safeguarding the independence of Tunisia, more than efforts at selective “modernization” or “reform,” triggered the move toward abolition and the emancipation of the enslaved black population, which was achieved in 1846. By assessing how European capitalism along with political pressure and dynamics in the western Mediterranean shaped the abolition of the trans-Saharan slave trade and slavery in Tunisia, this book attempts to bridge the historiographical gap that treats the Atlantic and Saharan slave trades as separate entities. It offers wider regional perspectives and shows how the Tunisian model of abolition is useful for viewing slavery in the Islamic context during the modern period.

This book presents a new framework for understanding the history of Algeria and its global connections from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It focuses on the movement of people within, but especially from and back to Algeria. These include immigrants crossing borders for purposes of work, education, or diplomatic or military service, and refugees fleeing political or religious oppression. This framework helps to bring out long term continuities in Algerian history and create an understanding of these continuities in a geopolitical context. The book examines both the political and economic factors that have affected Algerian border crossing, and the legal and institutional elements that have shaped it including international refugee law, trans-national Islamic movements, and great power conflicts. Algerians are understood as forming a global frontier society coming from an area where the Western and Islamic worlds have long experienced intensive interaction, sometimes resulting in a “clash of civilizations,” but at other times fostering interfaith dialogue and cultural syncretism. The book examines ways in which Algerians have interacted with “others”, notably through intermarriage, political alliance, and shared participation in music or theatre. The Algerian experience is viewed in a long term historical context in which there are cycles of opening when civil society is insulated from government authority, and of closing, with efforts to impose government control through means including arbitrary detention and torture.

This book chronicles the sociopolitical history and development of violence in the Sudan, and explores how it has crippled the state, retarded the development of a national identity, and ravaged the social and material life of its citizens. Beginning with the development of colonial states in Sudan, it establishes a solid base of discussion through an assessment of the country under Turko-Egyptian (1821–1875) and Anglo-Egyptian British (1898–1956) rules, examining institutional features, inherent violence, and the remnants of those legacies today. The book extends its investigation into the postcolonial period by examining social and political hierarchies, such as those of the Islamists and their opponents—including the Sudanese political parties, the Sudan Liberation Movement, and other armed movements—that have formed and clashed over the ensuing decades. The book chapter defines three forms of violence that have shaped the course of the country's history: decentralized (individual actors using targets as a means to express a particular grievance), centralized (violence enacted illegitimately by state actors), and “home-brewed” (violence among local actors toward other local actors). It reveals how each of these forms of violence has been taken to new extremes under each successive regime, ever deterring the emergence of a stable nation.

Scholarship examining the governments in the Middle East and North Africa rarely focuses on opposition movements, since those countries tend to be ruled by a centralized, often authoritarian government. However, even in an oppressive state, there are civil society and oppositional forces at work. The chapters in this book reveal how such forces emerge and are manifested in nondemocratic states across the region. In most cases, the chapters offer a comparative perspective, highlighting similarities across political borders. Providing historical context for current events, they examine the sociopolitical situations in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Algeria and analyze the role of Islam in Arab states' governments and in the opposition movements to them. They also demonstrate that not all opposition forces propose the overthrow of authority and point out the various forms opposition takes in societies that leave little room for political activism. Challenging the assertion that state–society relations are limited to coercive top-down arrangements in authoritarian regimes, the book aims to inspire debate on the topic of contentious political participation within the region, as well as in similar settings throughout the world.

This book offers a fresh examination of Muslim and Jewish cultural interactions during the medieval and early modern periods. The fifteen interdisciplinary studies assembled here investigate the complex relationship between these two monotheistic religions and reveal that, with respect to cultural diversity and professional cooperation, Jews and Muslims coexisted relatively peacefully for centuries. As has previously been demonstrated, these relationships would quickly deteriorate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That fact often colors our view of early religious, scientific, and cultural interactions between Jews and Muslims. These chapters remind us that this period of free exchange of information fostered important advancements in math, medicine, and the law. Chapters on early Islam and the shaping of Jewish-Muslim relationships in the Middle Ages shed light on the legal battles over the status of synagogues in twentieth-century Yemen or the execution of a fourteen-year-old girl in nineteenth-century Morocco.

This book offers a panoply of diverse interdisciplinary perspectives on the final chapter of Jewish minority life within the Islamic orbit, on Islam and Judaism as religions, and on the contemporary relationship between Jews and Muslims in the Western world and between Israel and the Muslim nation-states. It offers a wide variety of eclectic methodological approaches that work synergistically to supply nuances to complex and often-misunderstood relationships. A companion volume to The Convergence of Judaism and Islam, the book explores the Judeo-Muslim relationship from the nineteenth century to the present. While the earlier volume focused on the shared cultures and often peaceful relationship between the two religions and peoples in the medieval and early modern periods (convergence), this book reveals how the paths of Jews and Muslims began to diverge two centuries ago. Its chapters examine how each group reacted quite differently to colonial rule and how the Palestine question, the Arab–Israeli crisis, and rising tides of local nationalisms have soured relations. With contributing authors from diverse scholarly disciplines, the study offers a broad but deep analysis of the Jewish–Muslim relationship in recent times.

The gulf in birth and death rates between rich and poor countries is well documented, but little is actually known about demographic disparities between local class or status groups within most countries, particularly nomadic and stateless groups in the Middle East. Fertile Bonds: Bedouin Class, Kinship, and Gender in the Bekaa Valley takes a fresh look at social disparities in reproduction and health through a Bedouin case study in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. In addition to detailing the demographic underpinnings of class, occupation, kinship, and gender in Bekaa Bedouin communities, the book draws from microdemographic studies in nomadic and peasant societies worldwide to better frame questions on demographic inequities. A broader picture is provided that challenges the universality of class inequality and prompts closer consideration of the contingencies of geography and history when examining rich/poor divides. The study also calls into question dehumanizing stereotypes of prolific reproduction among rural poor women, offering alternative ethnographic and demographic interpretations of high fertility and gender.

In the burning deserts of Arabia came an insurgency that would later conquer the Sasanid Persian Empire and overrun large portions of Byzantine territory. But before this could happen, the important tribe of the Quraysh of Makkah had to be brought into submission to Islam. How did Muhammad, the last and most important prophet of Allah, recruit, train, and organize his forces? How did he strip his key nemesis, the Quraysh, of their allies? How did he fight against forces that outnumbered him and even defeated him on the field of battle and yet still emerge triumphant in the end? And even more important, how did Muhammad fund and supply his followers to achieve this ultimate victory? These questions and more are explored in this work, which examines the asymmetric tactics, strategy, political maneuvers, social techniques, and logistical factors that were used by Muhammad to make Islam the dominant religious and ideological force in Arabia and beyond. Besides discussing the campaigns and battles, this work breaks new ground in closely examining the logistics of the campaigns, highlighting why each combatant made the decisions he did in the field. Moreover, this book not only explains how and why Muhammad won, but why his opponents lost, particularly examining the Quraysh's failure in attempting to employ counterinsurgency techniques.

In Morocco today, the idea of female laborers is generally frowned upon. Yet despite this, many women are beginning to find work in factories. The author of this book spent a year in the ancient city of Fes; this book tells the story of what life is like there for working women. Forced to find a factory job herself so that she could speak more intimately with working women, she was able to learn firsthand why they work, what working means to them, and how important earning a wage is to their sense of self. This book conveys a general sense of the working life of women in Morocco by describing daily life inside a Moroccan sewing factory. It also reveals the additional work they face inside their homes. More than an ethnography, this volume shows what life is like for a new generation of young women just entering the workforce.

This book is a history of vernacular experiences of the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt. It focuses on schooling, conflict, and spirituality and discusses the political and cultural legacy of the Nasser years in today’s Egypt. At the same time, Mériam Belli reflects on the transformations brought about by the ’52 revolution in civic culture, in concepts of state and nation, in nationalist ideology in post-1950s Egypt, and in the development of religious ethno-nationalism in post-1970s Egypt.