This volume deals with the history of the "common people" in the Middle East, both villagers and urban dwellers. It investigates some of the characteristic traits of the structure and development of urban and rural society in pre-modern and modern Middle Eastern history.

This volume deals with the history of the "common people" in the Middle East. It investigates some of the characteristic traits of the structure and development of urban and rural society in pre-modern and modern Middle Eastern history.

Joel Beinin's book offers a survey of subaltern history in the Middle East.

During the last two decades, the number of anthropological studies on the Middle East has increased exponentially. This partially annotated bibliography offers a comprehensive survey of studies written in English, French and German, and covers the period from 1965 to 1987.

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded pits the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbīnī describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervish—offering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abū Shādūf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbīnī responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbī. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era. An English-only edition.

In this seminal study, Jane Hathaway presents a wide-ranging reassessment of the effects of Ottoman rule on the Arab Lands of Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq and Yemen - the first of its kind in over forty years. Challenging outmoded perceptions of this period as a demoralizing prelude to the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hathaway depicts an era of immense social, cultural, economic and political change which helped to shape the foundations of today's modern Middle and Near East. Taking full advantage of a wide range of Arabic and Ottoman primary sources, she examines the changing fortunes of not only the political elite but also the broader population of merchants, shopkeepers, peasants, tribal populations, religious scholars, women, and ethnic and religious minorities who inhabited this diverse and volatile region. With masterly concision and clarity, Hathaway guides the reader through all the key current approaches to and debates surrounding Arab society during this period. This is far more than just another political history; it is a global study which offers an entirely new perspective on the era and region as a whole.

In this groundbreaking book, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. She shows that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. In situating the Middle East within the context of world history, Khuri-Makdisi challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. The book demonstrates that these radical trajectories played a fundamental role in shaping societies throughout the world and offers a powerful rethinking of Ottoman intellectual and social history.