Search

Professor Amira Al-Azhary Sonbol, a renowned historian and founding editor of the international journal HAWWA: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World, passed away. She was a respected scholar and author who focused on the legal aspects of gendered history in the modern Middle East, particularly through her research on Ottoman era archives in Egypt. Through HAWWA, she made significant contributions to the field of gender studies and research on women in the Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic societies worldwide. Her work also brought attention to gender issues within Islamic communities that had previously been inaccessible to many scholars. Her colleagues and friends express their gratitude for the opportunity to continue her legacy by directing HAWWA. [Extracted from the article]

As an initial observation, it is important to underline in this conclusion the fact that the theme chosen for this special issue, i.e. the study of charitable and humanitarian actions in the Middle East, studied from a longue durée perspective, may appear at first sight to be a rather ambitious challenge, so diverse are the historical situations. The state seeks to have a control function either directly through its own agents, such as civil servants or other people who are directly involved in this task and who may take advantage of it to collect taxes or generate revenue for the state. The first aspect concerns the basic definition of the state insofar as it assumes responsibility for the social dimensions of society. [Extracted from the article]

Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus. By JAMES GREHAN. Publications on the Near East. Seattle: UNIVERSITY of WASHINGTON PRESS, 2007. Pp. xvi + 320. $50. James Grehan's important [...]

Despite these problems with her health, which sometimes involved days of hospitalization, Karin continued to bring her remarkable and critical analysis in the work as co-Editor of I Hawwa i . We had been looking forward to many fruitful and fulfilling years of working together as co-editors of I Hawwa i , Karin as much as myself. Being such an open and sincere person, she shared her health concerns from the start with all of us in the I Hawwa i team - Masoumeh Velayati, I Hawwa i 's Editorial Manager, Arjan van Oorsouw, Brill Production Editor, Nicolette van der Hoek and Randi Deguilhem. [Extracted from the article]

Gendered access to rights of property ownership and its exploitation are linked to explicit and implicit priorities and proclivities of a given society. Considering the situation from an intersectorial perspective and one which takes into account a non-linear long-term historical approach which necessarily includes changes over time which are firmly anchored within historical movements,1 the question of gender-specific prerogatives or lack of them regarding rights of property ownership and its use reveals points of convergence where this type of activity is possible for both women and men. Likewise, this transhistorical approach points to sectors where institutionalized and customary law prohibited, permitted, or favored gender-specific real-estate ownership and its exploitation. Hence, the development of various gendered strategies devised and deployed by women and men in order to gain, retain, or prohibit control over rights of property ownership and exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the 2012 issue of the journal "Archív Orientalní," focusing on international communication and public opinion.

Based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Damascene waqf documents as well as juridical normative sources, this article focuses upon the pious foundations as a gender blind institution. In other words, stipulations (shurūt) which regulate the creation and management of endowments are identical for both men and women: the question, apparently superfluous, was, in fact, not even raised in the normative literature - it was simply a given. The article also reflects upon the fact that both men and women founders of waqf, juridically free to choose the beneficiaries and the administrators of their endowments, were in reality subject to societal influences which conditioned their choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the French Secular Mission (Mission Laïque Française (MLF)), founded in 1902, was not an official organ of the French state, its cultural politics, expressed through the establishment of overseas schools in places such as late Ottoman Salonica (in 1906), early twentieth-century Egypt, early Mandate Syria and elsewhere, paralleled and coincided with the official French government program to promote the use of the French language and a knowledge of its civilizational values amongst non-Francophone peoples as a means of furthering its foreign interests. These interests should be seen within the double context of the international French 'mission civilisatrice' as well as with regard to France's longstanding rivalry with Great Britain in the economic, political and cultural domains. The present study examines the objectives of the MLF both in relation to the domestic situation in France during the first half of the twentieth century, especially as concerns the separation of church and state in 1905, which gave 'official' sanction to the MLF's mission to establish secular schools overseas in the name of France, and also as a cultural instrument, largely funded by Paris, to promulgate French Enlightenment values in regions of the world which were deemed important on the imperialistic scale. Turning Syrians into Frenchmen was not the goal but turning Syrians (not only Christians, but especially Muslims) into Francophiles was definitely part of the MLF strategy which straddled and swerved between the associationist and the assimilationist philosophies, creating an intellectual colonization amongst its students and thereby generating a sort of cultural schizophrenia (Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic societies confronting the West (Syracuse NY, Syracuse University Press, 1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]