Meaningful mediums is a study of the political economy of writing in the first Ottoman city to develop a sustained urban print culture. Cairo’s writing economy comprised the longstanding manuscript industry, the governmental printing industry from the 1820s, and the for-profit private press printing industry from the 1850s. I investigate these industries’ functions, interactions, and reputations to explore why Cairene printing developed and how contemporaries ascribed meaning to textual production during this period of flux. This study relies on the texts themselves to generate the history of their production. I aggregate the names, dates, and other information contained within their openings, contents, and colophons to chart the work of their producers and vendors for the first time. I then contextualize this information through contemporary iconographic and descriptive depictions of Cairene texts. My sources are drawn from libraries and private collections in America, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France. They include formal and ephemeral manuscripts and printings. Against narratives that invoke printing as a catalyst for modernity, I argue that printing was simply a tool. Its adoption increased because it was useful for different actors like the state, private entrepreneurs, and scholars who employed it to respond to specific political, economic, and intellectual needs. My argument reverses the causality of modernization narratives, in that I establish that printing was the result of practical demands instead of the origin of new demands. As a tool, printing was deployed by Cairenes flexibly. Some used it to appropriate western norms, including the idea that printing is a civilizing force. Others used it to enact manuscript tradition. The history of this process is important to social practices, like the creation of new professions. But it is also important to historical legacy. Nationalism, Enlightenment, and civil society are assigned their origins and proof in Cairene printings from the 1870s and 1880s. Yet this narrative of the Middle East’s generic print modernity draws from the expectation for printings to engender public discourse and galvanize society, instead of from the words that these texts actually contain or an understanding of who made and consumed them and why. To counter the prevailing idea that printing is fixed and universal in its value and effects, Meaningful mediums examines printing as both a social and economic practice, and itself a space for ideas. It therefore emphasizes the significance of human agency, local context, constraints, and continuity during a period of momentous technological, textual, and cultural change. In conclusion, this study documents Cairenes’ incorporation of printing into their political economy of writing and revises the widely held notion that this process was an agent of social change, a marker of modernity and colonial restructuring, and a foreign disruptor of local textual tradition. / Middle Eastern Studies Committee

This dissertation is the first major study of a slave trade that captured up to one million slaves along the Russian and Iranian frontiers over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alone. Slaves served as farm-workers, herdsmen, craftsmen, soldiers, concubines, and even, in rare cases, as high-ranking officials in the region between the Caspian Sea and westernmost China. Most of these slaves were Shīʿites who were captured by Sunni Turkmens and sold in Central Asian cities and towns. Despite the Central Asian slave trade’s impressive dimensions, and the prominent role of slaves in the region’s history, the topic remains largely unstudied by historians of the region and of the broader Islamic world. Drawing on unpublished autobiographical sources and eyewitness accounts, I argue that slaves’ resistance and resourcefulness helped to define the contours of the slave labor system and played a key, unacknowledged role in their emancipation. While previous studies of slavery in the Muslim world have emphasized the role of colonial governments in fostering abolition, I argue that slaves in Central Asia, by fomenting the largest slave uprising in the region’s history, triggered the abolition of slavery in the region as a whole. / Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

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The production and sale of arms is now the second largest industry in the world, only the oil industry is larger. More Third World countries produce arms now than ever before. Third World arms production may be a small percentage of total global production, but it causes an international diffusion of military power by increasing both the absolute number of weapons produced, and the number of available suppliers. / This dissertation empirically tests previous explanations why Third World countries produce arms. Previous research on the determinants of arms production is classified into four categories: internal political, internal economic, external political and external economic explanations. Each category is associated with competing theories of the state and economy. Cross-sectional and times-series research designs are specified to test nine hypotheses drawn from the previous research. The cross-sectional analyses produce a snapshot of the Third World, which is used to select three Third World arms producers for the times-series analysis. / The results from both cross-sectional and time-series analyses are remarkably consistent. Economic factors find more support than political-security factors when explaining both whether Third World countries will produce arms as well as the level of sophistication and volume at which they will produce arms. Indicators of a country's level of development and market size are consistently statistically significant and in the predicted direction. The effect of political-security variables such as embargoes, international threats and regime type find sporadic support in my analyses. In conclusion, Third World countries produce arms when they have the economic capacity and technological ability to do so. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-03, Section: A, page: 1313. / Major Professor: Dale L. Smith. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1996.

Much has been theorized about the positive correlation between education and the change in women's status in society. Yet, in 1995, a United Nations report on women showed that although there has been much effort to eliminate discrimination based on sex, with greater opportunities and access to education, or formal learning, the most bias was due to socialization, or informal learning, as expressed through cultural values, norms and traditions. The report also showed that although governments claimed to be dedicated to erasing illiteracy and improving educational opportunities, they are very quick to claim cultural relativity when asked to review other elements of concern, such as harmful laws and customs. Education of girls and women has not accomplished the anticipated social transformation, especially the socially constructed patriarchal ideology which places them as primarily providers of biological and sexual services and unpaid labor. In a study on women and higher education in Modern Lebanon one finds the Lebanese case mimics international trends in the unwillingness to confront and reinterpret the strict ideology which impose on women the primary and at times sole function as "mother and wife." In Lebanon, one also finds that this hegemony has obviated the transformation of much female educational progress into change in the role of women in society. Although education has become more accessible, the hierarchy of opportunities is maintained and is more complex as it now intertwines class, religious affiliations and gender. Girls' formal education at the primary level was introduced into Lebanese society in the early nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the doors of higher education were opened to them. Today, women make up half of the student population at the tertiary level. Not only are they able to enter and compete with young men, they are exceeding all expectations by graduating at higher rates. However, there are a few points of concern. First, most women still register and graduate from traditionally female fields. Second, although there has been a tremendous increase of women attending universities, participating in the labor force and the political sphere, there is little change in the way society views women. Women and men regard education and work as secondary functions to women's primary purpose as "wife and mother." Third, when efforts are made to change harmful laws and customs, women are accused of trying to divide their community by placing mundane women's issues before national interest. Even worse, they may be accused of conspiring with the West to destroy Lebanese or Arab identity and traditions. Fourth, in the last six years, the initiation of various policies seem to thwart the advancement of women in the marketplace as government plans push women back into the home. Finally, one must not underestimate the role of the religious authorities in the continuous attempt to shape the strict division of labor between the sexes in Lebanon. The question remains, how can Lebanese women actively and cautiously participate in the formation of new truths, which will generate more inclusive and empowering myths for both girls and boys in the future?

During the revolutionary period the Soviets came into political and cultural conflict with Russia's Muslims. Despite indications that the majority of Muslims desired political unification based on their Islamic heritage, the Party divided them into separate "nationalities" along narrow ethnic lines, incorporated most into the RSFSR, and attempted to uproot traditional Islamic institutions and customs under the aegis of class war. Resistance took the form of pan-Muslim nationalism, a reformist political conception with roots in the Near East. This conflict not only aborted the export of revolution to the Islamic world, contributing to the passing of the revolutionary era in Russia, but aided Stalin's rise to power. Soviet policy succeeded politically, defining the terms of interaction between Russians and Soviet Muslims for the next 70 years, but failed culturally in 1921-22, when the Party was forced to suspend its "war on Islam" as the price of political control.

<p>This dissertation examines the translation and printing of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Republic of Turkey (1820-1938). As most Islamic scholars deem the Qur'an inimitable divine speech, the idea of translating the Qur'an has been surrounded with concern since the first centuries of Islam; printing aroused fears about ritual purity and threatened the traditional trade of the scribes. This study examines how Turkish Muslims challenged these concerns and asserted the necessity to print and translate the Qur'an in order to make the text more accessible.</p><p>With the spread of the printing press and literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Qur'an translations have become increasingly important as means of transmitting the meaning of the text to expanding audiences. I investigate the rise of Qur'an translation through a historical survey of Ottoman and Turkish language translations and an examination of the debates surrounding them waged in periodicals, government archives, and monographs. While Turkish translations have often been construed as a product of nationalism, I argue that the rise of translation began with a renewed emphasis on the Qur'anic theme of intelligibility bolstered by the availability of printed books, the spread of state schools, and increased knowledge of European history and intellectual currents. Turkish nationalists later adopted and advocated the issue, reconstruing the "Turkish Qur'an" as a nationalist symbol. </p><p>Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the meaning of Qur'an translation itself has changed and incorporated a variety of new concerns. Asserting translation of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire became synecdoche for a new vision of Muslim authority and modernity that reduced the role of the ulama and created space for interpretive plurality on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, some Turkish intellectuals came to appreciate the symbolic value of Turkish renderings for the assertion of national identity in the Islamic sphere. While the notion of translation as replacement has withered, in practice, translations have come to play a robust role in Turkish Muslim life as supplement and counterpoint to the Qur'anic text.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation examines how Jews in medieval Egypt negotiated marital disputes while maneuvering between individual desires, legal prescriptions and societal expectations. The main sources for this investigation are the documents of the Cairo Geniza, a rich cache of manuscripts discovered in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. The study of medieval Jewish communities is often dominated by a top-down approach that focuses on the elites and adopts the perspective of the communal leadership as it examines the 'Jewish community' as the fundamental manifestation of Jewish life. The present study complements this perspective by offering a 'view from below' of married life and communal institutions. Recovering the life-stories of non-elite individuals as they experience communal institutions and creatively negotiate the legal arena reveals a substantially different image of Jewish communal life. For example, I show how women experienced the legal arena differently than their husbands as communal officials tended to pressure women to compromise their monetary rights. This, in turn, led women to adopt certain characteristic practices and behaviors in their interactions with communal leaders so as to withstand these pressures. In this way, rather than seeing communal legal institutions as merely imposing religious law on deviant practice, I shift the focus to the litigants' point of view as "consumers" of legal resources whose navigation of the pluralistic legal arena depended on status and personal networks as much as on legal considerations. Gender and status are revealed to be crucial categories in our understanding of Geniza society and medieval patriarchy. The result of this analysis is a better understanding of the instability and flexibility of married life and of their implications for the pursuing of legal disputes in medieval Egypt. The study is accompanied by an edition of nineteen previously unpublished Geniza documents that demonstrate the various aspects of married life examined in the study. </p>