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This book illuminates key aspects of Muslim life and how central tenets of that life are being challenged and culturally refashioned. Through a series of poignant tales—from the struggle by a group of friends against daily corruption to the contest over a saint's identity, from nostalgia for the departed Jews to Salman Rushdie's vision of doubt in a world of religious certainty—the book shows how a dazzling array of potential changes are occurring alongside deeply embedded continuity, a process it compares to a game of chess in which infinite variations of moves can be achieved while fundamental aspects of “the game” have had a remarkably enduring quality. Whether it is the potential fabrication of new forms of Islam by migrants to Europe (creating a new “Euro-Islam”), the emphasis put on individuals rather than institutions, or the heartrending problems Muslims may face when their marriages cross national boundaries, each story and each interpretation offers a window into a world of contending concepts and challenged coherence. The book is both an antidote to simplified versions of Islam circulating today and a consistent story of the continuities that account for much of ordinary Muslim life. It offers, in its human stories and its insights, its own contribution, as the book states, “to the mutual understanding and forgiveness that alone will make true peace possible.”

This book traces the relationships between disease, hygiene, politics, geography, and nationalism in British Mandatory Palestine between the world wars. Taking up the case of malaria control in Jewish-held lands, the author illustrates how efforts to thwart the disease were intimately tied to the project of Zionist nation-building, especially the movement's efforts to repurpose and improve its lands. The project of eradicating malaria also took on a metaphorical dimension—erasing anti-Semitic stereotypes of the “parasitic” Diaspora Jew and creating strong, healthy Jews in Palestine. The author shows that, in reclaiming the land and the health of its people in Palestine, Zionists expressed key ideological and political elements of their nation-building project. The book situates antimalarial medicine and politics within larger colonial histories. By analyzing the science alongside the politics of Jewish settlement, the author addresses contested questions of social organization and the effects of land reclamation upon the indigenous Palestinian population.

The way the Ottomans used clocks down to the end of the nineteenth century conformed to the inner logic of their temporal culture and did not disturb its coherence. However, this fabric of practice and meaning began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy, and the project of modern state-building began to gather momentum. In their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities, and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus over the second half of the nineteenth century, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values and behaviors into their self-consciously ‘modern’ outlook and life-style. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress. Mustering new media, new genres, and new sources of authoritative knowledge, they set out to combat temporal patterns they associated with the old political order. Far from being a mere reflection of processes that unfolded in other fields, Ottoman temporal culture is thus shown to be in itself a major arena in which social groups competed for legitimacy, delineated their identities, and put forward their ideologies; it was a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined, and alternative visions of modernization were expressed, and challenged.

This book is an argument for Middle East environmental history. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire—the longest-lasting and most important political power in the Middle East over the last millennium—and Egypt—the Middle East’s most populous and historically most lucrative region—Under Osman’s Tree shows the utility of environmental history for the study of the Middle East and the importance of the Middle East for global environmental history. The book tackles major topics in environmental history: natural resource management, climate, energy, human and animal labor, water control, disease, and the politics of nature. Throughout, it focuses on what the environmental history of the Middle East reveals about empire, the early modern period, and economic and social history, forwarding a view of empires as ecosystems of connections and linkages of mutual constitution and influence. It pays particular attention to the interactions of rural peoples with the Ottoman imperial state and how natural resource management tied the two together. Overall, it offers a novel and fresh account of the history of the Middle East over the last half millennium.