Modern Middle East Research Articles

Joel Beinin. Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt; David De Vries. Strike Action and Nation Building: Labor Unrest in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951.

Joel Beinin’s Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt draws on his earlier seminal work (Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 [1987]; Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East [2001]; and Beinin, The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt [2010]), as he offers a comparative, events-driven history of workers’ movements in Tunisia and Egypt that uses the 2010–2011 revolutions as beginning and ending points. Tunisia and Egypt are not only the first sites of recent insurrections in Southwest Asia and North Africa, but also historical sites of working-class activism, a topic too rarely addressed in North American scholarship. Beinin shows both labor activists’ efforts to dissociate their actions from politics and the ineluctably political nature of labor activism. Labor protest appears as a claim for political inclusion in response to policies imposed from above.

THE MANUFACTURE, EVALUATION AND CONSERVATION OF CLAY TABLETS INSCRIBED IN CUNEIFORM: TRADITIONAL PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern history is largely based on written records preserved on clay tablets, but tablets have often been separated from other archaeological artefacts, with erratic consequences. This paper discusses the treatment, distribution and evaluation of tablets since the first major discoveries in 1850, the problems and potential advantages of identifying clay sources and methods of manufacture, the challenges of preserving and recording tablets found in different conditions in the field, and the development of cleaning and long-term conservation techniques. Early experiments in firing tablets at the British Museum and at Babylon were followed by the systematic work of Friedrich Rathgen in Berlin around 1900. While his methods were gradually accepted in principle, there was limited communication among specialists, and independent procedures evolved. The debate on best practice continues.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNancy Christie teaches history at the University of Western Ontario. Her work centers on the cultural, political, legal, and social history of eighteenth-century Quebec, with a particular emphasis on the impact of British colonialism after the Conquest of 1763. Winner of numerous scholarly awards, in particular for Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada, she is the author of a major forthcoming volume, A Northern Bastille: The Formal and Informal Politics of Colonialism in Post-conquest Quebec, 1760–1837.Jason Dawsey is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he teaches courses in modern European history. Currently, he is completing a monograph on Günther Anders’s critique of technology.Michael Gauvreau teaches history at McMaster University. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and social histories of Canada and Quebec from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is the author of the prize-winning The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970, and his new research centers on Quebec in the age of revolutions.Aaron G. Jakes is assistant professor of history in the Department of Historical Studies at the New School. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. He is the author of “Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt’s Ecology of Interest, 1882–1914,” Antipode (2016), and he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled State of the Field: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism in Egypt, 1882–1914.Ahmad Shokr is a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and an assistant professor of history at Swarthmore College. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, the political economy of empire and decolonization, and the history of capitalism. He is a contributor to several volumes, including Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (Verso, 2012).Kristoffer Smemo is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught courses on twentieth-century American social and political history. His dissertation examines how social struggle shaped the rise and fall of the liberal wing of the Republican Party during the mid-twentieth century. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History and Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas.Samir Sonti is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught the history of capitalism and labor studies. His dissertation focuses on the politics of inflation in the twentieth-century United States.Gabriel Winant is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University. He has taught twentieth-century American history, the history of capitalism, and African American history. He is completing a dissertation on the transformation of the labor market and the emergence of the health care economy in Pittsburgh in the second half of the twentieth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 4, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691061 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Jörg Matthias Determann. Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East. (Library of Modern Middle East Studies.) 234 pp., figs., bibl., index. London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015. £64 (cloth).

Jörg Matthias Determann. <i>Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East</i>. (Library of Modern Middle East Studies.) 234 pp., figs., bibl., index. London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015. £64 (cloth).

Material Evidence and Narrative Sources: Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of the Muslim Middle East Edited by Daniella Talmon-Heller and Katia Cytryn-Silverman

Material Evidence and Narrative Sources: Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of the Muslim Middle East Edited by Daniella Talmon-Heller and Katia Cytryn-Silverman

Teaching the Digital Natives

The goals of the Middle East history survey course are to introduce students to the major events in the history of the Middle East and to show the diversity of Middle Eastern civilization. In this paper, I discuss how instructors can use the Internet to enrich their teaching of the Middle East history survey course for students known as “digital natives.”

Richard L. Chambers 1929-2016

Richard L. Chambers was born on 27 September 1929 in Brundidge, Alabama, and died on 1 August 2016 in Montgomery, Alabama. He attended the University of Alabama, studying diplomatic and Middle Eastern history and gaining a B.A. in 1950. He obtained a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a fellowship at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He then pursued an M.A. in History at Alabama, graduating in 1955, just when Middle Eastern studies really began to expand nationwide. He moved to Princeton for a second master's in 1958 and a Ph.D. in 1968. He studied with Ottoman historian Lewis Thomas and wrote a dissertation on Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, the nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectual, historian, and statesman.

Correcting for the Problems of the Survey Course

Every year, I teach a broad survey course on the Modern Middle East (between 120 and 200 students), along with seminars on a wide range of topics. Regardless of the content of these courses, I have three big goals. I want them to come away understanding that the history of the region is more complex and fascinating than they learned in high school and from the pundits, and the simplistic assumptions and solutions they offer answer no questions. Second, I want to persuade them that things change over time, and we can't understand anything without knowing its context—and the context of the Middle East is global. But most imperative: I want to convince students to be critical in analyzing sources of information. Informed citizenship requires students to be able to think critically, and that is what historians do offer. We analyze multiple sources in myriad ways.

Halil İnalcık 1916? - 2016

Halil İnalcık was born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, into a refugee family, probably in 1916 (he did not know his birthday; in Turkey he adopted 29 May, in the US 4 July). He died at age 100 in Ankara on 25 July 2016, as the premier Ottoman historian in the world. To quote one of his students, “Professor İnalcık transformed the field of Ottoman studies from an obscure and exotic subfield into one of the leading historical disciplines that covers the history of the greater Middle East and North Africa as well as the Balkans from the late medieval to the modern period. He set the tone of debate and critical inquiry from the early modern to the modern period.” Born an Ottoman, he made Ottoman studies a crucial part of world history.

Making the Foreign Past Real: Teaching and Assessing Middle Eastern History in Australia

Teaching modern Middle East history at the University of Melbourne raises problems of culture. Students are not generally acquainted with the Middle East and North Africa—even those whose families originate there—news coverage is patchy, and Australia is far away. Not all students are even arts students let alone history majors: our degree structure requires interdisciplinary study. The University is liberal about how to assess students, only requiring that during a twelve-week semester subject a student must write 4000 words. Within broad bounds, how teachers do this is up to them, although the Arts Faculty has a culture of avoiding unseen examinations. History major students are very accustomed to the “traditional” researched essay format, but it does not provide much variety of intellectual training; it is unfamiliar to non-Arts students; in classes that regularly number over 100 students, it is tiring and boring to assess; and large numbers of essays are freely available online. So I have introduced an assessment task to replace the standard researched essay. The purpose here is to describe an alternative approach to assessment and learning by using a simulation: in that sense the actual topic of the simulation is secondary. It concerns refugees, which is of course, a matter of vital current concern, but it is the reasoning behind the task that I hope is instructive.

Teaching with Film and Photography in Introductory Middle East Courses

Some years ago, a colleague from another institution told me how much she was looking forward to screening Nasser 56 in her introductory Middle East history course. Students had just finished reading about the Nasser era, and the screening of Muhamad Fadel's stylish biopic starring the charismatic film star Ahmed Zaki would serve as an enjoyable way to round out the unit. I was surprised, not at my colleague's use of the film in her class, but at her timing. Released in 1996, Nasser 56 is very much the product of the Mubarak era. It offers rich opportunities to discuss the particular challenges Egypt faced in the 1990s and how this nostalgic look back at a triumphant moment in Gamal Abdel Nasser's (Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's) presidency was marshalled to animate an economically and politically fraught period. Its celebration of ʿAbd al-Nasir as an effective and caring patriarch to the nation could be interpreted as an endorsement of Egypt's authoritarian political system. However, the film is less useful as an explication of ʿAbd al-Nasir as a political figure, or of 1950s Egypt.

Arab Transformations Framework Project Paper

The Arab Uprisings represented a series of events unprecedented in the history of the Middle East: mass, popular and largely non-violent uprisings took place starting in December 2010 in Tunisia and reverberating throughout the region. These protests threatened – and in several cases resulted in the overthrow of – apparently stable autocratic regimes. The unprecedented nature and extensive domestic, regional and international impact of the Uprisings in and of itself merits attention, but coming hard on the heels of a global financial crisis and given the resonance of the Arab Uprisings with protest movements beyond the region, these Uprisings appear all the more significant beyond the region itself. The significance of the Uprisings is not just academic, however: the Middle East is one of the most frequently conflictual regions in the world, it is central to the global political economy – e.g. as a source of hydrocarbon fuels, and as a global logistical nexus – it is a source of and transit point for migratory flows towards Europe, and its autocracies have been supported as key allies by Western governments, both in Europe and North America. This project aims to generate new data and analyses of the Uprisings themselves, but is also sensitive to the policy implications of these analyses. The objective of the ArabTrans project is to contribute particularly to a better empirical understanding of the Uprisings and of the longer-term processes that lead to them and which they epitomise. To do this, the project will a) identify the principal approaches to transitions between political systems as they pertain to the Middle East generally and to the Arab Uprisings in particular; b) identify a series of political, economic, and social categories and variables based on these orthodox approaches; c) evaluate the available literature and existing data on the basis of these variables; and d) design a survey based on available data in order to facilitate the creation of a useful longitudinal database against which long-term trends and transformations might be identified. While the project will use existing data sets from public opinion surveys to look at long-time trends and transformations in public opinion, it will update and integrate these data by carrying out a new survey which will provide up to date information on public opinion in the MENA countries in 2014. This survey will use relevant questions that have been used in previous surveys to facilitate the longitudinal analysis as well as adding new questions to answer questions that arise from the literature review, particularly focusing on security, detailed questions on participation in the Uprisings and on EU-MENA relations, as well as additional questions on media, including social media use. These survey data will then be combined in a longitudinal database with non-survey quantitative data, enabling measurements of long-term trends and transformations

THE ENVIRONMENTAL TURN IN MIDDLE EAST HISTORY

If historians of the Middle East have turned their attention to the environment rather later than those in other subfields, a recent crop of books indicates that a new generation of scholars has spent much productive time considering environmental histories of other geographies. The books reviewed in this essay stand out for their insistence on examining Middle Eastern environments as both ecological facts and representational spaces. Taken in concert, they indicate the vibrancy of environmental history in the field. Moreover, their careful attention to methodology and creative use of sources opens up spaces for new investigations of politics, culture, and religion as mediated through environmental management and representation. Following on the recent work of Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke III, and others, these historians have marshaled environmental, climatological, epidemiological, biological, and geological data for historical argument. Thus, the resulting works situate themselves deeply within their respective historiographic narratives, yet also interrupt, redelineate, and unsettle those narrative assumptions. At its best, the so-called “environmental turn” in the history of the Middle East represents not an intellectual fashion, but rather a major methodological shift that involves a reframing of our understanding of the formation of the field.

Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xxii, 335; 15 color figures and 10 maps. $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-953201-8.

Paul M. Cobb, <i>The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades</i>. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xxii, 335; 15 color figures and 10 maps. $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-953201-8.

Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in Nineteenth-Century Egypt and the Mediterranean

AbstractIn October 1898, the Italian vice-consul in Alexandria charged a group of Italians with participating in an anarchist plot to attack German Emperor Wilhelm II during his planned tour through Egypt and Palestine. This collective arrest produced unexpected outcomes, left a trail of multi-lingual documents, and illuminated specific forms of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean migration. Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of and connected to what was happening elsewhere: they sent letters, circulated manifestos, raised and transported money, and helped fugitive comrades. They maintained nodes of subversion and moved along circuits of solidarity. Similarly, diplomats of Europe, Cairo, Istanbul, and local consular officials operated across borders and cooperated to hunt anarchists down. By following people who were on the move on boats, in post offices, and in taverns, I make a methodological and historiographical argument. First, I examine the Mediterranean as a space of flows and show how theMaghreb/Mashreqdivide in Middle Eastern history has concealed webs and connections. Because anarchists and authorities acted on multiple fronts simultaneously, so must scholarship of this part of the world take account of several histories at once. Second, I look beyond the micro-macro binary to emphasize the interconnections and mutual implications of the micro, the macro, and everything in between. I highlight competing, intersecting, and even contradictory trajectories of some of these anarchist migrants’ belonging. As the affair of the bombs unfolded, all of these contradictions and scales of analysis became visible at once.

Transformative Occupations in the Modern Middle East

Transformative Occupations in the Modern Middle East

Another Sharp Weapon: Gender and Revolt in Arab and Jewish Editorial Cartoons, 1936–1939

72 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XL, No.2, WINTER 2017 Another Sharp Weapon: Gender and Revolt in Arab and Jewish Editorial Cartoons, 1936-1939 Jeff Barnes* Introduction Editorial cartoons gained a prominent position in the Arab and Jewish press in mandatory Palestine during the 1936-1939 Arab Rebellion. Cartoons in the Jewish daily Davar and Arab daily Filastin expressed Jewish and Palestinian nationalist sentiments respectively during the revolt, negotiating the complicated and emerging contours of nationalist discourse in both communities during this key historical juncture. They played a significant role in producing and reflecting public opinion,1 especially during the national strike that defined the first stage of the rebellion, and provide an excellent lens through which to view the emerging conflict in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. In spite of their prominent role in theArab and Jewish press in Palestine during the 1936 strike, they have received little attention from scholars.2 In his excellent monograph on the press in mandatory Palestine, Mustafa Kabha briefly considers *Jeffrey John Barnes is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Akron specializing in twentieth century Palestine. His research focuses on editorial cartoons and identity in Palestine and Israel in the twentieth century. 1 Press argues that cartoons occupy a liminal status between their production by societal elites, who dominate print media, and their reception by a (in the case of Palestine, largely illiterate) mass audience. This tension leads to cartoons, especially in low-literacy contexts like Palestine, simultaneously producing and reflecting popular opinion. See: Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (London: The Associated Press, 1981), 11. 2 Scholars have devoted considerably greater attention to Palestinian editorial cartoons in the post Naksa (1967) era. This is in part due to the towering influence of Naji al-Ali, Palestine’s most prominent cartoonist. See for example: Sune Haugbolle, “Naji al-Ali and the Iconography of Arab Secularism,” in Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image, ed. Christiane Gruber and Sune Haugbolle (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2013), OraybAref Najjar, “Cartoons as a Site for the Construction of Palestinian Refugee Identity: An Exploratory Study of Cartoonist Naji al-Ali,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31 (July 2007), and Nadia Yaqub, “Gendering the Palestinian Political Cartoon,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2 (2009). 73 cartoons in Filastin, especially as they relate to British censorship of the press, but offers no analysis of specific images.3 Khalidi, who provides a cogent discussion of the role of the Mandate-era press in the project of Palestinian identity, stating that “[o]ne of the best ways to gain an understanding of the linkage between local patriotism, anti-Zionism, and Arabism in the coalescence of Palestinian identity if via study of the burgeoning press in Palestine,”4 fails to reference cartoons at all, in spite of the fact that they demonstrate this linkage to perhaps a greater degree than the editorials he cites. LeVine’s work, which highlights the importance of images, especially advertising, in the production of Palestinian identity in the Mandate-era Jaffa press, provides a brief reference to cartoons yet offers no analysis.5 The only work entirely devoted to cartoons in both the Jewish and Arab press during the Thawra is Sandy Sufian’s well-researched and illuminating article that draws on representation theory and demonstrates that physiognomic depictions of the body of the “Other” in Jewish andArab cartoons during the period in question served to construct the opposing group as deviant, manipulative, uncivilized, and premodern.6 The present paper adds to the extant scholarship through viewing these images through the lens of gender. Editorial cartoons in theArab and Jewish press reveal how nationalists saw the emerging conflict in Palestine primarily in gendered terms. Many of Filastin and Davar’s political cartoons employed caricatures of women to signify national difference; others referenced gendered components of Jewish and Palestinian nationalist discourse respectively. The gendered content of cartoons in both papers intersected with other signifiers including race, an imagined historical past, and national figureheads, contributing to the construction of the Jewish and Palestinian national imaginary. Decoding the multilayered signs...

Book Reviews

87 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XLI, No.1, Fall 2017 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum CITY SCAPES OF VIOLENCE IN KARACHI: Publics and counterpublics edited by Nicholas Khan. UK, London Oxford University Press 2017, 252 pages. This book fundamentally concerns the relation of violence and language. The authors in these pages combine academic, contributions, creative non-fiction, literary works, journalistic analyses, social movements, texts and auto-ethnographies. They investigate the structural, political-economic, cultural, and geographic shaping of Karachi’s violence, and make comparative, synchronic, and diachronic connections in their particular case studies, biographical analyze, studies of particular localities, and analyses of the city as a whole. POLITICS AND STATE- SOCIETY RELATIONS IN INDIA by James Manor; New York Oxford University Press, 2017, 365 pages. This book revisits studies of key themes during the years of prime ministerial dominance, and then assesses the transition through the post-1989 period of hung parliaments to the present day. It examines the democratic process and state society relations during those two periods. It provides signposts as India navigates its way through a new phase THE SHIA REVIVAL: How Conflicts within Islam will reshape the Future by Vali Nasr. New York: W.W. Norton and company, Independent Publishers since 1923. This edition was updated in 2016, 310 pages. This book is not a work of historical scholarship. Its contribution is in the new ideas and arguments that it brings to an understanding of the Islamic world in the Middle East history and politics. It is written for the general audience. The author avoided the usual method of transliteration or citation of notes seen in scholarly works. The author used a simplified phonetic pattern closer to the Arabic, Persian or Urdu pronunciation, depending on the context of the discussion. The notes are meant for the most part to provide references for a striking piece of information or a quotation. 88 GUARDIANS OF THE ARAB STATE: When Militaries Intervene in Politics from Iraq to Mauritania by Florence Gaub. UK, London Oxford University Press 2017, 272 pages. this volume explains clearly and concisely how and why military organizations become involved in politics across the Middle East and North Africa, identifying four key factors: a high degree of organizational capacity, clear institutional interest, a forgiving population and weak civilian control. Looking at numerous case studies ranging from Mauritania to Iraq, the book finds that these factors are common to all Arab countries to have experienced coups in the last century. It also finds that the opposite is true in cases like Jordan, where strong civilian control and the absence of capacity, interest, or a positive public image made coup attempts futile. Gaub also convincingly argues that the reasons are structural rather than cultural, thereby proving a counter-narrative to conventional explanations which look at Arab coups along religious or historical lines. In essence, the questions addressed herein lead back to issues of weak statehood, legitimacy, and resource constraints—all problems the Arab world has struggled with since independence . Guardians of the Arab State picks up where previous literature on Middle Eastern military forces dropped the debate, and provides an updated and insightful analysis into the soul of Arab armies. YEMENS ENDURES: Civil War, Saudi Adventurism and the Future of Arabia by Ginny Hill. UK, London Oxford University Press 2017, 391 pages. Hill examines why is the oil-rich Saudi Arabia involved in a costly and merciless war against neighboring, Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East? Why, with billions of dollars of British and American weapons, have the Saudis lost the upper hand to the Houthi rebels? In this first authoritative account of the present conflict, Ginny Hill delves into a country still dominated by the pernicious influence of career dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who masterminded patronage networks that kept the state weak, allowing conflict and inequality to flourish . After three decades, he was forced from office by street protests in 2011. In the chaos following his departure, civil war and regional interference plague the country. While the Saudis battle the Houthis—whom they believe are backed by Iran—ISIS, Al-Qaeda and separatist groups compete to exploit the broken state...

Hijacking Law

This essay considers the legal strategies of comparative communities in South Asian, Middle Eastern, and US history. What does it mean for a particular group to “hijack” a body of law, taking everyone on board to an unwanted destination? The piece compares the legal strategies of the Parsi community in colonial and postcolonial India to those of the German Jewish yekke population in mandate Palestine and early independent Israel, the women's movement in India in recent decades, and Protestants in contemporary America before the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. There are multiple ways of trying to take control of a body of law, and for multiple reasons. A group may capture a body of personal law to perpetuate its own values within the group. It may try to control a territorial legal system to impose its values on the entire population. It may work across bodies of personal law to obtain as uniform a result as possible—as if the system were a unified field, not a segmented one. Or its group members may make available their legal expertise to shore up a newly independent state's legal system. The essay suggests that taking control of a body of law does not necessarily mean hijacking it.

Obituary: Professor Clifford Edmund Bosworth, FBA, 1929–2015

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 1, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources OBITUARY PROFESSOR CLIFFORD EDMUND BOSWORTH, FBA, 1929-2015 Professor Edmund Bosworth, Emeritus Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester, gained the affectionate nickname ‘Bozzy’ in some academic circles. It really suited him, echoing both Dickens and Boswell, for Bosworth certainly shared Boswell’s enormous energy for writing and Dickens’ fascination with all levels of society. Indeed, Edmund Bosworth was not always just interested in the grand sweep of Islamic history and high culture at the courts of caliphs and sultans. His desire to discover new facets of medieval Middle Eastern history led him to examine little-known byways of Muslim society, such as his lively and fascinating translation of a work in Arabic by alTha ‘alabi (d.1038) called The Book of Curious and Entertaining Information, or his book with the intriguing title of The medieval Islamic underworld: the Banu Sasan in Arabic society and literature. Bosworth’s enthusiasm and excitement were also aroused by travellers’ tales. He often ‘relaxed’ by writing about intrepid British visitors to the Middle East who recorded their experiences in a lively manner to an eager audience back home. Thus Bosworth published articles and a book about William Lithgow from Lanark in Scotland who travelled to Syria, Palestine, Turkey and North Africa in three major journeys and in 1632 wrote a book, describing what he called ‘the rare adventures and painful peregrinations of long nineteen years travails from Scotland, to the most famous kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa.’ Bosworth had a long-term fascination with Lithgow and others like him, such as Mrs Isabella Bishop, the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society - who went to remote Luristan and Kurdistan in 1890 - and the more famous James Elroy Flecker (d. 1915). Indeed, it is significant that the very last of Bosworth’s books, published in 2012, is entitled Eastward Ho! Diplomats, Travellers and Interpreters of the Middle East and Beyond, 1600-1940. Clifford Edmund Bosworth was born in Sheffield on 29 December 1928. His father, who came from a local family, was a government clerk. Bosworth was educated at Sheffield City Grammar School, where he acquired a lasting love of hill walking, music and history. In 1947 he won an exhibition in history to St John’s College, Oxford. Before going there, he had to spend two years in the army (1947-49). When talking about this period, he said wryly that he had learned to type then, though it was only with two fingers; this would be a useful skill for his future career. His studies in Oxford (1949-1952) were a revelation to him, and he gained a first-class degree in modern history. Whilst there, he met an American student studying Arabic. Intrigued by this he started learning 82 PROFESSOR CLIFFORD EDMUND BOSWORTH, FBA, 1929-2015 the language, and, after moving to Edinburgh (1952) to take up a Civil Service post in the Department of Agriculture for Scotland, he was able to carry on studying Arabic with the help of the Professor of Arabic at the university, the Rev. Montgomery Watt. This experience resulted in his being awarded a scholarship at Edinburgh University in 1954 to do a degree in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and for this too he was awarded a first-class degree. He was appointed Lecturer in Arabic at St Andrews University in 1956, and remained there until 1967. He wrote his doctoral thesis whilst in St Andrews and was awarded a Ph. D. at Edinburgh University in 1961. His next move was to the Chair of Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 1990. From that time until last year he continued to publish an immense amount of high-quality scholarly work with undiminished enthusiasm and passion for his subject. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992. He much enjoyed being affiliated from 2004 as a Visiting Professor at Exeter University. Bosworth did much more than work on his own research and teaching. He laboured...