Journal articles on the topic 'Bureaucracy – Egypt – History'

Histories of public administration have tended to give minor attention to the Bible. This can partly be attributed to the Bible's unique role as a document revered as being of divine origin, which might discourage secular scholarly inquiry. Another explanation focuses on the lack of originality in Israelite bureaucracy compared to those of other sophisticated empires of that era, such as Egypt. The limited scholarship in the area focuses on the Bible's unique intellectual contributions, its timeless stories about ethical dilemmas and its interesting details about administrative structures and offices. This essay seeks to identify and summarize the major descriptions of public administration contained in the Hebrew Bible and to encourage additional inquiries in this subject area.

The first three articles in this issue, grouped under the heading “Politics and Cultures of Capitalism,” address various ways that Middle Eastern actors dealt with European capitalist expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They all focus on cultural and political aspects of economic change and maintain a global perspective while constructing an intensely local analysis. Gad Gilbar and Jens Hanssen trace specific institutions and networks in Qajar Iran and the late Ottoman Empire, respectively, that operated within what Hanssen calls the “interstices” of state bureaucracy, local business concerns, and European expansion. The interstitial nature of the arguments made by both authors is underlined by the impressive range of sources they draw on: Persian, British, Russian, German, and French in the case of Gilbar and Turkish, Arabic, German, British, and French in the case of Hanssen. The third article, by Nancy Reynolds, takes us from late Qajar and Ottoman societies to Egypt during the first half of the 20th century and from general commerce to the marketing and consumption of particular commodities.

This article explores the policies of Nazi Germany towards the Karaites, a group of Jewish ancestry which emerged during the seventh to the ninth centuries CE, when its followers rejected the mainstream Jewish interpretation of Tanakh. Karaite communities flourished in Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Crimea, and Lithuania. From 1938 to 1944, the Nazi bureaucracy and scholarship examined the question of whether the Karaites were of Jewish origin, practiced Judaism and had to be treated as Jews. Because of its proximity to Judenpolitik and later to the Muslim factor, the subject got drawn into the world of Nazi grand policy and became the instrument of internecine power struggles between various agencies in Berlin. The Muslim factor in this context is construed as German cultivation of a special relationship with the Muslim world with an eye to political dividends in the Middle East and elsewhere. Nazi views of the Karaites’ racial origin and religion played a major role in their policy towards the group. However, as the tides of the war turned against the Germans, various Nazi agencies demonstrated growing flexibility either to re-tailor the Karaites’ racial credentials or to entirely gloss over them in the name of “national interests,” i.e. a euphemism used to disguise Nazi Germany's overtures to the Muslim world.

Defining Islam for the Egyptian state is an interesting historical study of an importantreligious institution in Egypt: The State Fatwa Office (Dar al lfta '). It traces this institution'sdevelopment from its inception in 1895 to the last quarter of the twentieth century,focusing on the role of official muftis and their "sometimes ungrateful task" of definingIslam for both the state and an increasingly conscious Muslim public (p. I).Uncomfortably situated between a state bureaucracy and an emerging Muslim publicconcerned with the transmission of Islamic values, occupiers of the seat of ifta' wereburdened with the task of asserting the compatibility of Islam with modern demands.Thus, their fatwas were different from those of their predecessors in that they were vestedwith new institutional authority and directed toward a Muslim public that did not existbefore the end of the nineteenth century. Therefore, this study goes beyond the office'srole as an official or state institution to analyze further its relation to Egypt's Islamicpolitical discourse. As this office occupies a well-defined position in Egyptian society,'l.A!.t'l????'l. as \he mout..tl.\)i.e<:.e 0ct: an offic.i.al l????lam th.at has 09ted for accommodati.on betweenstate and religion, and produces fatwas within the framework of existing state law, studyingDar al Ifta' offers significant advantages. By analyzing representative samples of itsfatwas in their social and political contexts, this study demonstrates how such fatwas canbe used as a source for studying modem Islamic social and intellectual history. In thissense, the history of Dar al Ifta' provides a rare glimpse into major themes of twentiethcenturyIslamic thinking. The main source for following its historical development is itswork-the fatwas it has issued (book cover & p. I) ...

Abstract To judge from wisdom literature and artistic production, the ideal man in pharaonic Egypt was as polite and even-tempered as he was well groomed. This article examines the evidence for warrior burials from periods when the state was decentralized or relatively weak and argues that conceptions of manhood in fact oscillated between an irenic ideal and a more violent counterpart. Drawing upon comparative case studies and advice given by Niccolò Machiavelli to his prince, I argue that hegemonic masculinity in Egypt did not simply reflect the character of the times. Rather, rulers actively promoted the type of masculinity that best served their purpose. To an ambitious local ruler engaged in enlarging his core territory, it was beneficial to appeal to and encourage ideals of valor among potential soldiers and supporters. Once peace had been established, however, violent masculinities proved disruptive. Based on internal evidence as well as observations of authoritarian governments that aimed similarly to solidify their power and pacify their realms, I suggest that pharaohs and their advisors likely employed five specific strategies to neutralize potential competitors and transform an honor-bound warrior aristocracy into courtiers and bureaucrats.

ABSTRACTThe international diffusion of ideas has often been described as an abstract process. John Bowring's career offers a different insight into the practical conditions that permitted a concept, free trade, to spread across national borders. An early advocate of trade liberalization in Britain, Bowring promoted free trade policies in France, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Siam, and China between 1830 and 1860. He employed different strategies according to local political conditions, appealing to public opinion in liberal Western Europe, seeking to persuade bureaucrats and absolute rulers in Central Europe and the Middle East, and resorting to gunboats in East Asia. His career also helps to connect the rise of free trade ideas in Europe with the ‘imperialism of free trade’ in other parts of the world. Bowring upheld the same liberal ideals as Richard Cobden and other luminaries of the free trade movement. Yet unlike them, he endorsed imperial ascendancy in order to remove obstacles to global communications and spread civilization outside Europe.

Elias Muhanna’s The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Ency- clopedic Tradition is an erudite, scrupulously researched, and eminently readable book that marks a significant contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Muhanna successfully analyzes—over the course of 232 pages with almost a dozen images and as many tables—the monumental, 31-volume encyclopedic compendium that consists of over two million words, titled Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition), composed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, an Egyptian bureaucrat and scholar, during the early fourteenth century. Muhanna’s goals are to consider why al-Nuwayrī composed his ambi- tious work; to analyze the disciplines al-Nuwayrī’s work encompassed and the models, sources, and methods that guided its composition; and to trace its reception among al-Nuwayrī’s contemporaries as well as its later recep- tion in Europe and the Islamicate world. Centering these questions on The Ultimate Ambition, Muhanna analyzes Arabic encyclopedism, a phenom- enon that reached its zenith in Egypt and Syria during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Muhanna challenges the argument that the rise in encyclopedism re- flected anxiety about the Mongol invasions and fears about the obliteration of civilization’s knowledge and heritage. He instead argues that encyclope- dists such as al-Nuwayrī were motivated by various factors, “chief among them the feeling of an overcrowding of authoritative knowledge in Cairo and Damascus, the great school cities of the empire” (3) which, coupled with the expansion of higher education and the migration patterns of scholars in West and Central Asia, meant that there were “new texts available for study and prompting the formation of new genres and knowledge practices” (3). The story of al-Nuwayrī is, thus, a story about the production, reception, and transmission of knowledge. Muhanna’s primary raconteurs are schol- ars of Mamluk history and historiography, Islamicate literature, and studies in the transmission of knowledge, including T. Bauer, J. Berkey, A. Blair, M. Chamberlain, L. Guo, K. Hirschler, H. Kilpatrick, D. Little, L. Northrup, C. Petry, J. Schmidt, M. van Berkel, and G. van Gelder. The World in a Book is both sweeping and specific, and it considers al-Nuwayrī’s compendium directly—not merely as a source to reconstruct Mamluk history—and assesses why encyclopedism surged during the thir- teenth through fifteenth centuries. Amongst the genres of medieval Arabic Islamicate literature to which scholars have directed their attention during the past several decades—such as adab, poetry, mirrors for princes, histo- ries, chronicles, hadith collections, and pilgrimage manuals—relatively few have studied Arabic encyclopedism. Chapter 1, “Encyclopedism in the Mamluk Empire,” explores why al-Nuwayrī compiled his work. Muhanna offers a useful distinction be- tween “encyclopedism and encyclopedia” (pp. 11-13) and grounds his ap- proach in encyclopedism, which is the idea that there is a “spectrum…upon which we might situate a variety of works belonging to different premodern genres and possessing different principles of order, structure, focus, agen- da, audience, and modes of reading” (12). The merit of this approach is that it casts a wider, less restrictive net, since “reading these texts as tokens of a similar knowledge practice rather than members of a common genre per- mits us to see the continuities between strategies of knowledge-ordering that cut across different bibliographical categories” (12). Given the fluc- tuating and complex notions of genre—the genre of medieval Arabic and Persian tārīkh, for example, encompasses a heterogeneous variety of texts, from local histories, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and often some combination of all of the above—encyclopedism is a compelling conceptual approach to this body of literatures. Muhanna argues that while al-Nuwayrī himself situated his work within the tradition of adab, his inspirations and sources belonged to other genres, which lead to the rise of this hybrid genre of encyclopedism. Al-Nuwayrī was an esteemed copyist who directly ad- dressed the scribal arts in The Ultimate Ambition, which “both described the expectations of the scribe and provided the content of his education: it styled itself as an encyclopedic guide for an encyclopedic education” (21). Chapter 2, “Structures of Knowledge,” offers a 30,000ft view of al-Nu- wayrī’s work, including its arrangement, structure, and overall composi- tion, and compares it to other Mamluk encyclopedic texts and to earlier adab works. This chapter is particularly useful to scholars who want an introduction into The Ultimate Ambition and Arabic encyclopedism, which Muhanna argues was itself a mélange of other extant genres: the work is “not recognizably a literary anthology, a cosmographical compendium, a chronicle, a pharmacopia, or a scribal manual, but an amalgam of all of these genres” (49). Chapter 3, “Sources of Knowledge,” contextualizes al-Nuwayrī’s com- pendium by situating it within the scholarly milieu of centers of learning within the Mamluk Empire, particularly Cairo and Damascus, during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. By situating al-Nuwayrī within the Nā- siriyya madrasa in Cairo and the intellectual, familial, and professional connections he cultivated and from which he benefitted, the author brings a granular depth to al-Nuwayrī and his work. This chapter is of particular interest to scholars of the production and circulation of knowledge. In Chapter 4, “Encyclopedism and Empire,” Muhanna turns to the im- perial and administrative scaffolding of the Mamluk Empire. The author argues that since compilers like al-Nuwayrī were part of the Mamluk bu- reaucracy, they “were particularly attuned to the processes of centralization and consolidation that transformed the politics of their time (4),” and wrote for an audience that reflected the nexus between literary encyclopedism and the imperial Mamluk state. Muhanna considers administrative knowl- edge and scholarly knowledge as separate but related spheres, arguing that “gathering vast quantities of information, collating sources, and synthe- sizing diverse types of knowledge represented the core activities of both the administrator and the large-scale compiler… a career in bureaucracy helped develop the skills of archiving and itemization that any compiler would have possessed…What set the two domains apart, however, was a difference in the types of knowledge that were valued. The world of admin- istration was one of contemporary, mutable information” (104). Muhanna’s more important argument in this chapter, however, is his claim about the unique position of Mamluk bureaucrats to be curators of knowledge and practices in the Mamluk Empire. He argues, “The common thread uniting the diverse professionals that comprised the administra- tion…was the importance attached to gathering data in the service of the state… By virtue of their access to demographic, financial, historical, and legal materials about the empire’s subjects, institutions, and communities, the bureaucratic class was in a unique position to shape the politics of their day in a manner that no other professional group could achieve” (104). As a bureaucrat-turned-scholar and an expert copyist, al-Nuwayrī embodied the related spheres of knowledge gathering, organization, and transmission in Mamluk Cairo. Chapter 5, “Working Methods,” delves into the manuscript tradition and reconstructs the composition history of al-Nuwayrī’s work. Muhanna addresses the strategies of collation, edition, and the management of sourc- es involved in the production of large compilations during the Mamluk period. The Chapter 6, “The Reception of the Ultimate Ambition,” addresses the literary afterlife of al-Nuwayrī’s work by discussing its reception in the Islamicate world and in Europe, with particular attention to the Dutch re- ception. By considering reception history of al-Nuwayrī’s work, Muhanna’s brief but engaging final chapter considers the impact of Mamluk encyclo- pedism in shaping the way Islamicate thought was perceived both within Europe and the Islamicate world. Muhanna’s appendices will prove valuable to scholars. “Appendix A: The Contents of the Ultimate Ambition” is extremely useful for those who do not share Muhanna’s patience to delve into the 31-volume work itself. In Appendix B, Muhanna compares the tables of contents of the two editions of The Ultimate Ambition: that of the standard Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya edition, which was begun in 1923 but only completed in 1997, which is dif- ficult to access; and the more recent Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya edition, pub- lished in Beirut in 2004, which is more widely available. The 11 figures that Muhanna intersperses throughout his book are attractive additions to his work, but it is the 13 tables that showcase Muhanna’s service to organize, divide, and categorize the sources, focusing primarily on al-Nuwayrī’s Ulti- mate Ambition itself. Some of these tables include: identifying The Ultimate Ambition’s chapter word counts for the Cairo and Beirut editions; outlining the arrangement of seven classical adab encyclopedias; and identifying and listing the sources of The Ultimate Ambition in its books 1, 3, and 4. These are valuable sources that the author has produced to help scholars and stu- dents make better sense and use of al-Nuwayrī’s massive tome. The World in a Book is a valuable contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Specialists will benefit most from this work, but its excellent readability makes it a valuable volume for graduate and undergraduate students as well as those interested in the production of knowledge in the Middle East more broadly. Mimi HanaokaAssociate Professor of Religious StudiesUniversity of Richmond

Elias Muhanna’s The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Ency- clopedic Tradition is an erudite, scrupulously researched, and eminently readable book that marks a significant contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Muhanna successfully analyzes—over the course of 232 pages with almost a dozen images and as many tables—the monumental, 31-volume encyclopedic compendium that consists of over two million words, titled Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition), composed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, an Egyptian bureaucrat and scholar, during the early fourteenth century. Muhanna’s goals are to consider why al-Nuwayrī composed his ambi- tious work; to analyze the disciplines al-Nuwayrī’s work encompassed and the models, sources, and methods that guided its composition; and to trace its reception among al-Nuwayrī’s contemporaries as well as its later recep- tion in Europe and the Islamicate world. Centering these questions on The Ultimate Ambition, Muhanna analyzes Arabic encyclopedism, a phenom- enon that reached its zenith in Egypt and Syria during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Muhanna challenges the argument that the rise in encyclopedism re- flected anxiety about the Mongol invasions and fears about the obliteration of civilization’s knowledge and heritage. He instead argues that encyclope- dists such as al-Nuwayrī were motivated by various factors, “chief among them the feeling of an overcrowding of authoritative knowledge in Cairo and Damascus, the great school cities of the empire” (3) which, coupled with the expansion of higher education and the migration patterns of scholars in West and Central Asia, meant that there were “new texts available for study and prompting the formation of new genres and knowledge practices” (3). The story of al-Nuwayrī is, thus, a story about the production, reception, and transmission of knowledge. Muhanna’s primary raconteurs are schol- ars of Mamluk history and historiography, Islamicate literature, and studies in the transmission of knowledge, including T. Bauer, J. Berkey, A. Blair, M. Chamberlain, L. Guo, K. Hirschler, H. Kilpatrick, D. Little, L. Northrup, C. Petry, J. Schmidt, M. van Berkel, and G. van Gelder. The World in a Book is both sweeping and specific, and it considers al-Nuwayrī’s compendium directly—not merely as a source to reconstruct Mamluk history—and assesses why encyclopedism surged during the thir- teenth through fifteenth centuries. Amongst the genres of medieval Arabic Islamicate literature to which scholars have directed their attention during the past several decades—such as adab, poetry, mirrors for princes, histo- ries, chronicles, hadith collections, and pilgrimage manuals—relatively few have studied Arabic encyclopedism. Chapter 1, “Encyclopedism in the Mamluk Empire,” explores why al-Nuwayrī compiled his work. Muhanna offers a useful distinction be- tween “encyclopedism and encyclopedia” (pp. 11-13) and grounds his ap- proach in encyclopedism, which is the idea that there is a “spectrum…upon which we might situate a variety of works belonging to different premodern genres and possessing different principles of order, structure, focus, agen- da, audience, and modes of reading” (12). The merit of this approach is that it casts a wider, less restrictive net, since “reading these texts as tokens of a similar knowledge practice rather than members of a common genre per- mits us to see the continuities between strategies of knowledge-ordering that cut across different bibliographical categories” (12). Given the fluc- tuating and complex notions of genre—the genre of medieval Arabic and Persian tārīkh, for example, encompasses a heterogeneous variety of texts, from local histories, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and often some combination of all of the above—encyclopedism is a compelling conceptual approach to this body of literatures. Muhanna argues that while al-Nuwayrī himself situated his work within the tradition of adab, his inspirations and sources belonged to other genres, which lead to the rise of this hybrid genre of encyclopedism. Al-Nuwayrī was an esteemed copyist who directly ad- dressed the scribal arts in The Ultimate Ambition, which “both described the expectations of the scribe and provided the content of his education: it styled itself as an encyclopedic guide for an encyclopedic education” (21). Chapter 2, “Structures of Knowledge,” offers a 30,000ft view of al-Nu- wayrī’s work, including its arrangement, structure, and overall composi- tion, and compares it to other Mamluk encyclopedic texts and to earlier adab works. This chapter is particularly useful to scholars who want an introduction into The Ultimate Ambition and Arabic encyclopedism, which Muhanna argues was itself a mélange of other extant genres: the work is “not recognizably a literary anthology, a cosmographical compendium, a chronicle, a pharmacopia, or a scribal manual, but an amalgam of all of these genres” (49). Chapter 3, “Sources of Knowledge,” contextualizes al-Nuwayrī’s com- pendium by situating it within the scholarly milieu of centers of learning within the Mamluk Empire, particularly Cairo and Damascus, during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. By situating al-Nuwayrī within the Nā- siriyya madrasa in Cairo and the intellectual, familial, and professional connections he cultivated and from which he benefitted, the author brings a granular depth to al-Nuwayrī and his work. This chapter is of particular interest to scholars of the production and circulation of knowledge. In Chapter 4, “Encyclopedism and Empire,” Muhanna turns to the im- perial and administrative scaffolding of the Mamluk Empire. The author argues that since compilers like al-Nuwayrī were part of the Mamluk bu- reaucracy, they “were particularly attuned to the processes of centralization and consolidation that transformed the politics of their time (4),” and wrote for an audience that reflected the nexus between literary encyclopedism and the imperial Mamluk state. Muhanna considers administrative knowl- edge and scholarly knowledge as separate but related spheres, arguing that “gathering vast quantities of information, collating sources, and synthe- sizing diverse types of knowledge represented the core activities of both the administrator and the large-scale compiler… a career in bureaucracy helped develop the skills of archiving and itemization that any compiler would have possessed…What set the two domains apart, however, was a difference in the types of knowledge that were valued. The world of admin- istration was one of contemporary, mutable information” (104). Muhanna’s more important argument in this chapter, however, is his claim about the unique position of Mamluk bureaucrats to be curators of knowledge and practices in the Mamluk Empire. He argues, “The common thread uniting the diverse professionals that comprised the administra- tion…was the importance attached to gathering data in the service of the state… By virtue of their access to demographic, financial, historical, and legal materials about the empire’s subjects, institutions, and communities, the bureaucratic class was in a unique position to shape the politics of their day in a manner that no other professional group could achieve” (104). As a bureaucrat-turned-scholar and an expert copyist, al-Nuwayrī embodied the related spheres of knowledge gathering, organization, and transmission in Mamluk Cairo. Chapter 5, “Working Methods,” delves into the manuscript tradition and reconstructs the composition history of al-Nuwayrī’s work. Muhanna addresses the strategies of collation, edition, and the management of sourc- es involved in the production of large compilations during the Mamluk period. The Chapter 6, “The Reception of the Ultimate Ambition,” addresses the literary afterlife of al-Nuwayrī’s work by discussing its reception in the Islamicate world and in Europe, with particular attention to the Dutch re- ception. By considering reception history of al-Nuwayrī’s work, Muhanna’s brief but engaging final chapter considers the impact of Mamluk encyclo- pedism in shaping the way Islamicate thought was perceived both within Europe and the Islamicate world. Muhanna’s appendices will prove valuable to scholars. “Appendix A: The Contents of the Ultimate Ambition” is extremely useful for those who do not share Muhanna’s patience to delve into the 31-volume work itself. In Appendix B, Muhanna compares the tables of contents of the two editions of The Ultimate Ambition: that of the standard Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya edition, which was begun in 1923 but only completed in 1997, which is dif- ficult to access; and the more recent Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya edition, pub- lished in Beirut in 2004, which is more widely available. The 11 figures that Muhanna intersperses throughout his book are attractive additions to his work, but it is the 13 tables that showcase Muhanna’s service to organize, divide, and categorize the sources, focusing primarily on al-Nuwayrī’s Ulti- mate Ambition itself. Some of these tables include: identifying The Ultimate Ambition’s chapter word counts for the Cairo and Beirut editions; outlining the arrangement of seven classical adab encyclopedias; and identifying and listing the sources of The Ultimate Ambition in its books 1, 3, and 4. These are valuable sources that the author has produced to help scholars and stu- dents make better sense and use of al-Nuwayrī’s massive tome. The World in a Book is a valuable contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Specialists will benefit most from this work, but its excellent readability makes it a valuable volume for graduate and undergraduate students as well as those interested in the production of knowledge in the Middle East more broadly. Mimi HanaokaAssociate Professor of Religious StudiesUniversity of Richmond

Yemen, as a center of international maritime trade, was one of the most important strongholds of the Egypt in their commercial dealings with India and China during the Ayyubid and Mamluk eras. In the first third of the 15th century the relations between the Mamluk sultanate and the Rasulid state of Yemen began to tense. An attempt to resolve the conflict and to create favorable conditions for the trade on the Red Sea was made by the Mamluk Sultan al-Ẓāhir Ṭaṭar, who ruled for some month in 1421. Al-Ẓāhir Ṭaṭar expressed his desire to improve the relations with Yemen and to ensure the safety of traders in the Red Sea in a letter to al-Nāṣir Aḥmad (1401–1424), the sultan of Yemen. The text of the letter was compiled by a mamluk bureaucrat and a prominent litterateur Ibn Ḥijjah al-Ḥamawī (1366–1434) and included in his “Qahwat al-inshā▒”, a collection of diplomatic correspondence, published by R.Veselẏ5. Another version of this letter is preserved in an anonymous collection of Mamluk chancery documents (MS Arabe 4440 BnF, Paris), studied by F. Bauden and M. Dekkiche. The third version of the same letter was discovered in Ibn al-Damāmīnī’s “Shams al-maghrib fī al-murqiṣ wa-l-muṭrib” (MS Sprenger 1223, Staatsbibliothek, Berlin). The article starts out with a short history of Ṭaṭar’s political career. Then the main part of the letter shall be translated and it’s three versions compared. Finally, the study follows the traces of al-Ẓāhir Ṭaṭar’s policy towards Yemen and explores the significance of the letter.

In this multidisciplinary discussion, the author advances the hypothesis that pre-firing potmarks placed externally onto bread moulds constituted a locally regulated rationing or wage payment system throughout Egypt in Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic times. In the absence of both formal writing and a centralized government, the invention of potmarks is seen as an administrative ‘first response’, an adaptive mechanism in the truest Darwinian sense, to meet an urgent need for order and control in a climate of increasing economic complexity as people transitioned from private to public spheres of food production. Furthermore, the distribution of geographically discrete but similar potmark corpora across Egypt suggests the presence of a ‘proto-bureaucracy’ before state formation, with this genre of mark situated at its core. This proto-bureaucracy is seen as inherently different from the bureaucracy of the impending state, dominated instead by elements of an adhocracy, a form of administration based on non-centralized management. The term adhocracy and its tenets, although developed in the modern era for present-day and future restructuring of bureaucracies, permit for the first time a cogent modelling of potmark administration.

Abstract In this article, we explore the “probate regime,” an administrative field of government activity of legally transferring, taxing, and administering bequests. As an example, we study the changes of the Egyptian probate regime in a longue durée perspective, with a focus on the nineteenth century when Egypt was a sub-Ottoman “khedivate.” We argue that the rationalization and expansion of the previously Ottoman administration of bequests, unlike Western bureaucracies, retained religious norms in the 1850s-1860s. In the context of Egyptian legal transformation, the change in the probate regime represents a case when Islamic norms became contested between administrative bodies of the government and the Muslim judge (qadi). Drawing on novel archival research in Egypt and elsewhere, we first consider the institutions of the Ottoman probate regime (probate judge, fees, and a probate bureau). Next, we zoom in on the way the khedivial probate bureau became a large, de-Ottomanized, Muslim administration of death by the 1870s in a partnership between khedives and local jurists. The khedives also considered the orphans’ wealth under the care of the bureau a source of government capitalism. Despite the abolishment of the probate bureau in 1896, the khedivial transformation ensured that Muslim principles remained normative during the British occupation which ushered in a new division of law into “religious” and “civil” legal domains.

For decades, Egypt -as many developing counties- suffers from various social issues as poverty, illiteracy and the decline of public service provision as healthcare, education, potable water and sewage. In spite of all the consecutive government efforts to confront such social dilemmas, the constituents of different locality in Egypt still feel the discrepancy and decay of quality for many social services proposed by the government.In fact, many challenges are hindering the government strategic path to overcome such social issues as the scarcity of financial and physical resources, deplorable bureaucracy crippled by red tapes, lack of competent human resources, escalated number of population and embedded corruption. Thereby, the people whined from social injustice due to the government failure in realizing a just national wealth distribution. Hence, social entrepreneurship emerged -from the twentieth century endings- as an alternate option to resolve inadequate government performance and to improve the quality and the delivery of social services. Whereby, this can be realized by mobilizing personal properties to be allocated to public affairs in the context of people cooperation and voluntary participation values. Such process of social entrepreneurship had to take place within an entity/corporation -as non-governmental organizations NGOs- (social entrepreneur) able to manage its activities effectively realizing an adequate model of actions within the organization (intrapreneurship/internal entrepreneurship). This paper, therefore, explores, discusses and analyzes the role of waqf corporate as a good example for social entrepreneurs who have played a significant role of providing opportunities in sharing the government’s fiscal needs and improving the communities and nation welfare throughout history in many countries. Waqf corporate has a potential to become one of the effective tools regarding the socioeconomic realm in the Egyptian community; whereby it can benefit the community in term of education, health care, national security, social justice, transportation facilities, basic infrastructure, foods and job opportunities. Keywords: Corporate waqf, Social entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, Egyptian community.

The article focuses on the Ottoman period scholar Kara Halil Efendi (d. 1123/1711) and his gloss/hâşiya on Kürdî, who was a gloss/hâşiya on Nüzhe. Black Halil has a professor, bureaucrat and glosser personality. Kara Halil, who rose from professorship to qazasker, is an important character in terms of raising the Ottoman ilmiye class, showing his interests and goals. His gloss is; The transfer of the Egyptian scientific heritage (Nüzhe and Kürdî Haşiyesi) to the Ottoman Empire is important in terms of the nature of Ottoman era hadith writing and the Ottoman understanding of science. The study is based on the 17th-18th century, which constitutes a part of the history of hadith, by revealing the flow of science in Egypt-Istanbul, the writing style, language and content of the hadith method, specific to Kara Halil, who is a scholar in the field, and his work. It aims to give an idea about the 19th century Ottoman period. In this context, Kara Halil's life, scientific and bureaucratic personality will be discussed first, and then his work, Haşiye alâ Hâşiyet'l-Kürdî ala Şerhi Nuhbeti'l-Fiker, which he wrote about the hadith method.

Editoriallist, Liszt, mist, quist (Dialect wood pigeon), wrist, grist, tryst, cyst, cist (box holding ritual objects), schist, whist, twist, xyst (long portico) (Fergusson 270)“Everyone uses lists,” Francis Spufford (2) tells us. Lists are all pervasive; they are part-and-parcel of how we experience and make sense of the world. According to Umberto Eco, the whole history of creative production can be seen as one that is characterised by an “infinity of lists” comprising, to name a few, visual lists (sixteenth century religious paintings, Dutch still life paintings), pragmatic or utilitarian lists (shopping lists, library catalogues, assets in a will), poetic or literary lists (such as in Joyce or Sebald, for instance), lists of places, lists of things (like the great list of ships in the Iliad), and so on, ad infinitum... In accordance with such variation in form comes great variation in purpose, with lists used to “enumerate, account, remind, memorialize, order,” and so on (Belknap 6). List making, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star point out, “has frequently been seen as one of the foundational activities of advanced human society” (137): to cite three examples, list making is argued to be crucial to our understanding of orality and the development of literacy (Goody 74-111), and to the connection between these and later forms and techniques of information management (Hobart and Schiffman), as well as to our appreciation of the functioning and value of narrativity (White). In this way, Robert Belknap perhaps has a point in proposing that, “The list form is the predominant mode of organizing data relevant to human functioning in the world” (8).Simply defined, a list is “a formally organized block of information that is composed of a set of members” (Belknap 15). What is significant about a list is that it is “simultaneously the sum of its parts and the individual parts themselves” (15). That is to say, like links in a chain, “the list joins and separates at the same time” (15). In addition to these features, Jack Goody also suggests that, across their various manifestations, lists have a number of basic characteristics or conventions concerning how they are constructed and read, which, appropriately, he lists as follows:The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends on physical placement, on location; it can be read in different directions, both sideways and downwards, up and down, as well as left and right; it has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end, that is, a boundary, an edge, like a piece of cloth. Most importantly it encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract. (Goody 81)Just as boundaries are “an important attribute” (Goody 80) of the list and how each is compiled, so too are semantic boundary disputes for how we conceive of the list vis-à-vis other forms of enumeration. If one were to compose a list of lists, Belknap suggests, it “would include the catalogue, the inventory, the itinerary, and the lexicon” (2). This is, however, a problematic typology insofar as each item can be seen to hold subtle differences in form and purpose from the list, as Belknap is quick to point out: “The catalogue is more comprehensive, conveys more information, and is more amenable to digression than the list. In the inventory, words representing names or things are collected by a conceptual principle.” (2-3) In his discussion of lists in literature, Spufford extends the first of these distinctions by drawing a qualitative distinction between the list (“In a list, almost everything that makes writing interesting to read seems inevitably to be excluded,” 1) and the catalogue (“Rather richer, and a step closer to the complex intentions and complex effects of literature proper, are the catalogues of some sorts of collections,” 3). Elsewhere, the close associations, and difficulties in differentiating, between the list and the classification system has also been noted (Bowker and Star, 137-61). While we recognise these delicate, at times almost imperceptible but nonetheless significant differences in meaning, in this special issue we take an expansive and inclusive approach to the list form and the implications of lists and listing. One (deceptively simple) distinction that is productive in framing this themed issue and the essays included in it is that which Belknap (3-5) draws between literary lists, on the one hand, and pragmatic or utilitarian lists, on the other hand. According to Belknap, literary lists are “complex in precisely the way a pragmatic list must not be” (5). Belknap, like Spufford before him, takes up and explores these “complexities” of literary lists in great detail. Two contributions to this special issue engage with the intricacies of the literary list. In the first of these, Darren Tofts, in his evocatively titled piece “Why Writers Hate the Second Law of Thermodynamics; Lists, Entropy, and the Sense of Unending,” examines the list form as it is mobilised by a range of writers, from Beckett and Borges, to Joyce and Robbe-Grillet. Tofts explores the exhaustion and tilt towards entropy that “issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information” by each of these diverse writers, and the way that words themselves tend to resist entropy by taking on “a weird half-life of their own” and sustaining “an unlikely […] stoical sense of unending.” Quite a different treatment of literary lists is offered by Tom Lee in his essay “The Lists of W. G. Sebald.” Focusing on the novel The Rings of Saturn, Lee explores the way that Sebald mobilises literary lists as a crucial device in his exploration and interrogation of the question, in Lee’s words, of what “might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.” But to focus solely on literary lists is to obscure or ignore other vital dimensions of lists and listing, such as the way that pragmatic listing forms (not just their literary counterparts) can be put to powerful rhetorical use (Belknap 3). Bowker and Star capture this well in the following passage:The material culture of bureaucracy and empire is not found in pomp and circumstance, nor even in the first instance of the point of a gun, but rather at the point of a list. (Bowker and Star 137)This is something that has been evident to a number of writers and thinkers, not least Foucault, who, in his The Order of Things, for example, sought to delineate the rise of the great natural history taxonomies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of their productive power as authoritative forms of classification. Foucault’s exploration of these connections can be said to have fed his subsequent theorisations of “governmentality”—which Judith Butler summarises as “a mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations” (52)—and of “biopolitics”—which Foucault defines as a “set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Foucault, Security 1). It is within this tradition—that takes as one of its sources the work of Foucault and which runs in diverse tributaries of critical enquiry outwards in its exploration of the interconnections between lists (and other, related processes and techniques of classification) and power (see, for example, Poster)—that we can usefully situate two further essays in this issue, that by Katie Ellis and that by Suneel Jethani. Both of these essays take up lists in relation to quite distinct aspects of disabilities studies. In “Complicating a Rudimentary List of Characteristics: Communicating Disability with Down Syndrome Dolls,” Ellis brings “an interrogation of disability into dialogue with a critical analysis of the discursive function of lists” by interrogating “the use of lists in the way meanings about disability are communicated through the medical diagnostic list,” the production of Down Syndrome dolls for children, and unfavourable public reactions to these dolls. Ellis’s aim in exploring these concerns is to “complicate perceptions of disability beyond a rudimentary list of characteristics through a consideration of the negative public response to these dolls”—responses, she argues, that serve as a potent example of “the cultural subjugation of disability.” Meanwhile, in “Lists, Spatial Practice, and Assistive Technologies for the Blind,” Jethani explores the promise and perils of locative mobile media technologies designed to assist vision-impaired supermarket shoppers. Examining two prototypic applications, Shop Talk and Blind Shopping, Jethani argues that “the emancipatory potential” of these applications, “their efficacy in practical situations,” and their future commercial viability, is dependent upon commercial and institutional infrastructures and control, regulatory factors, and the extent to which they can successfully address “issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data.”The bureaucratic—or more specifically, the political economic—dimensions of pragmatic or utilitarian lists and their composition also forms the point of departure for two further essays in this issue. The first of these is Gerard Goggin’s “List Media: The Telephone Directory and the Arranging of Names.” In this feature article (one of two in this issue), Goggin examines the long history and fraught future of telephone directories and proprietary interests in them. The argument he develops is that, while telephone directories are a form of book (at least traditionally), they are in fact better thought of as a unique form of media—what he terms “list media.” Proprietary interests in lists are also the specific concern of Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns who, in their article “Twitter Archives and the Challenges of ‘Big Social Data’ for Media and Communication Research,” explore the “technical, political, and epistemological” issues that attend the corporate control of network, profit-driven database—“list”—infrastructure, such as Twitter. Notwithstanding the above considerations of power, inclusion and exclusion, ownership and control, there is one further, vital aspect of non-literary lists that warrants explicit mention here. This is the fact that pragmatic and utilitarian lists and our engagements with them are, for the most part, deeply embedded in everyday life and form part of all the routines, habits, and familiar patterns that characterise our “ordinary lives” (Highmore)—after all, to restate Spufford’s opening remark, this is the context in which “everyone uses lists” (2). The final two of the eight articles making up this themed issue examine everyday lists and the potential of lists as productive mechanisms for documenting and making sense of the ineffability of the everyday. The first of these, which also forms the first of the two feature articles, is Ben Highmore’s “Listlessness in the Archive.” This playful and poetic piece explores the challenges that a researcher faces when they attempt to tackle an archive that is the work of an army of “amateur anthropologist” volunteers who documented British lives in a project of Mass Observation. The centerpiece of the article is a series of lists compiled by the Mass-Observers of the objects on their own mantelpieces. Picking up on the theme of entropy (also explored by Tofts in this issue), Highmore describes the sense of listlessness that threatens to overwhelm his encounter with these lists. Lastly, in our article, “The Everyday Work of Lists,” we take a rather different approach to Highmore’s by exploring the work that lists do in “mediating the materiality and complexity of consumer-based everyday life.” Our guide is the French writer, Georges Perec, who, across a variety of projects and texts, deployed the list as a productive mechanism (an “invent-ory,” as we refer to it) and lever for prying open for inspection the seemingly inscrutable inner workings of everyday spaces, things, and memories. To conclude this editorial introduction, it seems only fitting that we end with a brief list of acknowledgments. We wish to thank:those at M/C Journal, Axel Bruns and Peta Mitchell, for supporting and assisting with this special issue;the authors who entrusted us with their articles, and tolerated with good humour and patience our various requests; and,the many referees for their vital contributions in reading and reviewing the articles gathered here;Simon Hayter and the Ancient Egypt website, for the banner image, a twelfth century BC papyrus list of Egyptian rulers; those authors whose insights, scholarly pursuit and use of lists inspired this issue: Robert Belknap, Jack Goody, Umberto Eco, Georges Perec…ReferencesBelknap, Robert E. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004.Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Trans. Alastair McEwen. London: MacLehose Press, 2009.Fergusson, Rosalind. The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985.Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.---. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2002.Goody, Jack. “What’s in a List?” The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. 74-111.Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London: Routledge, 2011.Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Poster, Mark. “Foucault and Databases.” The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Oxford: Polity, 1990. 69-98.Spufford, Francis. “Introduction.” The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature. Ed. Francis Spufford. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989. 1-23.White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1981. 1-23.