Until recently, the study of the Middle East has focused almost exclusively on Islam and on the regime, especially on its non-democratic aspects. It has done so at the expense of accounting fully for the forces of skepticism, liberty, and creativity that struggle against Islamic conformism and state hegemony. Strangely, there seems to be no scholarly awareness of the simple fact that however influential religion appears in word and deed, however evident the trappings of state authority, people come into being, thrive, marry, raise families, think, laugh, and cry without regard to—indeed, sometimes in utter defiance of—the strictures of religious or state authority. This volume examines how Middle Eastern peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lived and flourished while trying to shape their political and religious surroundings outside the formal structures of established religion and the state.

Introduction: Between the State and Islam
Charles E. Butterworth and I. William Zartman

Part I. The Nineteenth Century
Preface
Charles E. Butterworth
1. On What Is Between, Even Beyond, the Paradigms of the State and Islam
Charles E. Butterworth
2. The Impact of Technology Change on the Nineteenth-Century Arab World
Antoine B. Zahland
3. An Islamic Political Formula in Transformation: Islam, Identity, and Nationalism in the History of the Volga Tatars
Serif Mardin
4. Muslim Opposition Thinkers in the Nineteenth Century
Said Bensaid Alaoui

Part II. The Twentieth-Century
Preface
I. William Zartman
5. Against the Taboos of Islam: Anti-conformist Tendencies in Contemporary Arab/Islamic Thought
As‘ad AbuKhalil
6. Democratic Thought in the Arab World: An Alternative to the Patron State
Iliya Harik
7. Political Parties between State Power and Islamist Opposition
Ibrahim A. Karawan
8. Liberal Professionals in the Contemporary Arab World
Timothy J. Piro
9. Daniel Lerner Revisited: The Audio-Visual Media and Its Reception: Two North African Cases
Jean Leca, Meriem Verges, and Mounia Bennani-Chraibi
10. Islam, the State, and Democracy: The Contradictions
I. William Zartman