PRINT, WRITING, AND THE POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN THE MIDDLE-EAST - INTRODUCTION

Texts, writing, and print create new forms of communication, community , and authority. Their transformative influence pervades Middle Easter n and Muslim religious and political forms. Scholarly attention to the m collapses conventional assumptions of a ''great divide'' separating ''tribal'' and urban, nonliterate and literate in the region. ''Textua l'' ethnography sheds light on phenomena as diverse as the continued s ignificance of the genealogy of the Prophet's ancestors for representi ng Muslim tribal identities, the linkage between legal writing and the patriarchal authority of the landed gentry in Yemen, pamphlets and tr acts in Islamic resistance to Marxist rule in Afghanistan, and the eme rgence of an Islamist anthropology.