Introduction: print, writing, and the politics of religious identity in the Middle East

Texts, writing, and print create new forms of communication, community, and authority. Their transformative influence pervades Middle Eastern and Muslim religious and political forms. Scholarly attention to them collapses conventional assumptions of a 'great divide' separating 'tribal' and urban, nonliterate and literate in the region. 'Textual' ethnography sheds light on phenomena as diverse as the continued significance of the genealogy of the Prophet's ancestors for representing Muslim tribal identities, the linkage between legal writing and the patriarchal authority of the landed gentry in Yemen, pamphlets and tracts in Islamic resistance to Marxist rule in Afghanistan, and the emergence of an Islamist anthropology. [writing, printing, Islam, politics, Middle East]