Introduction: Sami Zubaida, modernity, politics and a social Middle East

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Notes

1. Norbert Elias was published in the second number of E&S, in May 1972 (‘Theory of science and science of theory’, pp. 195–221). As Goudsblom & Mennell (1997) relate, his influence was eclipsed by the Marxist vocabulary of the period, only to be ‘re-discovered’ 30 years on. On Elias, Zubaida, Giddens et al see Goudsblom & Mennell, 1997, p. 84. On the broader role of Elias and Leicester's Sociology Department, see Goodwin & Hughes (2011). llya Neustadt, Norbert Elias, and the Leicester Department: personal correspondence and the history of sociology in Britain, The British Journal of Sociology (2011), 62 (4), 677–95.

2. On overhearing the jibe “flat-footed empiricist” as a term of intellectual abuse, he mused with a smile, “I have no problem with empiricism, it's the ‘flat-footed’ I object to, the condition is damn inconvenient.”

3. Evident in Hindess & Hirst (1977) and Turner's (1978) Marx and the end of Orientalism. The contents of Bryan Turner's work predate and are unrelated to Said's Orientalism – the influence of which is discussed in Aziz Al-Azmeh's text here.

4. The metrics of amazon.com are far removed from the concerns of the scholars discussed here. Yet such twenty-first century rankings do serve to underscore the substantial impact that the Middle East activists and scholars discussed here continue to have on the understanding and study of the Middle East. To this day Sami's Islam, the people and the state, Roger Owen's State, power and politics in the making of the modern Middle East, as well as numerous works by Talal Assad and Fred Halliday – both also part of the informal study group on the Middle East mentioned in the tributes here – continue to be the books most bought by graduate students.

5. See Sami's review of John Hall's Ernest Gellner: An intellectual biography which was published in The British Journal of Sociology, (2011).

6. Jaber & Dawod (2003), Jaber (2002), Vali (2011), Paidar (1995).

7. Bayart (2009), The state in Africa: The politics of the belly (2^nd ed.).

8. Zubaida & Tapper, 1994, p. ix.

9. Zubaida, S. (n.d.). ‘Our kitchen in 1940s Iraq’ [Turkish language newspaper]. The text unconsciously complements Tony Judt's (2009) memories of Jewish cuisine in London's East End at an identical point in the mid-twentieth century.

10. Prominent among these in the UK are Nadje Al-Ali, Toby Dodge, Gareth Stansfield and Charles Tripp. Sami's impact on broader understandings of the region also stem from frequent commentary on the BBC World Service. He has also been a long-standing contributing editor to the US-based Middle East Report, whose radical origins also lie in the 1970s.

11. For the historical foundations of this analysis, see Zubaida, 2002. Aspects of this were echoed in the conference meeting by Eugene Rogan, who presented on Iraqi history in the 1940s.

12. Volumes 1 (1975) and 2 (1976) of the Review of Middle East Studies consist largely of papers first presented at the conference; several present a pre-Said, materialist critique of Orientalism.