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M. Talha Çiçek's Negotiating Empire in the Middle East discusses the changing relationships between the Ottoman imperial administration and the Shammar and the Anizah tribal confederations, in the regions of today’s Iraq, Syria, Arabia, and Jordan, between the Tanzimat Era and the WWI. The book is an essential addition filling several scholarly gaps in the writing of the Ottoman Middle East's social history, the history of the Tanzimat Reforms across the Empire, and that of the Arab Tribal communities, commonly known today as the Bedouin communities. M. Talha Çiçek'in Negotiating Empire in the Middle East isimli kitabı, Tanzimat ile Birinci Dünya Savaşı arasındaki dönemde, günümüz Irak, Suriye, Arabistan ve Ürdün bölgelerinde Osmanlı İmparatorluğu yönetimi ile Şammar ve Anizah aşiret konfederasyonları arasındaki değişken ilişkileri tartışmaktadır. Eser, Osmanlı Ortadoğu'sunun sosyal tarihinin, Tanzimat Reformlarının ve genellikle Bedevi toplulukları olarak tanınan Arap kabile gruplarının yazımında mevcut akademik eksikliklerin giderilmesine önemli katkı sağlar mahiyettedir.

Sacred stone veneration is a global mythical phenomenon historically practiced by many groups, including ancient Semitic-speaking peoples. In their physical capacity, sacred stones themselves are not the object of worship or veneration. Their sanctity comes from the divine spirit believed to dwell within them. The common denominator among the mythological traditions of sacred stones veneration is the belief that they possess enormous spiritual powers that enable them to act as mediators between the worshipper and the gods. Stones were employed as tools in the rituals of veneration in many types of sanctuaries, such as stone circles. This study highlights this type of religious folklore in Palestine, representing one of the bridges linking the Palestinian present to its distant Canaanite past. It traces the various patterns of sacred stones in the central region of Palestine, the rituals that were practised using them, and the remnants of these practices found in oral folklore traditions. To these ends, the researchers relied on religious and historical primary and secondary sources, including oral interviews where available and possible.

This article discusses findings from a dissertation research project in the Palestinian village of Ni’lin in relation to the synthesis of an actor-oriented methodological approach with Indigenous theory. Through this synthesis, the article proposes a theoretical and methodological approach for studying settler colonialism and social transformations in Palestinian contexts. It also adapts the methodology, allowing enriching development theory to account for settler colonial settings and the case of Palestine. It shows the value of critical events, as sites to study historicity, violence, and resistance, highlighting the important interaction of individual and collective actors with culture and larger frames of meaning in relation to Indigenous resurgence.

AbstractUsing technology and social networking sites in education has become a variable that should be considered and utilized by educators to cope with learners’ needs and demands in the era of the technological revolution, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed at reviewing and analyzing the benefits of using one of the social networking sites (Facebook) in foreign language instruction, particularly teaching and learning English at higher educational institutions. A meta-analysis qualitative approach was followed as thirty-three studies were reviewed, summarized and synthesized based on predetermined criteria and procedures. The findings revealed five main roles and benefits that Facebook as a Web 2.0 technology can have in foreign language instruction, which were: (a) the impact of using Facebook on adult learners’ engagement; (b) the impact of using Facebook on improving college students’ academic performance and achievement; (c) the role of using Facebook in supporting cross-cultural awareness and collaborative learning; (d) the role of using Facebook in enhancing the interactive and communicative learning; (e) the role of using Facebook in immersing students in a meaningful learning experience. Accordingly, some conclusions and recommendations were suggested.

During the last decades, the reliance on email communication, especially in business, has increased significantly. Companies receive a massive amount of emails daily, that include business inquiries, customers’ feedback, and other types of emails. This inspired many researchers to propose different algorithms to classify and redistribute the numerous emails according to their content. Nowadays, emails containing Arabic text, especially in the Arab world, have raised an increasing concern since they became widely used in official correspondence. Nevertheless, just a small amount of literature focuses on Arabic text classification. Therefore, this work addresses Arabic business emails classification based on natural language processing (NLP). A dataset of 63,257 emails was used and the emails were classified as: urgency, sentiment, and topic classification. The proposed models are based on machine learning techniques and a lexicon of words on which the emails are identified. The models are composed of different settings of convolutional neural networks (CNN). A separate model was built, trained, and tested for each category. The results were promising and gave an accuracy of about 92% and a loss of less than 8%. They also proved the correctness and robustness of this work.