Michael Winter chaired the panel on “Medicine and Society in the Middle East” and was discussant at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America held in Boston in November 2007. During the second semester he was Visiting Scholar at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, where he researched the status and functions of the qadis in Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus. His Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt: Studies in the Writings of ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha‘rani (Transaction Publishers) was reissued in paperback in 2007. Winter co-edited two books: Turkey: The Ottoman Past and the Republican Present; Studies in Memory of Professor Aryeh Shmuelevitz, published in 2007 by the Dayan Center and the Department of Middle Eastern and African History. Winter contributed an article to that volume on the cultural relations between Ottoman Cairo and Istanbul. The second book was The Encounter of Crusaders and Muslims in Palestine as Reflected in Arsuf, Sayyiduna ‘Ali and Other Coastal Sites (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz HaMeuchad, 2007). He published two entries in Historians of the Ottoman Empire, Harvard University online project, at www.ottomanhistorians.com: Ibn Iyas, Muhammad b. Ahmad; and al-Ghazzi, Najmuddin Muhammad b. Muhammad. His article, “Struggling with a Complex Legacy: Egyptian Modernists on the Historical Caliphate,” appeared in David Menashri (ed.), Religion and State in the Middle East; Studies in Honor of Professor Shimon Shamir (Dayan Center and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv, 2006). He also published “Ottoman Qadis in Damascus during the 16th-18th Centuries,” in Ron Shaham (ed.), Law, Custom, and Statute in the Muslim World: Studies in Honor of Professor Aharon Layish (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

email: winter@post.tau.ac.il