Across the Middle East and North Africa economic reform has been a common theme amongst an array of other social and political developments since the 1980s, yet both popular and academic debates have tended to highlight the persistent state involvement and lack of opportunities that have limited the impact of new policies. Financial markets are no exception. Given the prevalence of state-owned banks, liberalizing the allocation of credit has been a major concern, but academics, practitioners, and policy-makers have also begun to take note of growing equity markets in countries from Morocco to Oman. Drawing inspiration from mainstream economic theories in North America and Europe, these studies have analyzed these emerging markets in order to assess their economic performance and compliance with norms of corporate practice. Unsurprisingly, the results have been mixed. Not only is there enormous variation in the size and institutional development in MENA stock exchanges, but the social, political, and economic environments they inhabit might limit the applicability of economic ideas developed to fit, for example, the American ideal type of publicly traded corporations with widely dispersed private ownership. My study follows the lead of works on other regions such as East Asia and post-communist Eastern Europe in bridging the gap between normative economic theory and cross-national variation by describing the social structure of publicly traded firms in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. My analysis has two stages. First, it uses data on ownership and boards of directors to construct a regional network of corporate control as a formal representation of the connectivity and density of corporate elites and their firms. Statistics from this network are used both to compare countries within the region while also providing a contrast to observed patterns in other areas of the globe. Next, it uses methods from network analysis such as community detection to offer preliminary explanations of the observed structure. It concludes by arguing that despite substantial movement toward Western norms of corporate governance, the social structure of public firms in MENA has several distinct features, such as regionally cohesive structure anchored by firms and directors from Gulf countries, and by proposing a strategy for investigating how this structure has evolved in tandem with qualitative changes in political, economic, and regulatory environments.