The first two articles in this issue, reflecting growing scholarly interest in the global era of decolonization in the two decades after World War II, track multilayered local, regional, and global forces that shaped particular historical shifts during these pivotal years. Cyrus Schayegh, in “1958 Reconsidered: State Formation and the Cold War in the Early Postcolonial Arab Middle East,” revisits the political crises that tore rapidly through the central Arab states in 1958, focusing on Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which were “sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt.” While Schayegh concurs with previous scholarship that the convulsions of that year did not lead to the deep sociopolitical and ideological transformations in the region that many contemporaries either hoped or feared, he argues that they can now be read as marking a historical milestone of a different sort. In all three countries, the events of 1958 sparked immediate, dramatic, and persistent “state-formation surges,” particularly through the rapid implementation of development plans aimed at defusing both socioeconomic discontent and the political aspirations fueled by Nasirist Arab nationalism on one side and Arab communist movements on the other. Schayegh suggests that these state-formation surges in turn shaped similarities in the three countries’ subsequent historical development in spite of stark differences in their political systems of governance.

Using Arabic, English, and French sources, and engaging Middle East and Cold War historians, this article makes a threefold argument. First, in United Arab Republic (UAR)–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, the 1958–59 explosion of domestic and regional tensions triggered state-formation surges. Second, these formed one process, which made those states more alike, with state-led socioeconomic planning playing a key role. Third, that process partook of a global Third World trend intersecting with the early Cold War. I draw three conclusions. Although existing scholarly readings that the events of 1958–59 in the Arab Middle East formed a crisis but not an ideological or political watershed are correct, from the viewpoint of state formation this crisis was a milestone. Moreover, UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had persisting affinities and shared regional positions—notably, the fact that all were sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt—that shaped their individual postindependence histories of state formation. Last, Washington's low-profile involvement in this state-formation surge illustrates how domestic sociopolitics and regional geopolitics—including the UAR's peaking popularity and influence in 1958–59—affected U.S. policy in the Cold War postcolonial world.

The Algerian war resituated the meaning of “Muslims” and “Jews” in France in relation to religion and “origins” and this process reshaped French secular nationhood, with Algerian independence in mid-1962 crystallizing a complex and shifting debate that took shape in the interwar period and blossomed between 1945 and 1962. In its failed efforts to keep all Algerians French, the French government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism, and did so with policies that took seriously, rather than rejected, the so-called ethnoreligious arguments that they embraced—and that, according to existing scholarship, have always been anathema to French laïcité. Most scholars on France continue to presume that its history is national or wholly “European.” Yet paying attention to this transnational confrontation, driven by claims from Algeria and Israel, emphasizes the crucial roles of North African and Mediterranean developments in the making of contemporary France.

The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

A political trial, according to Steven E. Barkan, is a trial revolving around highly publicized legal controversies. In some cases, such a trial may determine fundamental political questions, exceeding the legal realm, which are in debate inside a given polity. The 1957–58 trial related to the 1956 massacre in Kafr Qasim, Israel certainly belongs to this category. The trial established the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order” in Israeli military law, contributed considerably to the reshaping of civil–military relations, and influenced the civic status of the Arab minority in Israel. In this article, using hitherto underexamined primary sources, I argue that the most important contribution of the trial, the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order,” was not only a creation of the bench but also a result of a complicated interaction between the actors present in the courtroom: the defendants, their defense lawyers, the prosecutors, and the judges. Above all, the article shows how the bitter struggle between the two main attorneys helped shape the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order,” that is, an order that is illegal for a soldier to obey.

This article examines the depiction of women and gender within Coptic Orthodox video films or “hagiopics” produced between 1987 and 2010. As part of a recent religious renewal, hagiopics have expanded, altered, and reinvented traditional stories of saints and pious figures and have also generated, within this traditionally patriarchal setting, a wider space for the articulation of female voices. While their inclusion can be seen as potentially empowering for women, this paper suggests that during Pope Shenouda III's reign (1971–2012), the films became a powerful vehicle for broadcasting the church's conservative teachings on female power and authority, marriage and marital dissolution, spousal abuse, and femininity. By highlighting an array of exemplary female characters, hagiopics capture women's role as custodians of a distinctive Coptic ethos and of family and communal cohesiveness. The films’ emphasis on women's physical modesty, submissiveness, and obedience to male figureheads also hints at the modern church's anxieties about women's increasing autonomy in choosing marriage partners and their growing demands for more equal treatment within the church.

Taking Walid Sadek's fi annani akbar min bikasu [bigger than picasso] as its starting point, this article examines relations of art and politics in post-civil war Lebanon. A tiny and inexpensive paperback related to Picasso unfolds into a work of art that raises questions about the place of art and political dissent. After situating bigger than picasso in the context of contemporary book art and artistic practices of the postwar generation in Lebanon, the article focuses on the juxtaposition of text and image. By placing narratives of art vandalism next to the image of a monument dedicated to the late Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad, bigger than picasso playfully and provocatively breaks with political taboos at a time when the silence about the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and about Lebanese-Syrian relations was met with increasing anxiety. At the same time, the work makes room for aesthetic inquiries, exploring new possibilities of art at the margins of cultural production. The article concludes that bigger than picasso brings to the fore the discrepancy between public monumentality and artistic practices, which in finding ways around political violence and censorship have recourse to ephemeral and private spheres, and holds unexpected meanings in ever-changing political circumstances.

The study of the visual culture of the Middle East covers a wealth of topics from the birth of Islam to the present day and has long been marked by rigorous theoretical and methodological inquiries. Nevertheless, it has remained largely at the margins of Middle East studies, as measured by the limited space it occupies in interdisciplinary publications and conferences. This may perhaps be explained by a misconception that its reliance on “pictures” makes it a lighter, albeit pleasurable, complement to the more “serious” disciplines. Yet, due in part to the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and in part to the new wave of technological innovations, visual references now appear more frequently in the work of social and political historians, anthropologists, and even political scientists. In the process, some methodological tools for using visual material as primary documents risk being lost, as images are relegated to “decorative” backgrounds.

Kitab Suwar al-Kawakib (The Book of the Forms of the Stars) of ʿAbd al-Rahman b. ʿUmar al-Sufi (d. 986), though based largely on Ptolemy's Almagest, included much original material. In the 20th century, its importance for scholars lay mainly in its attestation of the ways Islamicate scholarship built on classical learning. Now we are finding that it also offers fascinating insights into the complex relationship between seeing and knowing in premodern Islamic book culture. Here, I consider that relationship through analysis of the paired images of the constellation Barshawush (Perseus) from the oldest surviving manuscript, copied and likely also illustrated in 1009–1010 by al-Sufi's son.

The idea that theology is either irrelevant to artistic production or “a baleful influence” on its history has recently been critically explored by Jeffrey Hamburger, in relation to medieval Christian art. Engaging the perennial problem of moving between immaterial concepts, normative texts, and material things, Hamburger's observations resonate with the long shadow cast by the Bilderverbot, the prohibition of images often assumed to characterize Islamic and Jewish cultures, on the modern reception of Islamic art.

Over the last decade an approach to 19th-century visual culture that focuses on cross-cultural contact and exchange has begun to supplement an earlier model of Orientalist critique focused primarily on the iconographic analysis of European Orientalist tropes and stereotypes. In this essay I engage with these discussions by analyzing what I will call networked objects. Tracking the mobility of art works and artifacts across cultural boundaries and their differing signification in varying sites of reception impels a nuanced understanding of how visual culture has been implicated in these networks of power. Influenced by anthropological debates, my approach focuses on the circulation of images and objects across cultures and within the region, exploring their function at divergent sites. Social networks of artists and patrons facilitated the transplantation of ideas and images, but the meanings of networked objects morphed independently of authorship according to their displacement to new geographic locations. Networked objects were also entangled within patterns of misinterpretation, blockage, and rupture as visual forms were created, reshaped, or productively misinterpreted in the environments into which they were transplanted, thus provoking challenges from the peripheries and divergent forms of indigenous agency.

Because the ideological landscape of the present does not match the ideological configurations of the past, the past and present of national monuments often collide in ways that complicate their utility as “patrimony” and “heritage.” In Spain, Islamic monuments such as the Alhambra Palace (built in Granada by Nasrid monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries) exist in the present as popular tourism sites and points of entry for an imaginative encounter with the Iberian peninsula's Andalusi past. The past evoked is a recognized part of Iberian history and yet, as patrimony, it is simultaneously admired as something that distinguishes Spain from the rest of Europe and resisted as something belonging to an exiled people who left long ago for places like Fez and Istanbul. Under Franco's dictatorship (1947–73), Spain was adamantly Catholic and, despite a small wave of conversions to Islam and the recent immigration of Muslims from northern Africa, it remains predominantly Christian.

In a recently discovered photograph of German architect Bruno Taut's retrospective exhibition at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, which opened on 4 June 1938, Taut in-exile stands with Erica Taut and his assistant Şinasi Lugal in front of a display (see Figure 1). What interests me in this image is not so much the frontal figures who posed for it as the documentary value of the exhibit in the background, the photographs inside the photograph. These images display Taut's Siedlungen (residential settlements/collective housing projects), designed and constructed as part of the Berlin Housing Program (1924–33) just before Taut was exiled from Germany due to the rise of National Socialism. After stays in Russia and Japan, Taut moved to Turkey, where he became head of the Architecture Department at the Istanbul Academy. Through a seminar and a studio he taught on Siedlung, he participated in a translation of the idea of collective housing that would shape the discursive space and practice of architecture in Turkey for decades to come. Most of the images in the exhibition were taken by the now-famous photographer Arthur Köster. The exhibit bears witness to the fact that Turkish architects were exposed not only to the influential Siedlungen of the Weimar period in Germany but also to their soon-to-be canonical photographs earlier than most of their colleagues around the world.

The Western academy's growing interest in the contemporary arts in the Arab world illustrates the desire to map “Islam”—problematic as this term is—within the global history of cultures and to integrate it into “Western” models of the writing and documenting of the past. As positive and corrective as these academic approaches may seem, the notion of recording time—that is, writing history—is still firmly bound at the beginning of the 21st century to the idea of continuity, and the pattern of “Western”-centric thinking imposes that notion upon contemporary artists and art historians. Yet the political changes and spontaneous eruptions that the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing, especially since the beginning of 2011, defy and resist conventional interpretations of historical processes and therefore demand a rethinking of the configuration of the past.

The Venetian nobleman Ambrosio Bembo (1652–1705) included this panorama of Aleppo by the French artist G.J. Grélot (see Figure 1), as one of the fifty-one carefully observed line drawings of cities, buildings, and people integral to his travelogue, proudly entitled Travels and Journal through Part of Asia during about Four Years Undertaken by Me, Ambrosio Bembo, Venetian Noble. During his visits to Aleppo between 1672 and 1675, Bembo may have crossed paths with the great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–82?), who included his own description of that commercial capital of the eastern Mediterranean in his monumental Seyahatname (Book of Travels). Evliya's book does not include a single illustration. This divergence is emblematic of the distinct ways in which early modern societies (in this case, Middle Eastern and European) visualized cities and architecture, and highlights a major challenge to writing the architectural and urban history of the Middle East before the 19th century: the almost complete absence of images that represent architecture.

Why are humans fated to remember and forget? For Plato, it is because we are wounded by our memory of a previous existence, namely the Platonic “realm of ideas,” to which we forever long to return. In the social sciences, especially history and anthropology, burgeoning cross-disciplinary methodologies and approaches have emerged to study the ways in which humanity remembers and forgets; “cultural memory studies” and the “anthropology of memory” constitute a contemporary realm of ideas concerned with discursive contestations over memory and history. The books under review here, all of which relate to the study of collective memory in Lebanon or Israel/Palestine, have recourse to French theories, despite time lags due to delayed English translation. Foundational writers of a field loosely grouped under the rubric “memory studies” include French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and posthumously published La mémoire collective (1950) both appeared in English in 1980, under confusingly similar titles. The English-language publication of Halbwachs’ corpus on the individual in relation to “collective memory” coincidentally corresponded with the American Psychiatric Association's 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, in which categories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) extended collective memory into collective traumatic memory, through the notion that “Post-traumatic disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory.” Another seminal thinker in this field is Pierre Nora, especially the multivolume, multiauthored essays produced under his direction entitled Les Lieux de mémoire, which appeared in French between 1984 and 1992.