In his recent article, “Secularizing Anatolia Tick by Tick: Clock Towers in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,” Mehmet Bengü Uluengin makes a significant contribution to our understanding of late Ottoman and early republican clock towers. Uluengin shows that Ottoman clock towers carried “complex and seemingly contradictory layering of meanings” (p. 31). These buildings were at times associated with Christianity and with European power but were also seen as modern extensions of the Islamic institution of the muvakkit (timekeeper) or as symbols of the Ottoman government and its modernizing project. The cultural meanings associated with clock towers were fluid, concludes Uluengin, and it was the context that determined the way clock towers were interpreted.

Cyrus Schayegh's “‘Seeing Like a State’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran” tries to show how historians of the Pahlavi era “have been gripped by the image of an omnipotent, completely autonomous state and how, each one . . . turned this image into what I call methodological statism” (p. 38). He discusses critically several works by historians and political scientists while mentioning more favorably a few works by anthropologists and sociologists and then indicates what he considers a better approach to Pahlavi history. Although I agree with some of his criticisms and am glad to see a serious discussion of historiography, I think he overstates the sins of historians and fails to distinguish between historians and political scientists, whose discipline leads them to emphasize the state.

I thank Professor Nikki R. Keddie for her constructive critique and am using this opportunity to clarify a few points. First, let me reiterate that I do not consider statist approaches to be “wrong,” but “one-sided,” and that I am not calling for their disposal but for “trying out new sources and perspectives then fusing them with state-centered perspectives into a broader panorama of Pahlavi Iran” (pp. 38–39). I see neither “sins” nor “an ongoing struggle between ‘statists’ and ‘antistatists.’” Such language would undercut a productive debate now and disregard the fact that in the long run—as some excesses of the cultural turn in the 1980s and many historians' subsequent search for new historiographic syntheses demonstrate—the pendulum always swings back.

This paper seeks to understand and contextualize the work of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, an institution committed to the elaboration of a fiqh of minorities through the production and dissemination at regular intervals of fatwas for Muslims living in Europe. Drawing closely on the work of Michael Warner, I suggest that the minority fiqh project may be best understood as the result of a performative conjunction between a particular tension—the tension between the cultivation of a pious subjectivity in tune with the temporalities of the global Islamic Revival and the perceived necessity to integrate Muslims into local European contexts—and a specific relation to public discourse. The paper argues that the Islamic counterpublic brought about by the European Council for Fatwa and Research's mode of interpellation of European Muslim subjects finds in the Muslim reader its paradigmatic figure. It concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which the Islamic counterpublic may be authorized or disrupted both by its Muslim addressees and by other discourses articulated in mainstream European publics.

This article delivers an empirical analysis of the effects of Danish Muslims' transnational activities during the Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005–6 on subsequent Muslim claims making in Denmark. The article argues that the envisioned “boomerang effect” of the transnational activities—the attempt to put pressure on Danish authorities by contacting political and religious authorities in the Middle East—backfired on Danish Muslims. The transnational move was successfully “securitized” by elements of the media and the political elite, inviting soft forms of repression against the Muslim actors, especially those involved in the “imam delegations” that traveled to Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria in December 2005. These actors were forced into a more defensive mode of claims making soon after their return to Denmark through processes of name calling and stigmatization. Building on this case study, the article concludes by suggesting some theoretical modifications/specifications to the boomerang model of transnational activism.

Scholars have long struggled with various and even conflicting historical narratives and definitions of Salafism (al-salafiyya), but a closer look at the history of the concept itself—rather than of the ideas for which it stands—goes a long way toward explaining the perennial confusion that has typified this religious orientation. This article examines the production of knowledge about Salafism as a conceptual construct and a typological category. It argues that although Salafi epithets have existed since the medieval period, they did not start referring to a religious concept known as salafiyya until the 1920s. By the same token, the widely accepted idea that salafiyya referred to an Islamic modernist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a historical fiction that originates with Louis Massignon. The history of Cairo's Salafiyya Press and Bookstore, however, sheds important light on the process by which the construction of Salafism took place.

Since at least the 1930s, Palestine has had a continuous role as a laboratory of counterinsurgency. During the British Mandate, Palestine saw a consolidation of the techniques of imperial policing and the development of a complex military-legal apparatus of control, from “security fences” and watchtowers to mass incarceration and collective punishment to emergency laws and administrative detention. Palestine has continued to be the setting for counterinsurgency military exercises, with Israel incorporating the British Mandate laws in its legal corpus and British military practice in its doctrines. Based on extensive primary research, this essay traces the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice and the legal apparatuses that uphold it and argues that both in the incorporation of British transmission of doctrine, law, and practice from Palestine, and in the Israeli military's deployment of new and transportable techniques of control, Palestine has been gradually transformed into a central node of military knowledge/power within a global matrix of counterinsurgency.

The postwar period of 1945 to 1963 witnessed dramatic political and economic transformations in Syria. To date, however, the cultural manifestations of these transformations remain largely unexamined. This article seeks to begin the process of redressing that historiographic imbalance and recovering the meaning of these transformations for those who experienced them through a close reading of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition of 1954. This event constituted the stage upon which the recently independent, and still fragile, Syrian state conducted an exercise in autoethnography, the attempt to define and represent itself to its citizenry and to the outside world, as well as the screen upon which Syrians' collective longings were focused and projected. Thus, I treat this body of discourse as a unique opportunity to apprehend an emergent elite's anxieties about foreigners' perceptions of their country, as expressed in this stratum's homiletic discourse about street begging and other forms of urban disorder that threatened to disrupt the exposition's staging.