On 13 July 2005, the Bursa edition of the Turkish daily Hürriyet announced the inauguration of a clock tower in the small Anatolian town of Çınarcık. The clock tower, which stands thirteen meters (roughly forty-three feet) tall, comprises a square-sectioned, white-colored, and fluted Classical column atop which a cube with four yellow-rimmed clock dials sits. Metal pennants, also colored white, project from the corners of the cube. Despite its questionable aesthetic qualities, the town's mayor, Murat Erdoğan, claims it “beautified” Çınarcık. Erdoğan further explains that Çınarcık had sorely needed a clock tower and that the city is happy to have finally built one.

Since the first printed books and newspapers, official censorship has been the norm, not the exception. Although we often regard freedom of the press as an integral part of Anglo-American law, the principle was only established after 1688. The English press did not completely escape such press control measures as seditious libel prosecutions and confiscatory taxes until the 1860s.1 Official censorship in the United States has been directed against left-wing agitation, alleged pornography, and most recently, exposure of national secrets. France and Germany have suffered various degrees of official censorship, including the most draconian. Russia has scarcely known any period in which both preand postpublication censorship was not practiced. In view of the universality of censorship, Ottoman censorship in Lebanon and Syria deserves close examination in its historical context instead of the unanimous condemnation accorded it heretofore.

According to Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception” is established by the sovereign's decision to suspend the law, and the archetypical state of exception is the Nazi concentration camp. At the same time, Agamben notes that boundaries have become blurred since then, such that even spaces like refugee camps can be thought of as states of exception because they are both inside and outside the law. This article draws on the notion of the state of exception in order to examine the Syrian refugee camp cum shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab as well as to analyze questions of religious authority, ritual practice, and pious devotion to Sayyida Zaynab. Though Sayyida Zaynab and many of her Twelver Shiʿi devotees resemble Agamben's figure of homo sacer, who marked the origin of the state of exception, they also defy Agamben's theory that humans necessarily become animal-like, leading nothing more than “bare lives” (or zoē) in states of exception.

It is common knowledge of Iranian history that at the turn of the present century iran was undergoing important social transformations. A notable feature of this period that witnessed the rising movement for constitutional reforms was a heightening of social tensions and contradictions in a traditional society that had now become subject to potent forces of change from within and without. The disintegration of the political power of the Qajar dynasty went hand in hand with an accelerating trend of economic decline, while the social fabric of the country at large was unraveled by a growing tendency for outbursts of massive social agitation and popular unrest.

The fall of Baku to combined Ottoman-Azerbaijani forces on 15 September 1918 ended the British involvement in Transcaucasia during World War I and resulted in the death of thousands of Armenian civilians. The responsibility for the fall of the city has been hotly disputed since that fateful day. One view, held by General Lionel C. Dunsterville, the commander of British troops committed to the defense of Baku, blames the local forces, especially the Armenians. The Armenians were undisciplined, uncooperative, lazy, and unreliable in battle; they abandoned their positions as soon as they came under enemy fire. In short, with some exceptions, they were cowards who expected the British to do all the fighting. Under these conditions the small British contingent could not stop the enemy indefinitely. On the night of 14 September, when the local forces showed little inclination to resist a new attack, Dunsterville brought his men back to the safety of the Persian port of Enzeli, thus saving them from certain death. Another view, held by the leaders of the Baku Armenians, ascribes the fall of the city to British perfidy. These critics of British policy claim that Dunsterville did not keep his promise of a large British force for the defense of Baku. The effective British force did not exceed one thousand men and it was secretly withdrawn from the city in the heat of the battle, leaving the local troops, who were fighting valiantly, to their fate. This, the Armenians claim, was nothing less than treachery.

One of the most remarkable surveys of Islamic history and civilization remains Marshall G. S. Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, published posthumously in 1974.1 For an introductory text, it has some bad faults—notably, a very dense style. Moreover, it has inevitably fallen out of date at many points. For example, one may admire Hodgson for coming up with his own critique of modernization theory in volume 3, but modernization theory has fallen so completely before other critiques that we hardly need Hodgson any longer. However, Hodgson has had some permanent effects on the way scholars approach Islamic history. For example, we may not have adopted many of his neologisms, but he certainly has made us self-conscious when we use the traditional terminology. The mere mention of “Jamaעi-Sunni,” “Islamicate,” “Arabist bias,” and other special terms immediately alerts us to the dangers of some customary approaches to Islamic history.

By the 1880s, the growth of anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria as well as the avalanche of pogroms in Russia and East Europe convinced a considerable section of the Jewish intelligentsia that assimilation was no longer a desirable nor a possible solution to the “Jewish Question.” They came to realize that Jews were not only a religious group, but also a separate nation, bound by a common faith and sentiment rather than by land. According to these Jewish nationalists, the Jewish Question could only be solved if the Jews stood on a par with other nations, which could be attained by the collective return of Jews to the ranks of the nations as a people living in their homeland. This was why Dr. Theodor Herzl, as the founder of political Zionism, insisted that the Jews should be “granted sovereignty over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation.”

This article explores the experience of the Great War in Syria and Lebanon with a specific focus on the famine that, combined with other wartime calamities, decimated the civilian population. Using food as its primary register, it looks at a wide range of largely untapped Syrian and Lebanese poems, zajal, plays, novels, memoirs, and histories written over the course of the 20th century, in order to illuminate the experiential dimensions of the civilians’ war and to delineate some of the discourses that structured it. More specifically, it argues that the wartime famine in Syria and Lebanon gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that is deeply informative about the ruptured world of the civilians’ war.

The role of the ulama in Iranian politics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been studied extensively. Particularly the rise of the ulama's social influence and power in the Tobacco Movement (1891–1892) and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 has been investigated at length. Much less attention has been devoted to examining the relationship between the ulama and the state after the Constitutional Revolution, and the role of the religious community in Reza Khan's assumption of power and his subsequent accession to the throne in 1925.

This article examines the growing interest in questions of memory, trauma, and justice in Turkey, with a special focus on the notion of “coming to terms with the past.” Through an analysis of key academic and popular texts published between 2002 and 2013, it argues that “coming to terms with the past” is a therapeutic public discourse that rewrites national history through the temporality of trauma. In other words, this discourse reconfigures the sequence of past, present, and future as the beginning, development, and end of a case of collective trauma, applying the psychotherapeutic terminology of victimhood, healing, and forgiveness to social realities. The article offers new perspective on existing debates over “coming to terms with the past” by analyzing the limits of this therapeutic discourse and by exploring the potential and open-endedness of the politics of memory in Turkey.

To consider in what ways incorporating the emerging field of environmental history into studies of the Middle East challenges our views of the past and/or present, it is necessary first to take stock of our mainstream notions of the environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and how we think it has changed over the last several thousand years. The most common received wisdom about the environment in the MENA is that it is an arid, marginal environment, in many places a wasteland degraded by overgrazing and deforestation for hundreds if not thousands of years. The local populations, especially nomads and small farmers, are frequently blamed for the alleged environmental ruin. Born in large part of Western imperialism in the region, this environmental imaginary of the MENA has been uncritically adopted by the majority of postindependence ruling elites as well as development agencies.

The debut of Turkish-language translations of the Qurʾan in the newly founded Republic of Turkey sparked lively debates over whether Qurʾan translation was possible or desirable, who should engage in interpretation of the text, and what characteristics a Turkish-language rendering of the Qurʾan should have. Whereas the abolition of the Islamic caliphate, closure of the medreses, and prohibition of the Sufi orders have received considerable attention in histories of early republican Turkey, the state-sponsored translation of the Qurʾan into Turkish remains both neglected and misunderstood. Muhammad Rashid Rida, who was highly influential in shaping opinion in the Muslim world, portrayed the state-sponsored project as a long-term plot to displace the Arabic Qurʾan. Other accounts misrepresent the involvement of President Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in the promotion of Qurʾan translation by anachronistically suggesting that he sparked the initiative and led a “campaign” in support of it. Mustafa Kemal had no hand in the composition of Turkish Qurʾan translations published in 1924, other than helping create the political context in which they could be published. Their composition began well before the foundation of the Turkish republic, and their inspiration emerged from the intellectual milieu of the late Ottoman public sphere.

The 1930s are generally represented as a decade of crisis in Egypt's liberal experiment. In this conventional interpretation, a clear and acute expression of the crisis can be found in the intellectual discourse. The transition of Egyptian intellectuals to the large-scale production of Islamic literature (islāmiyyāt), books and texts dealing with classical Islamic themes and heroes, particularly biographies of the Prophet and al-Khulafā⊂ al-Rāshidün, is presented as “the crisis of orientation.” This intellectual crisis is depicted as a general abandonment of the Western modernist project by intellectuals who, until that time, had advocated a progressive, rational, and liberal orientation and had assumed that the adoption of European ideas, values, and practices en masse was essential for the modernization of Egypt and its formation into a modern nation-state. Now, in the early 1930s, by enthusiastically embracing Islamic themes, the intellectuals were carrying out a “complete retreat on all these fronts.”

The events of Aleppo have caused amongst all classes of all nationalities a sensation such as I have never witnessed here before. The population of Aleppo is the wealthiest, best conducted community in Syria. That such a body of people in a time of profound peace, living under the protection of an organized government of two pashas and a garrison of regular troops of all arms should find themselves, without the slightest provocation on their part, or a moment's warning, the victims of atrocities which are rarely practiced on a town taken by storm, is a consideration which has, I regret to say, produced a feeling most unfavorable to the responsible government.

World War I in the Ottoman Empire was a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scale. By 1916 in the Greater Syrian provinces, men, women, and children were dying en masse of a war-induced famine so devastating that popular memory still names this war ḥarb al-majāʿa (the war of famine). Despite the civilian catastrophe, people's experiences on the Ottoman home front have been only marginally explored in the scholarship. Focusing on the city of Beirut, this article highlights the centrality of food provisioning in the competition for political legitimacy in the provincial capital. Through a detailed analysis of how the Beirut municipality was represented in the city's daily newspaper al-Ittihad al-ʿUthmani, I argue that for local reform-minded notables and intellectuals the war presented an opportunity to prove, both to the local population and to the Ottoman state, that issues related to the internal security and well-being of the Beirut province generally and the city specifically could be dealt with locally through existing governing bodies. The article thus traces the fierce political games played around the issue of food by various actors seeking to win the hearts of Beirutis through their stomachs.

The reign of Reza Shah characterized a difficult and controversial period in the contemporary history of Iran. Properly speaking, it may be said that it represented not only the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty which Reza Shah had founded in December 1925, but also what could be considered pioneering efforts designed to modernize a feudal system in a land that had in the past commanded a venerable culture. The scholarly literature dealing with the earlier period of Reza Shah's rule has developed almost in response to continuing interest shown in things Iranian, and particularly in the country's recent history.

In Turkey, foreign trade now confines its principal operations to the cities of Constantinople, Smyrna, and Alexandria … Aleppo, which was before the Middle of the last century the most considerable emporium in Turkey, is now a place of comparatively little commercial importance. The trade began to decline shortly after the above mentioned period, and in the year 1792 the Levant Company finally dissolved the respectable Establishment which they had previously supported there, the Consul in fact being then the only English resident in the city, whereas in former times there had been as many as twenty-eight British merchants attached to that factory. The towns in Syria have been of late supplied with British manufactures from the establishments at Alexandria, but the consumption dose not appear to have been sufficiently extensive to encourage any of the trading houses in that city to form branch establishments on the Syrian coasts.

The murder of ‘Uthmân was an important turning-point in Islamic history, and the story of how opposition in the provinces, particularly Egypt, combined with opposition at Medina itself and brought about the Caliph's death has been repeated many times. Accounts in sources such as al-Tabarî's History and al-Balâdhurîs Ansâb al-ashrâf bring together much transmitted detail concerning this dénouement. Caetani's monumental Annali dell'Islam serves as an extensive compilation of such detail, and Wellhausen, Levi Delia Vida, Gibb, Veccia Vaglieri and Petersen are only some of the other modern scholars who have commented on the event. Perhaps Professor Gibb best expresses the current view of the background to it in his thought-provoking article entitled ‘An interpretation of Islamic history’, where he sees in the caliphate of 'Uthmân a conflict between two main parties, the Meccans and the ‘tribesmen’. He points out that the Meccan merchants had been swift to seize the opportunities of wealth which arose in the immediate post-conquest phase, and goes on to say that in the course of 'Uthman's caliphate there arose at Medina ‘growing resentment at the rapid affirmation of Meccan political control… and the economic exploitation of the empire. Open discontent was first expressed by several religious personalities, whose conscience was shocked by the worldliness and grasping materialism displayed in the name of Islam. But these only provided a rallying-cry and a cloak for the material grievances of the tribesmen and Medinians, who swung into line behind them.’ Gibb therefore sees a total of four alignments, of which the Meccans and the tribesmen were the main parties, while the Medinans and the so-called religious party were secondary in importance.

The rise of a vigorous and sometimes violent Islamist movement in Egypt over the last quarter century has attracted considerable attention from the media and scholars, as have the efforts to control it at the political and police level. Less attention has been given to those who have responded to this challenge at the level of ideological debate and in their writings sought to defend the essentials of the existing system on Islamic grounds. One of these is a prominent judge, Muhammad Saʿid al-ʿAshmawi. The purpose of this article is to present and examine some of his views and arguments.