This article revisits the official culture of the early khedivate through a microhistory of the first modern Egyptian theater in Arabic. Based on archival research, it aims at a recalibration of recent scholarship by showing khedivial culture as a complex framework of competing patriotisms. It analyzes the discourse about theater in the Arabic press, including the journalist Muhammad Unsi's call for performances in Arabic in 1870. It shows that the realization of this idea was the theater group led by James Sanua between 1871 and 1872, which also performed ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Misri's tragedy. But the troupe was not an expression of subversive nationalism, as has been claimed by scholars. My historical reconstruction and my analysis of the content of Sanua's comedies show loyalism toward the Khedive Ismail. Yet his form of contemporary satire was incompatible with elite cultural patriotism, which employed historicization as its dominant technique. This revision throws new light on a crucial moment of social change in the history of modern Egypt, when the ruler was expected to preside over the plural cultural bodies of the nation.

These are critical times for democratic politics from Morocco to Iran, as heterogeneous popular movements for greater representation and social justice increasingly challenge established authorities. It is not surprising that these struggles have laid claim to symbolic urban places in the process of claiming their collective political demands. Politics is not purely discursive or institutional; it always has material and spatial dimensions, which for democratic politics is manifested through public space. For all the recent enthusiasm about the emancipating possibilities of the digital media, the fact remains that Tahrir Square (Cairo), Gezi Park (Istanbul), Revolution Street (Tehran), and Pearl Roundabout (Manama) are not virtual locations on the Internet.

Artifacts that have experienced atrocities, even genocide, and survived, acquire the power to recall the horrors of the past, and to recollect the absent persons, things, and places that were lost. They symbolize violence, but also survival and resilience. Material objects that have endured looting, mutilation, displacement, and separation from the communities where they functioned as sacred relics, liturgical aids, or prized artworks form a special category. They are survivor objects.

The cholera and plague pandemics of the 19th and early 20h centuries shaped Ottoman state-building and expansionist efforts in Iraq and the Gulf in significant ways. For Ottoman officials, these pandemics brought attention to the possible role of Qajar and British subjects in spreading cholera and plague, as well as the relationship between Iraq's ecology and recurring outbreaks. These developments paved the way for the expansion of Ottoman health institutions, such as quarantines, and the emergence of new conceptions of public health in the region. Specifically, quarantines proved instrumental not only to the delineation of the Ottoman–Qajar border, but also to defining an emerging Ottoman role in shaping Gulf affairs. Moreover, the Ottomans’ use of quarantines and simultaneous efforts to develop sanitary policies informed by local ecological realities signal a localized and ad hoc approach to disease prevention that has been overlooked. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that environmental factors operating on global and regional scales were just as important as geopolitical factors in shaping Ottoman rule in Iraq and the Gulf during the late Ottoman period.

This article analyzes two accounts of the Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859–60 in light of scholarly debates about historiography, translation, and modernity in the colonial context. The first text is Ahmad b. Khalid al-Nasiri's Kitab al-Istiqsa (1895), which explores the organization of the Spanish army in an effort to understand the military technology and state apparatus behind colonial domination. The second text, Clemente Cerdeira's Versión árabe de la Guerra de África (1917), is framed as an annotated Spanish translation of al-Nasiri's text, but Cerdeira suppresses key passages from al-Nasiri's account in order to undermine any hint that the Moroccan historian's thinking is reformist or modern. By comparing these two accounts of the same war, the article aims to situate al-Nasiri's text within the reform movements that spread through the Muslim Mediterranean in the 19th century and to use al-Nasiri's historical thinking as a model for theorizing Moroccan modernity.

This paper investigates the contemporary phenomenon of smuggling sperm from within Israeli jails, which I treat as a biopolitical act of resistance. Palestinian prisoners who have been sentenced to life-imprisonment have recently resorted to delivering their sperm to their distant wives in the West Bank and Gaza where it is then used for artificial insemination. On the level of theory, my analysis of this practice benefits from Jacques Derrida's commentary in The Post Card on imaginative postal delivery of sperm to distant lovers. I use Derrida's heteronormative implication to examine how Palestinian prisoners defy the Israeli carceral system via the revolutionary act of sperm smuggling. The article then argues that smuggling sperm challenges the conventional gender codes in Palestinian society that see women in passive roles. Drawing on Derrida's metaphorical connection between masturbation and writing, I problematize the perception of speech/orality as primary in traditional Palestinian culture. Women, who mostly act as smugglers, become social agents whose written stories of bionational resistance emerge as a dominant mode of representation.

The last few decades have seen a rise in the number of studies on Christian missions. These studies are located within a wide range of fields and are written from different perspectives. They tend to abide by national boundaries and to focus on mission organizations and missionaries, not least because of the availability of source material in Western languages. Recent historiography on Christian missions to the Middle East, however, has seen a profound change in approach, methodology, and sources. We can locate three main shifts: a national to a transnational approach, a reevaluation of local agency, and a new emphasis on unintended consequences.

It is a strange interaction that occurs between Muslim and Copt in the passage above, which was written in the 11th century and set in the 10th century. What might be proven by such a debate over a dog's religion? What is more, why record such an incident in a church-sanctioned history? Because the dog cannot speak, there must be another way to know whether it is Christian or Muslim (for those are the only two possibilities in the story). In the end it is through the dog's ritual practice—drinking wine or eating meat or not drinking wine or not eating meat—rather than through the dog's outward proclamation of religious affiliation that the Copt and the Muslim come to an agreement about what distinguishes one from the other. Ritual practice, action such as abstinence from meat or alcohol that demonstrates adherence to particular religious ideas, distinguishes Copt from Muslim even in the absence of a shared spoken language to communicate that difference. Copts and Muslims in Egypt, the story teaches, are different, and they may be distinguished even by something as minor as their food and drink.

At a time when orientalism is under attack both from within and without the profession, the publication of Marshall G. S. Hodgson's three-volume work, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization1 is an event of major importance. So rich is its subject, so complex and ambitious its analytic scheme and serious its moral purpose that it is difficult in brief compass to give an idea of the book. In the following pages, I discuss those aspects of the work that seem to me most important for an understanding of its achievement and significance. In the end, I shall argue, The Venture of Islam must be seen as the most ambitious and successful effort to salvage the orientalist tradition to date.

First-time European and American visitors to the United Arab Emirates, where I live, are often surprised by the prevalence of heritage villages, festivals, and sports in hypermodern Abu Dhabi and Dubai. “Heritage” in the Arab Gulf, as elsewhere in the Middle East, is a central and growing industry, attracting the attention of scholars as well as investors and tourists. At the same time, much of the region's—and the world's—invaluable cultural heritage has been and continues to be obliterated by insurgents and governments alike. Spectacular assaults on historical sites, cultural institutions, and symbols of cultural-religious diversity in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Yemen demonstrate that the “new wars” of the 21st century are being fought on the terrain of cultural heritage as much as they are over other precious resources. And yet, the interconnections between this heritage construction and destruction remain underexplored. In much of the scholarship produced in the burgeoning field of critical heritage studies, the duplexity of these processes is ignored. Instead, most edited volumes and “global” analyses of the field look to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority nations only in so far as they present case studies of heritage destruction—the bombing of the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and the looting of the National Museum of Iraq being iconic examples.

This paper examines the relatively neglected rural history of Syria. It concentrates on the Hauran, a dry-farming region of hills and plains south of the Damascene oasis between the northern Jordan's tributaries and the eastern desert. Although the Hauran is today no longer a region of primary economic importance to Syria as it once was, it is of historical interest because it was the very first of greater Syria's outlying rural zones to be integrated into the developing modern Middle Eastern economy.

The Hauran is, moreover, of comparative interest because it held a position in Syria's political economy then which bears many resemblances to the positions held by younger hinterland regions now. The parallels between the situation of the Hauran then and the Syrian north and northeast now, for example, are indeed many.

This article explores the role of the ʿulamaʾ in shaping the use of mechanical timepieces in Cairo in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ottoman interest in new technologies in this period is often understood in relation to the emergence of modernization projects and new scientifically trained actors, with a corresponding decline in the status of the ʿulamaʾ. However, the vogue of mechanical timepieces in Cairo allowed ʿulamaʾ trained in the very old tradition of mīqāt (astronomical timekeeping) to make their knowledge speak in new ways to new audiences. Based on several manuals and tables that such scholars wrote “on the position of the watch hand,” this article shows how ʿulamaʾ not only facilitated distinctively Ottoman timekeeping conventions, but also furthered an understanding of watches as instruments of precision. The article builds on a growing literature on Ottoman temporality, while expanding our historical view of ʿulamaʾ and their authority, of the material culture of Cairo, and of science and technology in an Islamic context.

In August 1915, in the midst of World War I, a young Muslim resident of Jerusalem wrote the following in his diary:

The first image that the question of violence in the Middle East conjures up, especially in the West, is that of the suicide bomber. This association, etched into the political imaginary particularly over the course of the last two decades, is due neither to the number of victims suicide bombing creates (more conventional weapons of war can claim as many or more victims), nor to the identity of its victims (conventional weapons are also often directed at civilians). Rather, the potency of the image of the suicide bomber is connected to the simultaneously self-destructive and other-directed form that this act of violence takes. If the Orientalist impulse that has raised the image of the suicide bomber to iconic status is deeply problematic, it nonetheless constitutes an involuted acknowledgement of a reality: the significant rise in self-destructive violence (and not just in the Middle East). I have in mind practices such as hunger striking, self-immolation, and fatal self-mutilation, which constitute an emergent repertoire of struggle that has come to mark a certain current of radical politics around the globe. Those modalities of self-destructive violence that are not directed at others are overshadowed by suicide bombing.

In 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization.

Professional attorneyship emerged in the Ottoman Empire in tandem with the consolidation of the Nizamiye (“regular”) court system during the late 19th century. This article analyzes the emergence of an Ottoman legal profession, emphasizing two developments. First, the Nizamiye courts advanced a formalist legal culture, exhibited, inter alia, by the expansion of legal procedure. Whereas the pre-19th century court of law was highly accessible to lay litigants, the proceduralization of court proceedings in the 19th century limited the legibility of the judicial experience to legal experts, rendering legal counseling almost indispensible in civil and criminal litigation. Second, the reformers made efforts to render state-granted legal license a sign of professional competence, presenting a formal distinction between the old “agents” (vekils), who lacked formal legal training, and the professional “trial attorneys” (dava vekils). In practice, however, lawyers of both categories had to adapt to the Nizamiye formalist culture.

The foundation of Abu ʿAbd Allah's movement was that which God Almighty had ordained concerning the victory of His friends' cause, the strengthening of His True Religion and the exaltation of His Word. Abu ʿAbd Allah al-Shiʿi was an Ismaʿili dāʿĪ and the architect of the Fatimid revolution in North Africa. Mobilizing support among the Kutama Berbers, he was able ultimately to overthrow the Aghlabid house and proclaim ʿAbd Allah as the Mahdi and first Fatimid imam in 909.1 Our primary source for Abu ʿAbd Allah's career is al-Qadi al-Nuʿman's Kitāb iftitāḥ al-daʿwa, completed in 957.2 As the official account of the Fatimid rise to power, it is an excellent source for understanding the ideology and propagands of the North African phase of the Fatimid daʿwa. Although the Iftitāḥ is not devoted explicitly to religious/theological questions in the manner of al-Qudi al-Nuʿ man's other writings, an attempt to establish the historical validity of the Fatimid claim to the imamate is implicit throughout the work.The Iftitah is a text of religious significance precisely because it is a historical account of God's action through His human agents to restore the original Islamic community of the Prophet and a righteous political order governed according to God's will, a theme not uncommon in medieval Islam and one to which we shall return later in our discussion. The Iftitah is thus a superb document for ascertaining the Fatimids' perceptions of themselves and how they wanted to appear to a literate audience. Marius Canard, Farhat Dachraoui, and Tilman Nagel have discussed these subjects thoroughly in several works dealing with the Fatimids' North African propaganda.3 My intent here is not to discuss the specific vocabulary of Abu cAbd Allah's daFwa anew, but rather the environment which Abu cAbd Allah proclaimed his "summons to the truth," an environment which enabled him, both by accident and by design, to pattern his career after that of the Prophet.

While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis on Ikhwan in the Sudan,1 a Sudanese colleague of mine working in a related area used to joke that we have all become “Orientalists.” There was a certain sense of irony—and truth—in this “accusation.” Our endeavor was either the negation and supersession of Orientalism, or its final triumph. For here we are, fiery Islamic militants, squatting meekly and dutifully at the feet of our Orientalist sheikhs, hoping to drink at their hands the cup of knowledge on which we had simultaneously turned our backs. Is this conceding defeat or starting an invasion?