Labor problems were no less a reality to big business in the medieval Islamic world than they are today. Where competition was keen and skilled laborers in limited supply, workmen could demand to receive their pay on schedule or, indeed, even demand higher wages from their employer on a par or above those paid by his competitors.

At the climax of Egyptian author Out el Kouloub's novel, Zanouba, the reader is witness to a crime. We find ourselves in Matariyya, a village north of Cairo, in a somber bedchamber with a blind shaykh. It is the room where only a week before Zanouba, the novel's titular character, suffered a forced miscarriage in the final month of her pregnancy and lost her long-coveted male child. The women of the household are lined up in front of the shaykh—all except for Zanouba, who is still bedridden, and her co-wife, Mashallah, who is exempt from participating because she is menstruating. They prepare to swear on the Qurʾan their innocence in the matter of the miscarriage, as Zanouba's husband, Abdel Meguid, and her mother-in-law suspect foul play.

How do states produce religion and how can the study of state censorship cast light on this phenomenon? This article examines the logic by which two Egyptian government bodies, the Ministry of Culture and the Islamic Research Academy, censored the sermons of a premier Islamist preacher, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1999), between 1987 and 1993. To do so, it draws on two distinct sets of sources: a sixteen-volume printed edition of Kishk's sermons published in Egypt and MP3s of original performances recorded initially by audiocassette. While previous studies on religion and state power in the Middle East emphasize the strategies by which states use religion to assert their interests, this article uses the censorship of a leading antiregime preacher to probe the undertheorized distinction between claiming and producing religion. A focus on the strategies, in turn, casts light on both the internal diversity of religious visions within the Egyptian state and on the subtle, yet significant, ways in which state actors not only censor but also are shaped by their Islamist challengers.

My engagement with the social history of the Middle East, as I embarked on graduate studies, coincided with Judith Tucker's lamentation in 1990 that it was a field understudied to the point of being largely ignored. I came to the study of this new region with training in the native history of Canada, which had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of reconstructing the stories of people who had been denied agency in a narrative dominated by European conquest and nation-building.

This article analyzes the transformation of the Kızılırmak Delta on the Black Sea coast of Turkey into a Turkish wetland. This production involved the transformation of international categories of wetlands into national imaginaries, as well as the material remaking of landscapes themselves. Population and agro-economic shifts concurrent to the formation of the Turkish nation-state transformed the delta into an agricultural landscape, and subsequently into a contested conservation area whose use is informed by changing Turkish and international notions of wetlands. I focus on the situated, local processes and practices through which wetlands are produced and become relevant to different social groups as subjects of scientific knowledge and environmental imaginations. These, I argue, have rendered the wetland an open-air laboratory and an object of care for environmental advocates, scientists, and residents.

Academic interest in the study of forced migration as a specific field developed only in the late 20th century. But its conceptual tools had a much earlier incarnation in the United States. In the early 20th century historical linguistic and ethnographic research was being conducted with Native American peoples who had been subjected to massive ethnic cleansings in the preceding two centuries. Much of that early work was with tribes who had been displaced, dispossessed, and involuntarily marched into resource-poor reservations. The scientists working with them thought they were engaging in a kind of salvage operation to record ways of life before they disappeared. These researchers largely ignored or failed to recognize the impacts of displacement—destroyed settlements, land occupation, nonviable reservations, inadequate welfare, and hostile administrations and lack of legal rights—and focused instead on trying to reconstruct memory culture of “what life was like in the old days.” Nevertheless, these studies gave us many of our basic concepts to describe and analyze the experience of uprootedness and dispossession. These fundamental concepts have become important in the discipline of forced migration studies. They include understandings of: role and identity, hierarchy, social networks, conflict mechanisms, reciprocity and trust, boundary creation, rites of passage, liminality, and the role of myths.

This essay examines how administrative documents categorized the mamluks who served Ottoman governors of Tunis from the early 18th to the mid-19th century. The categorization of these state slaves-cum-servants illuminates three issues, namely, the relationships between Islamic states and societies, interactions between the Ottoman Empire and its provinces, and forms of military slavery around the globe. Seeing registers, letters, and historical chronicles as spaces of interaction allows us to break free from an a priori definition of mamluks. By exploring how slaves and servants contributed to defining themselves in administrative documents, I not only argue for a new understanding of the mamluk category, but also show that mamluks did not separate state and society. On the contrary, in the Tunisian case, mamluks connected the state to various imperial and provincial social forces.

“Relocating Arab Nationalism” locates various representations of nationalism in the Arab world in new and hitherto neglected contexts. The project was first conceived in a conversation among some of the contributing authors about the validity of nationalism as a research topic in a seemingly postnationalist period in the Middle East. This conversation turned into a panel at the 2007 MESA conference in Montreal as an attempt to contribute to a further shift of perspective in the study of Arab nationalism away from the realm of theory and politics toward that of cultural history. The articles in this volume therefore trace the contours of multiple imaginary Pan-Arab spaces between the Atlantic Ocean and the Tigris river, inquiring into the movements of people, terms, and ideas between physical locations and in time. The space is imagined but experienced; the people who moved in it were sometimes excited about its promises and sometimes disappointed about its corruption and containment. Such experiences are the focal points of the articles. They ask whether and in what ways a virtual Pan-Arab community transcending the borders of nation–states ever existed. They also present the multitude of national narratives that were at work—and more often than not in conflict—inside the boundaries of nation–states. The authors do not see Arab nationalism as first and foremost a political agenda of unification and cooperation but rather focus on the roots, establishment, and evolution of imaginative, symbolic, or “lived” ties between people(s) who claimed to belong to an Arab national community, or tried to claim space for dissident minorities through counterhegemonic narratives. Case studies from Algerian, Moroccan, Syro-Palestinian, and Iraqi contexts from the interwar to the postindependence periods investigate the ways these ties of community were established beyond the rhetoric of textbooks and political speeches.

Since 1974, U.N. peacekeepers on the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus have patrolled a buffer zone that divides the Greek-leaning, government-controlled south from the northern third, the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). The economy of Northern Cyprus resembles that of other small islands with negligible industrial production that rely on the service sector to generate income. What makes Northern Cyprus unique, however, is that the rest of the world does not acknowledge it as a separate political entity. This limits economic functions because the “country” cannot trade freely and depends on Turkey, the only nation to formally recognize Northern Cyprus.

Over the past five years, from volume 37, number 1 (February 2005) to volume 41, number 3 (August 2009), IJMES published thirty-seven articles that deal with politics in the contemporary Middle East, broadly understood. This is my count, of course, and others might add or drop some articles. I define contemporary as post World War II and have a relatively expansive definition of politics. My count does not include short features, only full articles.

This article explores the rhetorical function of al-Andalus (medieval Spain) in modern Syrian popular culture, with a focus on music. The rhetoric of al-Andalus in Syria is intimately related to the project of nation building. The nostalgic performance of links between modern Syria and medieval al-Andalus assumed great rhetorical force in the 1960s as a result of ideologies of pan-Arabism, the loss of Palestine, the rise of Islamist threats at home, and the emergence of petrodollar regimes in the Arabian Gulf. As a result, the rhetoric of al-Andalus became “good to think” for wide audiences of Syrians. Musical genres linked to al-Andalus play an important role as potent vehicles for constructing Syrian memory cultures. Drawing on heavily mythologized and nostalgic visions of an Andalusian golden age, musical performance in Syria sonically reinforces forms of nostalgic remembrance and enacts claims on Syrian pasts, presents, and futures.

In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novel Jacob's Ladder (1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan subjects was Orientalized and relegated to the background where it served to highlight a European-like Levantine cosmopolitanism.

Middle East gender studies is a lively and fascinating field. With two very different journals (Hawwa and Journal of Middle East Women Studies) and dozens of panels at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference and the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, we have come a long way over the last two decades. Women's, queer, and masculinity studies are now part of how we understand gender studies in the region. Middle East gender studies does, however, remain marginal in two fields—Middle East studies and gender studies. It is normally assigned to the end of a Middle East studies conference (“and gender”), or, conversely, to the end of a gender studies conference or edited volume (“and elsewhere”). But can a discussion of technology or World War I in the modern Middle East weave in insights gained from gender or queer studies? And can a discussion of women's movements or women's labor incorporate what we know about the Middle East? I believe that more can be done to mainstream gender in Middle East studies, and to mainstream the Middle East in gender studies. Transnational history is a particularly promising direction for this endeavor.

Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the pioneering postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Bringing three competing accounts of the machine's invention together, I find that in each the Arabic typewriter was turned to very different purposes. Consistently, however, it was co-opted into intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeded its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it was written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. And across the accounts, diverse names and places reappear: New York, Palestine, Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter's origin-stories, I ask finally whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history—one that is itself uncanny and estranged.

In our imperfect world, rape happens frequently but nearly no one publicly defends the legitimacy of forcible or nonconsensual sex. So pervasive is deference to some notion of consent that even Daʿish supporters who uphold the permissibility of enslaving women captured in war can insist that their refusal or resistance makes sex unlawful. Apparently, one can simultaneously laud slave concubinage and anathematize rape. A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Qurʾan forbids nonconsensual relationships between owners and their female slaves, claiming that “the master–slave relationship creates a status through which sexual relations may become licit, provided both parties consent.” She contends that “the sources” treat a master's nonconsensual sex with his female slave as “tantamount to the crime of zinā [illicit sex] and/or rape.” Though I believe in the strongest possible terms that meaningful consent is a prerequisite for ethical sexual relationships, I am at a loss to find this stance mirrored in the premodern Muslim legal tradition, which accepted and regulated slavery, including sex between male masters and their female slaves.

In this article, the first fruit of an ongoing research on the sociocultural history of midwifery in medieval Muslim societies, I trace the attitudes toward midwives as revealed in Arabic biographical, medical, and legal texts. These texts, the product of male scholars, mirror an ambivalent attitude toward midwives: a mixture of repressed admiration, open repulsion, and fear. Thus, midwives are almost totally absent from Islamic scriptures, and Muslim writers make them play only a minor role in biographical and hagiographic literature, where the midwives of the Prophet's family are consciously or unconsciously “blocked” from becoming mythological figures. Women, sometimes hesitatingly identified as midwives, nevertheless played a role through their very presence at the moment of the Prophet's birth. In a storylike manner, they set an example for the implication of the legal rules concerning the midwife's exceptional status as a witness in court, rules that were formulated and consolidated in the formative period of Islamic law side by side with the traditions on the Prophet Muhammad's birth.

As Nadia Maria El Cheikh has said of the harem in western scholarship on the premodern Islamic world, slavery and the slave trade have yet to be fully historicized. While scholars of Abbasid-era slavery have made tremendous contributions in this regard over the last two decades, there remain ample opportunities to expand the chronological and geographic scope of their work. What does it mean to historicize slavery in the medieval Islamic Middle East and why is it worth doing?