The story of the Oran-based Jewish merchant Jacob Lasry (1793–1869) illustrates how preexisting North African business practices survived and adapted to the radical dislocations of the French conquest of Algeria. In the 1830s, French political turmoil and indecision helped foster a chaotic situation where French generals with nebulous goals “outsourced” financing and even military campaigns to local experts in Algeria. Lasry's business success in the economy of the early conquest invested him with a degree of power vis-à-vis the French administration, whose other proxies sometimes ended up in severe debt to him. With the rise of a “civilizing mission” discourse in the 1840s and 1850s, aspects of this mission, too, were outsourced to local experts. Despite his Moroccan birth, Gibraltarian family, and British subjecthood, Lasry used his stature to secure the official position of president of the province's consistoire israélite, charged with advancing French civilization among Oran's indigenous Jews.

This roundtable brings together a diverse group of scholars to ask how a critical engagement with science studies, writ large, might allow us to rethink the modern history of the Middle East. They speak in the name of a number of disciplines, including: archaeology, agriculture, engineering, geography, medicine, natural philosophy, public health, psychology, sociology, and urban planning. And they cover a wide array of local, regional, and even international networks of expertise and experts. These included (to name a few) a British engineer who worked in colonial Egypt and India calculating the future demography of water supplies and sewage systems; American, Palestinian, and Zionist agricultural researchers and proponents of dry-land cultivation and colonization in Ottoman Palestine; Ottoman Arab and Turkish nationalists in Istanbul who debated the metaphysical and political implications of positivism; and, finally, the various experts and political actors who fought over the preservation (and destruction) of antique material artifacts and objects in Iraq and Egypt from the 19th century to the present. What we might claim they have in common, however, is a concern with the rise of the “modern state”—another broad category here encompassing a range of imperial, colonial, and national states in the region, and the multiple claims for legal and political sovereignty that they spawned. Of course, interlacing these questions of sovereignty, particularly in this context, as the essays show, is a further set of questions organized around the various forms of power that both these new states and these new sciences exercised. We could say, therefore, that collectively these essays reflect upon the coterminous rise of epistemic, material, and political orders in the region, and that, in the process, they contribute to our understanding of the ideas and practices claimed on behalf of both “science” and the “state.”

Only recently has the Persian Gulf assumed primacy in Iran's foreign policy. Basic reasons for this ascendency lie in: (a) stabilized relations with the superpowers since the early 1960s, (b) progressive enhancement of the Gulf's role in Iran's economic and strategic interests, and (c) competitive and conflicting interests and aspirations of nonlittoral states of this region.

The events of the Turco-Italian War (1911–1912) presented several complex problems for Germany's diplomatic and economic policies in the Near East. First, the War served as a test of strength for the Triple Alliance, because the Wilhelmstrasse (German foreign ministry) had guaranteed to maintain Italian interests in Tripolitania, but the hostilities threatened to spread into Macedonia where the Wilhelmstrasse had guaranteed Austrian interests. If the status quo of the Balkans was disturbed by the War, then an Austro-Russian diplomatic struggle might ensue, thus requiring German support for Austria-Hungary. The Germans were forced to support Italian interests in Tripolitania, while simultaneously preserving Austrian interests in the Balkans. Under these circumstances, could Germany preserve the solidarity of the Triple Alliance against internal dissension?

Over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, within the occupied Palestinian territories, photographic technologies and image-oriented politics would grow increasingly central as activist and human-rights tools of bearing witness to Israeli state and settler violence. This essay investigates the Israeli right-wing and international Zionist response to these Palestinian visual archives and their perceived threat. In particular, it tracks the rise and normalization of a repudiation script that impugned the veracity of these images, arguing that they were fraudulent or manipulated to produce a damning portrait of Israel. Drawing on post-colonial and settler-colonial studies, as placed into dialogue with digital media studies, the essay focuses on three cases studies of repudiation (2000, 2008, 2014, respectively) to consider how the long colonial history of repudiation in the Israeli context would be progressively updated by right-wing Israelis and their international supporters to meet the challenges posed by the smartphone age. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the script had become an increasingly standard Zionist response to viral images of Palestinian death or injury at Israeli state or settler hands. Repudiation was thus marshaled as a solution to the viral visibility of Israeli state violence by bringing the otherwise damning images back into line with dominant Israeli ideology, a process of shifting the narrative from Palestinian injury to Israeli victimhood. The story of the “false” image of Palestinian injury endeavors strips the visual field of its Israeli perpetrators and Palestinian victims, thereby exonerating the state. Or such is the nature of this digital fantasy in the Israeli colonial present.

As explained by one of its founders, subaltern studies seeks to counteract histories written by elites, about elites, and for elites that ignore the majority of society. Through this examination, the urban poor, workers, and peasants of India, the original focus of attention, are agents in the formation of their subaltern consciousness: the “agency of change is located in the insurgent or the ‘subaltern.’”

Diplomatic relations between Egypt and the USSR were established in August 1943. The motives behind the Egyptian government's decision to take this step have so far remained obscure. In fact, this subject has not yet been probed thoroughly or systematically and has not been given appropriate attention by either Soviet or Middle Eastern research. Studies dealing with Soviet-Egyptian relations or with Soviet policy toward the Middle East tend to allude only briefly to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Cairo and Moscow in 1943. The explanation for this lack of interest is probably the widespread belief among scholars that Soviet interests and political activity in the Middle East during the Stalinist period were marginal, focusing mainly on nurturing local communist parties. These studies have held that a full-fledged Middle Eastern policy crystallized gradually only after Stalin's death in March 1953.

The Lebanese war revealed man to me. It revealed to me that there was no end to evil. Man's capacity to suffer and cause suffering is endless too. War is the cloth which weaves relationships amongst men and nations. When I write, “From your absence comes the evening,” I express the anguish of losing my beloved. This anguish is similar to that caused by war. Fear and anguish provoked by war have also at their root jealousy, desire, ambition, money, success. What is specific about war is that it strips down man and shows him in his absolute nakedness.

When Rashīd al-Daʿīf (henceforth, plain text) expressed himself in this fashion in an interview in 1989, several of his novels and poems had already appeared in Beirut. His original voice had started to spread in the intellectual circles of Lebanon and abroad. Al-Daʿif's originality lies precisely in this stripping of human beings, feelings, and things down to absolute nakedness in the midst of a war that tore apart the artist'snation. He expresses himself in a language stripped to its bare essentials, as well, breaking away from the traditional Arabic mode, in which rhetoric and lyricism dominated.

Marcel Proust ends the first book Du côte de chez Swann of his mammoth novel A la recherche du temps perdu with this sentence: “Le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant; et les maisons, les routes, les avenues, sont fugitives, hélas, comme les années.” It would seem that a significant part of the early fiction of Intiℑār Husain, a Shī'ite Muslim and by far the most talented Urdu writer in Pakistan toäay, is devoted to the remembrance of things past, moments gone, and faces dissolved by time.

During the past decade, the Iranian economy has experienced two severe shocks. The first was the huge increase in oil revenues and the subsequent increase in government expenditures. The second was the Iranian revolution, with the concomitant flight of capital and production setbacks. The first shock produced in the Iranian economy severe inflation that, although not unfamiliar to the Iranians, has been unprecedented in scale and is still accelerating. Analysis of the causes of this inflation is important for understanding the course of events and for predicting future trends.

It has been just fifteen years since my researches in the Başbakanlik Arşivi (Prime Minister's Archives) in Istanbul on Ottoman provincial administration and finance before the nineteenth century led me to attempt to describe what I saw in the archives for the benefit of other researchers. Since that time, a number of additional collections in that archive have been catalogued and made available, and my own subsequent research into the Ottoman reform movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have enabled me to examine these and other materials which I did not see or examine during my earlier research efforts in Istanbul. It is the purpose of this survey, then, to describe these more modern archival materials in Istanbul, particularly those in the Başbakanhk Arşivi which were not described in my earlier article, in the hope of encouraging all those interested in modern Ottoman and Middle Eastern history to make use of them in the course of their own research. In order to help the reader understand the nature of the bulk of materials in each collection, I am dividing them into four general categories: basic laws and regulations, administrative records and regulations, records of sultans and individual statesmen, and judicial records, although in fact the materials in each collection at least partly overlap in nature with those of the others.

Few Islamic concepts have undergone as radical a semantic shift over the past couple of centuries as ijtihād. This Arabic term, confined for centuries to sophisticated works of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), has been liberated and transformed into the handmaiden of modern Muslim reformists throughout the world. Numerous Western scholars have investigated either the classical legal ijtihād of the first definition above or the modern employment of ijtihād among reformists encapsulated in the second, succinct gloss of this word. Valuable studies have been published on topics ranging from the relationship between ijtihād and writing fatwas (iftāء) to the so-called “closure of the gate of ijtihād” to the role of ijtihād in 19th- and 20th-century reform movements. In short, ijtihād is ubiquitous in modern studies and formulations of Islam.

There is a short answer to the question that has been posed to the participants in this roundtable. Tribes have a great deal of currency in modern Yemen because they provide an effective means to govern and protect local society. Tribalism is a deep pool of widely accepted customary practices in Yemen that people draw upon to provide security, manage agricultural resources (Yemen's tribespeople are mostly settled agriculturalists), and resolve local disputes.

Samy Elmaghribi was a mid-twentieth century Moroccan superstar. From his debut in 1948 through his professional zenith in 1956, the Jewish musician was a ubiquitous presence on radio and in concert. His popularity owed to his pioneering of modern Moroccan music and to his performance of Moroccan nationalism through song and on stage. Elmaghribi's brand of anti-colonial nationalism, however, was not that of any particular political party. Instead, he espoused what might be termed, “Moroccanism,” a territorial nationalism that placed Sultan Mohamed ben Youssef at its center. Like Elmaghribi, it enjoyed widespread support. This study demonstrates that a focus on musical culture gives voice to mainstream forms of Moroccan nationalism that have received little scholarly attention to date. It also points to the active participation of Jews in postwar MENA societies. Finally, this article reconsiders the dynamics of decolonization through study of Elmaghribi's career, which spanned colony and independent nation.

As I sit down to write the introduction to this IJMES roundtable on threats to academic freedom in the Middle East and the multiple consequences of these threats for scholars from and of the region, I also am reading news about proliferating restrictions in the United States. In Florida, professors are changing their courses due to prohibitions on teaching about race issued by the state's governor and legislature, and under threat of losing their jobs and livelihood if they run afoul of these restrictions. In Minnesota an adjunct art history professor was denied future teaching opportunities and called Islamophobic by her employer for exposing her students to the range of Muslim perspectives on creating images of the Prophet Muhammad. At Harvard the former head of Human Rights Watch was initially denied a fellowship, seemingly due to the organization's reporting on Israeli human rights violations. And these instances are just a small sample of the anti–academic freedom news. They serve as a reminder that threats to academic freedom are global.