Rabiʿa Balkhi was a princess and poet who, according to medieval accounts, flourished in 10th-century Balkh. She gained wide popularity in 20th-century Afghanistan, where she has been the subject of books, poems, and movies. This article recounts the story of her grave's discovery in the center of Balkh's town park in the 1960s, the emergence of a shrine around it, and its integration with Balkh's landscape of antiquity. Drawing on parallels from across the Muslim world, I argue that Rabiʿa's shrine emerged through a dialogue between state officials and local forms of placemaking. But although initially motivated by nationalist sentiment, the Afghan state lost its ability to define Rabiʿa's life on nationalist terms. As Afghanistan fragmented through war, her shrine survived as a space where her life was constantly reinterpreted and where disputed visions over the nation's past and future played out.

Armenian sources from the 15th century provide distinctive viewpoints on the history of the Safaviyyih Sufi order before the foundation of the Safavid Empire. The history of T‘ovma of Metsop‘ suggests an earlier intermediate step in the militarization of the order, which scholars have typically viewed as an unprecedented development beginning after 1447, and ascribes to the Safavi shaykh the idea of taxing non-Muslims to encourage conversion to Islam. A second Armenian text, a previously unknown colophon, describes Haydar's attack on Shirvan in 1488 and the suffering of the Muslim and Christian sedentary population, as well as an episode of interreligious mockery. It is probably the earliest extant source to identify the Qizilbash by their distinctive red hats. Together, these sources suggest ways in which the Safaviyyih order's development was conditioned by the multireligious environment. They are examples of the value of non-Muslim sources even for late medieval Islamic history.

The three-week uprising in Egypt that ended with the removal of Husni Mubarak on February 11 happened to coincide with the section of my spring course syllabus on the Egyptian novel from Najib Mahfuz to Ahmed Alaidy. As was the case for many of my colleagues and their students, the rapid and awe-inspiring events unfolding daily before us pushed purely academic concerns to the margins of class discussion. This tidal wave of revolutionary politics erupting into the classroom forced me to the realization that my larger syllabus was not simply some neutral or systematic survey of half a century's worth of Arabic literature. I began to think about the largely invisible dystopic intellectual and historical paradigms through which modern Arabic literature is often framed, at least in the United States. The nahḍa/naksa narrative, which compelled many of us to read Arab cultural history of the 20th century as a story of brief “awakening” followed by irredeemable decline and corruption, is clearly no longer tenable in the wake of February 11. This same narrative underpinned the highly self-conscious postmodernism that began to emerge in Egypt in the 1990s and that reached its apogee a couple of decades later at the end of the 2000s, a postmodernism that was celebrated (though by no means universally) as the true beginning of literary modernity and the emancipation of the subject from the dead weight of a past ideological age.

Scholarship has long held that Islamic reform was a preparatory stage for nationalism in the Muslim world. In challenge to this view, this article shows how in the context of 20th-century Algeria Islamic reformers and nationalists continued to maintain distinct political ideas, visions, and projects. The article examines the internal framework of the Association of Algerian Muslim ʿUlamaʾ, an Islamic reform movement founded in 1931 when Algeria was under French colonial rule, and its interactions with other local movements, especially the Algerian nationalist movement. Through a comparison of the discourse of the Algerian ʿulamaʾ to that of the nationalists, it argues that while both groups claimed to be successors of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, their understanding of politics (siyāsa) was different. Whereas the ʿulamaʾ associated politics with their own spiritual leadership, the nationalists associated it with institutions. The study situates these distinct visions within the post–World War II historical context, in which the expanding nationalist movement undermined the ʿulamaʾ’s popular appeal.

Historical sociology has long been concerned with the study of organized state violence. Since the mid-1970s, a substantial body of work has come to focus on the importance of warfare to historical processes of state formation. The first generation of this literature proposed that the relentless existential struggle between the warring polities of medieval Europe had favored the survival of states that could adopt ever more efficient means to extract and mobilize resources from the local population to feed the war effort. Early states therefore evolved the institutions to collect taxes and administer territory largely as a functional byproduct of interstate military competition. From this perspective, the logic of war making was the driving force behind the rise of the modern state in Europe.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, the newly formed League of Nations saw Middle Eastern refugees—particularly displaced Armenians and Assyrians scattered in camps across the Eastern Mediterranean—as venues for working out new forms of internationalism. In the late 1940s, following the British abandonment of the Palestine Mandate and the subsequent Zionist expulsion of most of the Palestinian Arab population, the new United Nations revived this concept of a refugee crisis requiring international intervention. This paper examines the parallel ways in which advocates for both the nascent League of Nations and the United Nations made use of mass refugee flows to formulate arguments for new, highly visible, and essentially permanent iterations of international authority across the Middle East.

This article analyzes Turkish forestry as a site of nation building. To understand the ways in which forestry shaped ideas of the state and citizenship, I explore the history and memories of the forestry enterprise, Zingal, from the early 20th century to the present. I argue that the conflicting narratives around Zingal in archives and memory are symptoms of the contradictions inherent to nationalist modernity. I also reveal the continuation of similar contradictions in the 21st century by showing how citizens’ discourse of resentment over deindustrialization can coexist with their objection to a potential nuclear industry.

The surge in foreign direct investment (FDI)—investment with managerial control by the foreign investor, usually a multinational corporation—has been the major driver of globalization in the past two decades and the accelerator of economic development in many developing countries. It has, however, bypassed Turkey. By all relevant relative measures found in the United Nations' annual World Investment Report, Turkey has failed to attract much FDI.

The governorships of Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (1859–68) and Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II (1868–78) in Qajar Kirman were highlighted by an extensive building campaign which initiated a period of significant social and economic change in the province. This article explores the activities of local elites in managing their family estates in the context of this project through a careful analysis of provincial geographical and historical writings, Persian-language travelogues, and commentary by European administrators and travelers. Kirmani elites began investing in land and commercial agriculture on an unprecedented scale, accelerating Kirman's absorption into global economic patterns as a producer of raw materials like cotton, wool, and opium. An integrated political economy developed regionally through the expanding networks of elite households and their estates, reinforced by families combining landownership with administrative functions in rural areas. This process demonstrates the extent to which Iranians were active participants in transforming their communities in the context of the advance of global capitalism, with longstanding patterns of elite household competition playing an important role in mediating social and political change locally.