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.

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.

Revolutions seldom involve more than one percent of the population. However, in Bahrain, a small island nation with a population of around 570,000, twenty percent of the population took to the streets in February 2011 to demand greater democratic reform, making it “proportionally one of the greatest shows of ‘people power’ in modern history.” The regime's response was disproportionally brutal. Saudi-dominated troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council Peninsula Shield Force were “invited to” or “invaded” Bahrain, depending on who is telling the story. Under cover of the Saudi military, Bahrain's security forces killed dozens of civilians, torturing, maiming, and raping many others. The arsenal of repressive techniques was exhaustive. Belonging also was used as a tool of repression, with many being stripped of their Bahraini citizenship on spurious, terror-related charges.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian Jews have faced two powerful and inherently contradictory calls to compromise their voice and identity. From one side, Israel has consistently held the opinion that as an at-risk community they should be evacuated and resettled. On the other, Iran's revolutionary regime has made “Islamic” a centerpiece of Iranian identity, placing Jewish identity directly at odds with what it means to be an Iranian. For decades, foreign opposition groups have spread baseless and unsubstantiated claims suggesting that Iranian Jews are to be placed in concentration camps or forced to wear yellow stars. At the same time, Iran's top politicians repeatedly peddle anti-Semitic innuendo and promote Holocaust denial conspiracies. Yet such narratives miss the central fact rarely acknowledged in Israel or Western academic and public spheres: Iranian Jews have continued to maintain ownership of their story and narrative as both Iranian and Jewish. This article seeks to analyze the navigation of Iranian Jews between their struggle as a religious minority in the Islamic Republic and maintenance of their autonomous voice as represented outside Iran.

Economic history is an underdeveloped discipline in Middle Eastern historiography. Within our field, economic history articles are not published often, and books on economic history are rare. It is true that certain topics have been better explored than others, as Maya Shatzmiller's contribution to this roundtable on medieval economic history shows. Previous scholarship on Ottoman economic history has focused on land tenure, fiscal practices and institutions, artisanal production and organization (almost exclusively in urban areas), economic and charitable functions of awqāf, and, especially for the 19th century, questions relevant to Ottoman incorporation into the capitalist world system. There also exist studies on urban and rural markets, regional and long-distance trade networks, and economic activities of specific individuals (primarily government officials and provincial notables), although these tend to be descriptive. But there are very limited numbers of studies on standards of living; levels, accumulation, and distribution of wealth; productivity in agricultural production and manufacture; demography (especially for the 17th and 18th centuries); credit relations and financial institutions; and economic development. As in the literature on medieval Islamic contexts, sophisticated quantitative research is particularly rare, which makes empirically based comparisons among different parts of the region and with other parts of the world very difficult.

“They say the city never sleeps, they say it bursts at the seams. The city rotates and revolves. The city branches out. The city beats, the city bleeds.” This unnamed city is Cairo, Umm al-Dunya or “mother of the world,” at once a vibrant character and the pulsating backdrop of Ahmed Naji's scandal-rousing Istikhdam al-Hayat (Using Life) and countless other works in Egyptian literature. Cairo, Amitav Ghosh has argued in his autobiographical chronicle of historical research and anthropological fieldwork in the Egyptian Delta in 1980 and beyond, is “Egypt's own metaphor for itself.” If that is the case, what does this sprawling and pervasive synecdoche reveal and what does it obscure?

This article examines the representation of the Cold War in Turkish children's magazines in the 1950s, contributing to the current literature on children in the Middle East and the cultural Cold War. My main argument is that Turkish children's magazines played an important role in educating and indoctrinating children to support Turkey's pro-Western stance during the early part of the Cold War in two ways. The first was the production of new local content in the form of articles, stories, and comics that introduced terms and institutions relevant to the Turkish experience of the Cold War as part of the Western camp. Additionally, stories and comics reflected anxieties typical of the Cold War, such as fear of espionage and fifth columns. Second, American comics, translated into Turkish, or in some cases repurposed existing comics, instilled in Turkish children American concepts such as capitalism and consumerism.

On August 31, 2020, a US military plane returned the archive of the Baʿth Party Regional Command, more commonly known as the Baʿth Party Archive, to Iraq from California, where it had been held by Stanford University's Hoover Institution Library and Archives since 2008. A leftover issue from the 2003 Iraq War, it had been static as a policy matter for years, but appeared on the agenda of the US–Iraq Strategic Dialogue in summer 2020. Mustafa al-Kadhimi's emergence as the compromise choice for prime minister by Iraq's competing factions that May facilitated this development. Kadhimi, a journalist and human rights activist by background, was one of the cofounders with Kanan Makiya of the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a nongovernmental organization that followed in the wake of the US-led invasion in 2003 as a US Department of Defense contractor. The origins of this relationship dated to the aftermath of the 1990–91 Gulf War. Shortly after arriving in Iraq in 2003, and responding to the rumor that looters were headed toward the mausoleum and museum of Baʿth Party founder Michel ʿAflaq, Kadhimi and Makiya by chance discovered the Baʿth Party Archive underneath the structure, which was adjacent to the Baʿth Party's headquarters in Baghdad.

For decades Armenian studies has been marginalized in Middle Eastern, Turkish, Iranian, and Ottoman studies for political and ideological reasons.1 Ignorance and reluctance to understand the field also have contributed to this marginalization. Some scholars viewed the field as an archaic one, remote from the above-mentioned fields. Whereas some only thought of Armenian studies as part of Caucasian studies, others did not want to be associated with Armenian studies due to its research focus on the Armenian Genocide, concerned that any such association might endanger their access to the Ottoman archives or be tainted as advocating an “Armenian point of view.” However, in the past two decades the situation has started to change, as a new generation of young scholars, few in number and mostly based in the West (with a few in Turkey), have embarked on diverse research projects to understand the history and the culture of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. Although these have only scratched the surface, they should be welcomed as an honest approach to understanding the history and contribution of the Armenians to the region that goes beyond the approach of “good Armenian, bad Armenian” that was endemic to Ottoman and Turkish studies during the Cold War period.2 Although the new trend tends to concentrate on the 19th and early 20th centuries, it should be considered a welcome step.

This article provides a close reading of two popular Egyptian action films, al-Almani (The German, 2012), the first blockbuster since the 25 January 2011 revolution, and Qalb al-Asad (Lion heart, 2013), both starring Muhammad Ramadan as a socially produced proletarian “thug” figure. Made for Egyptian audiences, the films privilege entertainment over aesthetics or politics. However, they express distinct messages about violence, morality, and revolution that are shaped by their moments of postrevolutionary release. They present the police state in salutary yet ambivalent terms. They offer a rupture with prerevolutionary cinema by staging the failure of proletarian masculinities and femininities that rely on middle-class respectability in relation to sex, marriage, and work. Even as each film expresses traces of revolutionary upheaval and even nostalgia, cynicism rather than hopefulness dominates, especially in al-Almani, which conveys to the middle and upper classes the specter of an ever-present threat of masculine frustration. The form and content of Qalb al-Asad, by comparison, offer the option of reconciling opposing elements—an Egyptian story line with a less repressive conclusion if one chooses a path between revolutionary resistance and accepting defeat.

The dinner I was invited to was held after the monthly meeting of the Kayseri Chamber of Industry on a pleasant summer night in 2015. The spacious dining hall on the top floor of the chamber headquarters was filled by over a hundred industrialists from large and small companies. Kayseri's nationally celebrated cuisine was lavishly represented on our table. I was in a good mood because I had been looking forward to this opportunity for the previous two years. This meeting, and especially the part closed to the press, would hopefully give me many insights into the relations among the members of the chamber.