Beginning in the second decade of the 19th century, Egyptian agriculture began a process of transformation from basin to perennial irrigation. This shift facilitated the practice of year-round agriculture and the cultivation of summer crops including cotton whose temporalities did not match that of the annual Nile flood. One facet of the perennially irrigated landscape was an increase in the prevalence of the parasitic diseases bilharzia (schistosomiasis) and hookworm, the symptoms of which came to constitute normative experiences of the body among those engaged in perennially irrigated agriculture. Male agricultural laborers, who most often performed the work of irrigation, were at the greatest risk of infection. This article considers the significance of agricultural labor in the continuous making and maintenance of perennially irrigated agriculture and the role of parasitic disease in producing temporal experiences of this labor.

In this article, I use the 1969 Egyptian film Abi fawq al-Shagara and the motif of the kiss as a launch pad to explore broader cinematic experiences and cultures in 1960s Egypt and beyond. I argue that the deployment and debates around screen kisses not only represented wider conflicting and shifting impulses around questions of audience tastes, sexuality, and the role of the cinema, but became central motifs through which audiences experienced the movies. Inspired by a historical approach to the study of cinema, one in which media texts and audiences are central, this article shifts the gaze away from the screen to consider the public lens through which films were appreciated, the broader global media landscape in which they existed, and the tensions between audiences and critics. I bring popular magazines, audience reactions and memories, and wider international cultural trends into the frames of analysis not only to nuance our understanding of Egyptian cinematic cultures, but to shed light on an often-neglected component of Egyptian history of the 1960s; the fun, the pleasures, and the anxieties of a quickly changing cultural and leisure landscape, and the wider cultural mood that helped shape a generation's experiences of the cinema.

Despite the growth in scholarship on diverse religious communities in Turkey, little attention has been paid to Twelver Shiʿi Muslims. Since the founding of the Republic, the Turkish state's foundational secularist agenda has attempted to control and promote a single hegemonic form of Islam, and Shiʿa have faced continuous issues practicing their faith in public as a result. While the liberalization of the past three decades has allowed Shiʿism to enter the public sphere, the community has had to continue navigating limitations on their expression of religious difference. Based on fieldwork in Eastern Anatolia, this article deepens understandings of Islam in Turkey by showing how Shiʿa have negotiated their position vis-à-vis both secularist and Sunni-majority actors and policies across various religious and political currents. Rejecting categorization as either mezhep (sect) or minority, Shiʿa have demanded independence from state religious control while also asserting their allegiance to the Republic and nation as Turkish Muslims.

This roundtable on women and crime was inspired by a discussion at a CUNY Dissections Seminar in April 2021, where Gülhan Balsoy presented her work in progress on Ottoman crime fiction in the early 20th century. The focus of her paper was a popular murder mystery series called The National Collection of Murders, which had been published in Istanbul in 1914. The protagonists of this fictional crime series were a mother and daughter known as the Dark Witch and the Bloody Fairy, who led an underground criminal gang living in a secret subterranean world beneath the city of Istanbul. While reading her paper the night before the seminar, I could not help but notice striking parallels between this fictional Ottoman murder mystery and the sensationalized media coverage of a 1921 Egyptian serial murder case, popularly known by the name of its alleged perpetrators, Raya and Sakina. In both the fictive Ottoman story and the Egyptian media coverage of a real crime, two sets of female relatives were presented as the respective leaders of a criminal gang that stole luxury goods from respectable families and turned their homes into human slaughterhouses. In both cases, the female gang leaders used “superstition” to deceive and trap their victims while continually outwitting the police, all against a backdrop of illicit sex.

Afghanistan assumed its modern cartographic form in piecemeal fashion between the late 1860s and early 1890s in the context of British imperial boundary-making projects in South Asia and the Middle East. The bordering of Afghanistan was contextualized by the global British empire and multiple boundary conflicts and frontier anxieties involving the British and the French, German, Russian, and other imperial powers as well as local rulers. The fundamental point here is that the map of Afghanistan is a product of imperial and interimperial concerns, and it has not benefited the Afghan people. The map of Afghanistan may or may not have served the imperial purposes for which it was created, but more importantly, by uncritically accepting it and its imperial heritage, we Afghans have become victims of an imperial map of ourselves. Afghans and non-Afghans will benefit from directly confronting the coercive impact of imperial mapping agendas on the largely invisible people “on the map” of Afghanistan. This essay historicizes the production of maps of modern Afghanistan, exposing imperial and crypto-colonial influences upon our national cartography. In so doing, it critically reimagines our spatial politics and reconfigures our intellectual infrastructure. It is an exercise in historical recentering designed to instill Afghan humanity and agency onto the map of Afghanistan.

This article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.

Over the past decade, historians have finally started listening to the past. Mark M. Smith, an American historian and a leader in this wave of sensory and sound history, has said that historians today are “listening to the past with an intensity, frequency, keenness, and acuity unprecedented in scope and magnitude.” However, scholars of the modern Middle East have yet to join this auditory revolution. Whether working in history, political science, anthropology, or gender studies, they are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives.

Trade is often discussed in an Islamic context with reference made to Muslim merchants. However, the significance of Islam in specific commercial circumstances is difficult to assess. Some historians label trade as “Muslim” because it was conducted by Muslims; others do so because the trade originated and/or concluded with the boundaries of an Islamic state. The label Muslim may also suggest networking, a process more familiar in relation to Armenians or Jews. We can ask if the operative principles of Muslim networks were at all the same as those for the minority groups.

When the State of Greater Lebanon was established in 1920, the Jewish Community Council of Beirut was officially recognized as the central administrative body within Lebanon, and although smaller communities such as Sidon and Tripoli also had their own councils they were consequently made subject to the authority of Beirut. In this context of political overhaul, I argue that some Jewish actors made use “from below” of political opportunities provided by sectarianism “from above”—or national sectarianism—to garner control over all Jewish political structures in Lebanon. But by examining in particular activities in and around the Israelite Community Council in Sidon (al-Majlis al-Milli al-Isra'ili bi-Sayda), I show how and why these attempts to practice new forms of sectarianism were met with resistance, despite connections that tied Lebanon's Jews together administratively in one community.

The first two articles in this issue, reflecting growing scholarly interest in the global era of decolonization in the two decades after World War II, track multilayered local, regional, and global forces that shaped particular historical shifts during these pivotal years. Cyrus Schayegh, in “1958 Reconsidered: State Formation and the Cold War in the Early Postcolonial Arab Middle East,” revisits the political crises that tore rapidly through the central Arab states in 1958, focusing on Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which were “sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt.” While Schayegh concurs with previous scholarship that the convulsions of that year did not lead to the deep sociopolitical and ideological transformations in the region that many contemporaries either hoped or feared, he argues that they can now be read as marking a historical milestone of a different sort. In all three countries, the events of 1958 sparked immediate, dramatic, and persistent “state-formation surges,” particularly through the rapid implementation of development plans aimed at defusing both socioeconomic discontent and the political aspirations fueled by Nasirist Arab nationalism on one side and Arab communist movements on the other. Schayegh suggests that these state-formation surges in turn shaped similarities in the three countries’ subsequent historical development in spite of stark differences in their political systems of governance.