Rudi Matthee's book has several key problems, which I discussed already in my review. Here I will provide evidence for two main issues that I see in the book. These issues are the limited use of Persian primary sources, and a tendency to make very broad claims based on very limited evidence.

During the late 19th century, British supremacy in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean basin increasingly brought the hajj under the surveillance and regulation of non-Muslim powers. With the development of steamship travel and the opening of the Suez Canal came rapid growth in the number of oceangoing pilgrims. Colonial authorities eventually identified the steamship-era hajj as both a conduit for the spread of epidemic diseases, such as cholera and plague, and a critical outlet for the growth of Pan-Islamic networks being forged among Indian dissidents, pilgrims, and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the British and Ottoman empires engaged in a contestation of sacred space in which the stakes ranged from suzerainty over the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj to even larger questions of hegemony in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and even dār al-Islām as a whole

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.

Iraqi women's struggle for equal rights has been shaped by similar circumstances and factors in both past and present. Since the founding of the Iraqi nation–state, ruling elites have repeatedly traded women's rights for building alliances with tribal and religious conservative forces in the interest of sustaining power. There was some progress in the areas of personal status and family law as well as women's access to education and the labor market throughout the years from the revolution of 1958 to the 1980s. Women's status declined dramatically during the 1990s due to intermittent wars, economic sanctions, repressive policies of the Baʿthist regime, and eroding state structures. Similar developments are notable since the toppling of that regime in 2003 at the hands of a US-led invasion. The selling rhetoric of liberating Iraqi women was quickly debunked when women's rights were de-prioritized and sacrificed for the sake of maintaining order and security, giving way for tribal and Islamist powers to control and discipline women. Iraqi women have been grappling with a new reality marked by a lack of security, an ethno-sectarian muḥāṣaṣa (quota-based) system, conflict, terrorist groups and militias, rampant corruption, the fragile rule of law, and the erosion of Iraqi institutions. All of these have allowed for the (re)emergence of different forms of patriarchies and masculinities, compounded by the empowerment of tribal and religious authorities, contributing to an increase in various forms of gender-based violence.

In the oral traditions of Jordan's Balga tribes, one event occurs many times: local shaykhs are invited to a feast by the Turks, and at this feast the shaykhs are attacked, arrested, or killed. Sometimes it is the Ottomans who are betrayed by their bedouin hosts. Either way, they should have seen it coming—that is usually the narrator's conclusion—but the lure of hospitality was strong. Something about these encounters was worth the risk of ending up in manacles, or dead.

This roundtable focuses on the marginalization of ethnicities or religious denominations within Middle East studies, and in the larger realm of history writing. Without a nation–state of their own to preserve their language and history, the Assyrian people and the Church of the East denomination of Christianity fell subject to repression in Turkey, only recently finding a voice. Marginalization in history books and educational curricula is one symptom of broken treaty commitments and lack of equal access to state institutions and funds. In our century, marginalization has given way to something perhaps even worse: vilification and expulsion even from countries outside of Turkey where the Assyrians reside, during a neo-Ottoman period in which parts of Iraq and Syria came to more closely resemble Turkey, a resemblance that included the presence of Turkish arms.

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.

A joke appearing in the folds of a Cairo-based newspaper published in Italian in 1895 must have fallen flat with Port Said's inhabitants. But the irony was not amiss. The jest suggested that the town, whose toponym could be translated to “happy port” given the Arabic meaning of saʿīd, ought to be renamed “unhappy” due to the sad state of its public services. Readers may have smiled mirthlessly in agreement with the author, who claimed the Egyptian government treated the city “as if it were less than a village.” Many were under the impression that Cairo wanted to scrap this “unhappy happy port” from the rest of Egypt. Continuing the wordplay, British journalist George Warrington Steevens wrote in 1898 that Port Said “would be wonderful if it were not unhappy,” stuck as it was between its riotous past and its doubtfully industrious future. Puns based on Port Said's name must have circulated for a while. Already in 1875, a French author had ironically remarked that this town's auspicious name seemed quite unjustified.

In 1917, an Arabic treatise was published by the recently inaugurated Daudi Bohra dāʿī al-muṭlaq (chief cleric), Tahir Sayf al-Din (r. 1915–65). In the work, entitled Dawʾ Nur al-Haqq al-Mubin (The Brilliance of the Light of Transparent Truth), the dāʿī not only underscored his monopoly of religious interpretation in the Daudi Bohra community, but also engaged in a series of jibes against Sunnis and Shiʿis.1 As the book gained a wider readership beyond the confines of the Daudi Bohra community, several cities in Gujarat were beset by public campaigns against the dāʿī and his followers. Handbills in Gujarati and Urdu were disseminated challenging the dāʿī to a disputation and calling for his censure. Arabic, Persian, and Urdu fatwas were also penned castigating the dāʿī for engaging in what his detractors regarded as takfīr (excommunication).

In most Middle Eastern jurisdictions, the applicable family law is determined based on the religious affiliation of the parties involved. Whereas Jordanian Islamic family law has last been reformed in 2001, 2010, and 2019, and the law that regulates the shariʿa courts has been amended several times since 1972, the family laws of Christian communities and the church courts have largely been exempted from this reform dynamic. Based on semi-structured interviews as well as the review of written sources, this article investigates why it is difficult to reform the church courts and even more difficult to reform the family laws of Christian communities, using the Greek Orthodox community in Jordan as a case study. I argue that conflicts within the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the fact that the jurisdiction of the patriarchate over family law transcends Jordanian state boundaries have made state-led reform challenging and presented obstacles for Jordanian Christians lobbying for change.

Research into ego-documents has being going on around the world for several decades, especially in continental Europe. The Dutch historian Jacques Presser, the inventor of the term, used “ego-document” to refer to materials such as diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal letters. The term was first used in the English language by Peter Burke. Some groups of historians, such as the one in Berlin under the leadership of Claudia Ulbrich, prefer to use the term “self-narrative” instead. Kaspar von Greyerz, leader of the Basel team and a leading critic, considers the term “ego-document” an unfortunate one on account of its connotation of Sigmund Freud's concept of ego. He claims that early modern material does not reflect the inner psychological state of the writer but rather the formal, outward facade. Artificial periodization prevents us from understanding the nature and intellectual heritage of the human being. The question is, “What changed with the transition from premodern to modern when suddenly characters started to see themselves as historical figures worth talking about?”

In 1925, the Turkish parliament commissioned a translation of the Qurʾan from Arabic to Turkish as well as a Turkish-language Qurʾanic commentary. This project is commonly misunderstood as an initiative engineered by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and linked to the radical institutional reforms of 1924: abolition of the Islamic caliphate, prohibition of the Sufi orders, and closure of the medreses. In fact, parliament's support of a Qurʾan translation was not a radical nationalist reform but an initiative supported and executed by devout intellectuals who opposed other facets of Islamic reform in the early years of the Turkish republic.