The articles in this issue explore the formation and consolidation of national political communities in the Middle East, as well as the atomization of those communities over the past half-decade. The opening section, “Labor and Economy,” brings together two scholars of modern Egypt. In “The Egyptian Labor Corps: Workers, Peasants, and the State in World War I,” Kyle J. Anderson focuses on Britain's mobilization of Egypt's human resources for the war effort. The British recruited workers and peasants from rural areas of Egypt to serve as laborers in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC), which Britain had formed to provide logistical support to its troops in various theaters of war, principally nearby Palestine. By reconstructing the wartime recruitment network through the colonial archive, Anderson considers the broad relationship between the central state extending out of Cairo and rural Egyptian society. Where many historians of modern Egypt have seen a hermetic bifurcation characterized by mutual antagonism, Anderson sees linkages and interdependence that undermine category boundaries. The ELC recruitment effort “bound ordinary Egyptians from all corners of the Nile Valley to one another, to their local administrative officials, and to wartime decision makers in Cairo, in London, and on the front lines of the war.” Seeing the relationship between power and resistance as dialectical and mutually constitutive, he shows how, in reaction to wartime mobilization efforts, “workers and peasants developed new ways of interacting with state officials,” while “the Anglo-Egyptian state changed its labor recruitment practices in response to recruits, their families, and their communities in the countryside.” Anderson's analysis of ELC recruitment concludes by providing important context for rural responses to the outbreak of revolt in 1919.

Academic interest in the study of forced migration as a specific field developed only in the late 20th century. But its conceptual tools had a much earlier incarnation in the United States. In the early 20th century historical linguistic and ethnographic research was being conducted with Native American peoples who had been subjected to massive ethnic cleansings in the preceding two centuries. Much of that early work was with tribes who had been displaced, dispossessed, and involuntarily marched into resource-poor reservations. The scientists working with them thought they were engaging in a kind of salvage operation to record ways of life before they disappeared. These researchers largely ignored or failed to recognize the impacts of displacement—destroyed settlements, land occupation, nonviable reservations, inadequate welfare, and hostile administrations and lack of legal rights—and focused instead on trying to reconstruct memory culture of “what life was like in the old days.” Nevertheless, these studies gave us many of our basic concepts to describe and analyze the experience of uprootedness and dispossession. These fundamental concepts have become important in the discipline of forced migration studies. They include understandings of: role and identity, hierarchy, social networks, conflict mechanisms, reciprocity and trust, boundary creation, rites of passage, liminality, and the role of myths.

How do history and literature create a sense of ethnic or imperial community? And how do social and legal normative and disruptive narratives contribute to drawing the boundaries of such communities? To provide some answers, this issue brings together three articles on “Historicizing Fiction” and two on “Early Safavids and Ottomans.” In the first section, David Selim Sayers's article, “Sociosexual Roles in Ottoman Pulp Fiction,” analyzes “premodern sociosexual roles” in the Ottoman Empire through the Tıfli stories, a form of lowbrow literature that narrates the everyday lives of their protagonists in Ottoman Istanbul. This genre seems to have appeared initially in the 18th century, but it peaked in the early 19th century amidst the expansion of Ottoman commercial printing. As Sayers points out, the early 19th century was also a period that witnessed a major transformation of the sociosexual order of the Middle East, perhaps explaining why the authors of the Tıfli stories reflected on the prior order in their writing. Sayers argues that whereas most sources on this subject are prescriptive and transgressive, seeking to “outline, defend, or undermine sociosexual norms,” the Tıfli stories “portray the conflict that ensues when these norms are compromised in suspenseful yet relatable ways.” Through his analysis of these stories, Sayers blurs the lines between roles such as the boy-beloved, the female adolescent, and the adult male and female pursuer, which in other sources and analyses appear self-contained. Yet he also makes an effort “to advance beyond a definition of the roles towards an understanding of how they were negotiated by subjects of history.”

It is with deep sorrow that we open this issue with the announcement that IJMES editorial board member Barbara Harlow has passed away. We mourn the unexpected loss of our dear colleague, one of the most brilliant and accomplished scholars in Middle East studies. In addition to her influential work, Barbara was known for her keen mind, generous spirit, and gentle sense of humor, coupled with an unabiding sense of justice. She will be sorely missed by the IJMES and Middle East and North Africa studies families. We encourage you to read Tarek al-Ariss's moving tribute to Barbara published at the end of this issue.

The sociosexual world of the premodern Middle East has been studied through a variety of sources ranging from legal documents to shadow theater. Most such sources are either prescriptive or transgressive: they uphold or subvert a normative framework, telling us more about the framework itself than about how it was inhabited by subjects in everyday life. This study introduces the Tıfli stories as a descriptive source that transcends the prescriptive–transgressive dichotomy. An Ottoman-Turkish genre of prose fiction produced at least from the 18th to the 20th century, the Tıfli stories were a protorealist form of “pulp fiction.” Where most sources sought to stabilize specific sociosexual roles, the Tıfli stories explored the ambiguities inherent in these roles. This study employs the Tıfli stories to interrogate understandings of the Ottoman sociosexual world that rely strongly on normative sources and to stage an approximation of how norms were negotiated in practice.

In this article, I detail the British imperial system of human resource mobilization that recruited workers and peasants from Egypt to serve in the Egyptian Labor Corps in World War I (1914–18). By reconstructing multiple iterations of this network and analyzing the ways that workers and peasants acted within its constraints, this article provides a case study in the relationship between the Anglo-Egyptian colonial state and rural society in Egypt. Rather than seeing these as two separate, autonomous, and mutually antagonistic entities, this history of Egyptian Labor Corps recruitment demonstrates their mutual interdependence, emphasizing the dialectical relationship between state power and political subjectivity.

During the late Ottoman period, a large influx of migrants and the expansion of cultivation created opportunities for new settlements in the countryside of Anatolia, Greater Syria, and Iraq. However, settlement often brought misery to newcomers in the form of malaria, especially when it occurred in the lowlands of the Mediterranean. This article traces the contours of the encounter with malaria that arose out of settlement, offering an overview of how Ottoman state and society confronted the conundrum of the swamp and examining the impact of this confrontation on local political economies. It demonstrates that swamps and malaria were a significant concern for late Ottoman state and society, and that policies adopted to address malaria sometimes facilitated the creation of large estates in the countryside of the Mediterranean littoral.

This article explores the performative politics of devotional soundscapes at Coptic Christian mūlid festivals. Echoing the state's reformist efforts in the 1990s to transform Muslim saint festivals into utilitarian spaces and their goers into “modern” Egyptian citizens, today the Coptic Church works to refashion these popular festivals from places of debauchery into morally productive spaces. Aided by affluent Cairene-based volunteers, church choirs travel from Cairo's poshest neighborhoods to these festivals to actively sing, disseminate, and teach popular religious songs (taratīl) in an effort to develop poorer Christian pilgrims into modern, pious, and more audible “citizens of heaven.” Through the analysis of one church choir's taratīl ministry at the mūlid, I illustrate how middle-class spiritual volunteers disrupt and, at times, reinscribe the Coptic Church's disciplinary efforts on the festival's poorer pilgrims, particularly as they look to modernize popular festivity into grounds of Christian ethical transformation.

Examining the writings of prominent Islamist women intellectuals in Turkey, including Fatma Barbarosoğlu, Cihan Aktaş, Yıldız Ramazanoğlu, and Nazife Şişman, this article explores the repercussions of their intellectual activism for how scholars understand and study piety politics. These Islamist women intellectuals, whose discourse and subjectivities have been translated into analytical categories by scholars of piety politics, contest the terms of their encounters with academics and, more broadly, the conversion of Muslim women into objects of research. Their writings shed light on the complex interpretative interplay between academic and lay discourse when the objects of scholarly study speak back to social scientists. I argue that these kinds of critical engagements between Islamist women intellectuals and social scientific discourses attest to the mobility and circularity of social scientific categories, which have infused and reconstituted Islamist debates in Turkey. Rather than uncritically endorse or dispute these intellectuals’ interpretations of social scientific accounts, I leverage their claims to underscore the social life of academic discourse and to promote an enriched vision of piety politics and reflexive methodology.

In the final decades of Ottoman rule, several waves of refugees from the Russian Empire's North Caucasus region immigrated to Transjordan, where they founded Amman and other agricultural villages. This article examines the economy of Amman in its formative years as a Circassian refugee settlement. By exploring connections between North Caucasian refugees, Syrian and Palestinian merchants, and Transjordanian urban and nomadic communities, this study posits refugees as drivers of economic expansion in the late Ottoman period. I argue that the settlement of North Caucasian refugees and their active participation in the real estate market in and around Amman contributed to the entrenchment of the post-1858 property regime in Ottoman Transjordan. Through a study of an upper-class Circassian household and its legal battles, this article also illustrates the rise of refugee elites who benefited from the commodification of land and the construction of state-sponsored infrastructure in the late Ottoman Levant.

This article examines the political economy of Cairo's emerging Arabic private printing industry during the third quarter of the 19th century. I use the constituent texts of the industry to demonstrate that it developed upon the speculative model of commissioning, whereby individuals paid printers to produce particular works of their choosing. Commissioning indicates that Egyptian private printing grew from local traditions for producing handwritten texts. Nevertheless, print commissioning differed from manuscript commissioning by requiring individuals to assume great financial risk. I explore the nature and implications of this divergence through a treatise published in 1871 by Musa Kastali, a particularly prolific printer who helped to professionalize Cairene printing. Musa's treatise details his legal battle with a famous Azhari commissioner, and is unique for describing a printer's business practices. It demonstrates the importance of situating printings within their socioeconomic contexts in addition to their intellectual ones, a task which cannot be done without an appreciation for the functioning of the printing industry at a local level.

This article examines modernist-nationalist thought on Sufi lodges during the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic via the controversial novel Nur Baba (1922) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu. Widely translated and the basis of the first-ever Turkish motion picture, Nur Baba depicts a debauched Sufi lodge in turn-of-the-century Istanbul where drug use, alcoholism, and illicit amorous liaisons run amok. The novel played an important role in shaping public perceptions of Sufi lodges in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire. This piece explores the novel's place among early 20th-century critiques of Sufism, its approach to national history, its historical setting (during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II), and its close relationship to the intellectual concerns of the Second Constitutional Period (1908–18). It argues for a revised understanding of the novel's historical setting and contends that the novel employs a combination of moralistic critique and romantic nostalgia that is central to modernist-nationalist treatments of Sufism that instrumentalize Sufi culture for nation-building purposes.

Turkey has been absent from the growing literature on the phenomenon of transnational Salafism. A tendency among Middle East specialists to focus on Arab regions and in Turkey on the Islamist movement and its long struggle with the Kemalist establishment has perpetuated the notion of Turkey as a category apart. This article argues that, on the contrary, Salafism is a fringe strand of Turkish Islam that began to evolve in the context of the state's effort in the 1980s to recalibrate religion as a complement to nationalism. Salafism became a topic of discussion in media and scholarly writing in Turkish religious studies faculties, while self-styled Salafi preachers trained in Saudi Arabia found a niche through publishing houses. These publishers facilitated the translation into Turkish of Arabic texts by important Saudi religious scholars in an effort to change the discursive landscape of Islam in Turkey. I show that contra assumptions of a rich Sufi tradition acting as a block against modern Salafi ideas, Salafism managed to gain a foothold in Turkey, facilitated in part by the republic's experience of secular materialism.

In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novel Jacob's Ladder (1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan subjects was Orientalized and relegated to the background where it served to highlight a European-like Levantine cosmopolitanism.

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.

Through their interactions with French archaeologists from around 1930, Afghan historians formulated a new official historical identity for Afghanistan based on its pre-Islamic past. This article provides the first analysis of this process by tracing the emergence of the new historiography through the career of its chief promoter, Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, as curator of the National Museum (founded 1931) and director of the Afghan Historical Society (founded 1942). Through placing Kuhzad in these official institutional settings and reading his major works, the article shows how traditional Persianate historiography was challenged by an imported and amended version of world civilizational history. In the decades after independence in 1919, this new historical vision allowed the young Afghan nation-state to stake its civilizational claims on an international stage. In these previously unexcavated historiographical strata lie the roots of the Taliban's iconoclasm, which are revealed as a dialogical response to the state cultural institutions that remade Afghanistan as Aryana.

In late 2015, approximately 2,000 Syrian asylum seekers made their way into Norway via the Arctic passage from Russia. What ensued are “global moments,” breakthrough events that have reshaped lives and futures for both the refugees and those who aided them, and it is the latter group on which this article focuses. As refugees began arriving in Arctic Norway, Refugees Welcome to the Arctic, an ad hoc grassroots organization, was formed to assist them. This group of ordinary people, most of them with no previous humanitarian experience, took action in defiance of Norwegian government policies, and providing food became the focus of their efforts. Refugees Welcome to the Arctic members often described being motived to act by their own traumatic memories of the region's experience of World War II, a time of deprivation and brutality suffered at the hands of the retreating German army. Food, as an enactment of compassion, is shown to be a powerful means through which people connect in very personal, concrete ways to the humanitarian enterprise.

How do states produce religion and how can the study of state censorship cast light on this phenomenon? This article examines the logic by which two Egyptian government bodies, the Ministry of Culture and the Islamic Research Academy, censored the sermons of a premier Islamist preacher, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1999), between 1987 and 1993. To do so, it draws on two distinct sets of sources: a sixteen-volume printed edition of Kishk's sermons published in Egypt and MP3s of original performances recorded initially by audiocassette. While previous studies on religion and state power in the Middle East emphasize the strategies by which states use religion to assert their interests, this article uses the censorship of a leading antiregime preacher to probe the undertheorized distinction between claiming and producing religion. A focus on the strategies, in turn, casts light on both the internal diversity of religious visions within the Egyptian state and on the subtle, yet significant, ways in which state actors not only censor but also are shaped by their Islamist challengers.

Based on a series of recollections published between January and April 1926 in the Izmir-based daily newspaper Ahenk (Harmony), this article explores how individual Muslim Turks remembered their emotional responses to the Greek occupation of that city (May 1919–September 1922). Analyzing these recollections, it considers why certain events were remembered while others were almost completely left out. By studying how Muslim Turks described their feelings towards the occupying forces, local non-Muslims, and the eventually victorious Turkish army, the article makes an initial contribution to the history of emotions in early republican Turkey. I argue that the composition and consumption of memories were avenues for connecting emotionally to the Turkish nationalist project. This finding challenges the widespread notion that the early republican period was characterized by collective amnesia of the immediate past, and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on popular participation in early republican nationalism.

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.