In our imperfect world, rape happens frequently but nearly no one publicly defends the legitimacy of forcible or nonconsensual sex. So pervasive is deference to some notion of consent that even Daʿish supporters who uphold the permissibility of enslaving women captured in war can insist that their refusal or resistance makes sex unlawful. Apparently, one can simultaneously laud slave concubinage and anathematize rape. A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Qurʾan forbids nonconsensual relationships between owners and their female slaves, claiming that “the master–slave relationship creates a status through which sexual relations may become licit, provided both parties consent.” She contends that “the sources” treat a master's nonconsensual sex with his female slave as “tantamount to the crime of zinā [illicit sex] and/or rape.” Though I believe in the strongest possible terms that meaningful consent is a prerequisite for ethical sexual relationships, I am at a loss to find this stance mirrored in the premodern Muslim legal tradition, which accepted and regulated slavery, including sex between male masters and their female slaves.

After losing control of the capital Sanaa to Yemen's northern Houthi movement, which is aligned with forces loyal to the former president ʿAli ʿAbd Allah Salih, current Yemeni President ʿAbd Rabbu Mansur Hadi turned to Saudi Arabia for help. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its coalition of nine states began a bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Prior to the conflict, Yemen was already 90-percent dependent on imported food and had been battling a severe water deficit. A twenty-eight-month-long siege of its civilian population has left the country in a situation that some humanitarian groups deem to be worse than the crisis in Syria. The media has barely covered Yemen's catastrophic crisis, partially because of overt censorship by the Saudi kingdom and a shielding of its systemic violations of international law by powerful allies including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. These countries are clearly more concerned with billion-dollar arms deals with the kingdom than with putting an end to what has been described as the worst food crisis since the establishment of the United Nations.

In post-2009 Iran, not only is space gendered for a variety of reasons ranging from customs to state intervention, but also public space has become less accessible and secluded for security purposes. To securitize the state or replace a sense of trust with that of suspicion, states blend the gendering of space with the architecture of seclusion. In the United States, for instance, the separation of males and females in the prison industrial complex includes seclusion of bodies and often subjects gender-nonconforming people, immigrants, and those with HIV to disproportionate levels of physical danger. In Iran, architectural adjustments with the aim of seclusion have significantly increased since the 2009 protests. In Tehran, for instance, shisha shops in the mountains, which used to be common sites of leisure, are randomly raided by security forces. As a result, participating in such spaces means having to hide in the back areas to engage in an activity that not too long ago was legal. It follows that the combination of gendering and seclusion of space disrupts the formation of organic relationships and generates real, falsely stimulated, and contested intimacies. How we approach intimacies in this complicated situation determines in important ways the impact that this new spatial scheme will have on our research agenda, analysis, and perhaps even safety.

“Place matters,” geographers are fond of saying. And it seems this sentiment is more and more embraced by scholars in other disciplines. The current outpour of writing in Middle East studies that draws on geographic themes goes a long way toward showing how “spatial form can alter the future course of the very histories which have produced it.” At the same time, geography in Middle East studies is at risk of being provincialized over the long term, instead of taken seriously as a source for new approaches to studying the region. For the so-called spatial turn to endure, it must be transformed from a vague thematic concern to a more self-conscious analytical perspective, one that reveals the many competing visions and practices that constitute space. More reflection on the purposes, limits, and politics of thinking geographically in research on the Middle East is required.

As one of the Middle East's more open countries, Lebanon is fairly congenial to foreign researchers. Classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, it ranks ahead of all the region's countries, except Israel, Tunisia, and Turkey. However, when it comes to researching Hizbullah, this openness and congeniality subsides. While Hizbullah contains political and social branches, it is first and foremost a military and guerilla organization—the self-proclaimed Islamic Resistance in Lebanon (al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya fi Lubnan). Like any military and guerrilla organization—especially one that is subjected to Western terrorist designations and economic sanctions—Hizbullah is innately and justifiably secretive, vigilant, and suspicious of foreigners and outsiders, including academics, scholars, and researchers. Based on my personal experiences researching Hizbullah in Lebanon, these characteristics have ebbed and flowed with its organizational evolution and situational context. At the international, regional, and local levels, the complexities and dynamics of the politics surrounding Hizbullah have shaped my experiences as a researcher in Lebanon and have demonstrated the importance of being aware of these politics and adapting to them. These convoluted and shifting politics have also revealed the inherent merits and challenges of ethnography—a rigorous, informal, and improvisational endeavor and process that necessitates, above all else, flexibility.

Considering geography's potential to inform research and teaching in Middle East studies, it is necessary to acknowledge that the discipline's full potential in the United States—despite many accomplishments in recent decades—is yet to be realized. In American higher education, this lack of engagement always seemed to me a consequence of at least four factors in both fields’ institutional and disciplinary histories. As a matter of self-examination, we should first acknowledge that regional orientations in geography (e.g., the Berkeley/Sauer school's emphasis on Latin America and its indigenous and agrarian landscapes) often overlooked the area, leaving engagement with the Middle East more to the efforts of individual scholars and students. Second, despite recent surges in geography's importance and institutional presence on many American campuses, for a variety of reasons (not all of which are agreed upon) there were several periods in the 20th century when geography departments were eliminated from many of those universities regarded as leaders in Middle East studies. Third, forces of inertia—institutional, fiscal, pedagogical (e.g., offerings of language classes, particularly at advanced levels), and mental—set in place by the first two factors are impossible to overstate and difficult to overcome. Fourth and finally, American notions of how to define geography are often tenuous; this is true not only within the general population but also among scholars of other disciplines, compelling recurrent rediscoveries of the discipline. As a consequence—and apart from the contributions of individual scholars—only in the past two decades has geography witnessed significant exchanges with Middle East studies beyond select areas of inquiry in the discipline (e.g., urban studies), and a regional specialty group for Middle East geography within the American Association of Geographers (known until recently as the Association of American Geographers) did not emerge until the late 1990s. In the following paragraphs, therefore, I introduce geography as a discipline for scholars of the Middle East. This introduction provides a useful starting point as I proceed to engage with one (sub)subfield of the discipline that features routinely in both academic and policy-making engagements with the Middle East and its study: geopolitics.

Contemporary and later Arabic texts provide much evidence that wayward conduct by elite young adult males was a source of considerable stress in early Abbasid cities. This brief essay turns on a question: to what extent is such conduct to be attributed to concubinage? I treat two sample texts, each describing untoward activity on the part of well-placed adult sons and its impact on the Abbasid body politic. Neither text, however, speaks to concubinage. What follows, then, is an argument from circumstantial evidence. Concubinage seems a most likely source, and so can reasonably be connected to the broader patterns of social disjunction of the first Abbasid period (roughly the mid-8th to mid-10th centuries).

Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions have inflicted tremendous direct and collateral damage on historic sites, monuments, and museums. The chaos has also facilitated the emergence of new identitarian politics wielded by groups operating outside the framework of the nation-state. Consequently, history and geography are being contested and reconfigured, while cultural heritage itself is being divided and reappropriated, and its ill-fated fragments captured by groups that do not recognize them as their own heritage, or as heritage at all, destroyed.

It is telling that Cambridge University Press commissioned two anthropologists to write its histories of modern Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Having escaped the experience of direct colonial rule, these countries do not fit comfortably into the dominant model of modern Middle Eastern history. It follows that the template for modern Saudi statehood cannot be retrieved from the colonial archives, or the postcolonial corporate ones, for that matter. Instead, it must be cobbled out of disparate parts, some Arabian, some Islamic, and some imported. Few modern states defy the reigning scholarly consensuses of economics, politics, history, and anthropology like Saudi Arabia, a place that on account of oil wealth has been transformed almost beyond recognition in the span of two or three generations. As a rentier-based, kinship-organized, orally inscribed, puritanically orthodox Muslim polity, Saudi Arabia poses problems for the best traditions of graduate training in any single discipline.

By the time I completed fieldwork in Qatar in 2016, the Msheireb project that aimed to redevelop the heart of Doha was nearing completion of its first phase. The way this development project unfolded during this time was indicative of broader negotiations of Qatari cultural brokers with ideas of indigeneity and expertise: the project was rebranded from Dohaland, “The Heart of Doha,” to Msheireb (after the local wadi) in the first half of 2011, while the iconic Al Kahraba Street—the “spine” of the old city and the first street to be electrified in Qatar—was referred to in architectural notations as the “Champs-Élysées” of Doha. The politics of indigeneity of place-making in these negotiations reflected an unresolved unease with the cosmopolitan nature of expertise. This tension was related not necessarily to the ingenious remixing of traditional and modern concepts of cultural and environmental sustainability, but rather to the active erasure of foreign expertise. We see this, for example, in the active rebranding of the I. M. Pei's Museum (in reference to the Chinese American “starchitect” who designed it) in order to take its rightful “local” name, the Museum of Islamic Art. While these efforts would suggest an intention to localize expertise and build local capacity as part of national objectives, I argue in this essay that this mastering in fact obscures local expertise by dissociating it from the cosmopolitan context in which knowledge production is negotiated in Qatar.

Abu ʿUbayda (d. 825) was a mawlā (client) of Jewish descent who wrote prolifically about history, religion, and culture. As such, he exemplifies the well-known feature of early Islamic learning that is the Abbasid-era mawlā scholar. His grandfather was a freeborn convert, rather than the more common manumitted slave, and it happens that the grandfather's patron—his sponsor, as it were, for admission into Islamic society—was a slave trader named ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar (d. ca. 665). And ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar, on a conservative estimate, had purchased hundreds of slaves from ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, the caliph who, before his assassination by a slave, had presided over the explosive early phases of the Islamic conquests.

There is hardly a source on early Islam that does not mention slaves in one way or another. They were ubiquitous companions of events, occasions, and incidences. But they played marginal roles in historical accounts. The numerous fragments of information, anecdotes, and offhand references concerning slaves during the rise of Islam call to be collected and analyzed to piece together a picture of various aspects of slavery during this period. References to slaves are especially prevalent in legal texts, as slaves provided useful cases to Muslim jurists to think through legal questions. The discussion of examples of slaves, walāʾ (clientele relationships), and manumission in hadith, exegesis, and jurisprudence has not only provided significant insight into the legal status of slaves, but has also helped scholars to develop a methodology for verifying and evaluating the source material itself. In this essay, I examine pieces of information available in historical and biographical works on early Islam to address the question of the provenance and procurement of slaves in Mecca, Medina, and the Hijaz during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Reconstructing this story involves dealing with narratives transmitted in various short, spurious, and often unrelated accounts. The source material for early Islam is, as is often pointed out, problematic and at times contradictory. It is laced with topoi and leitmotifs, and frequently proves tendentious, reflecting the opinions and biases of those who wrote them more than what actually happened. Nevertheless, reading beyond the topoi, leitmotifs, and tendentiousness, we find that “in the Traditions there is an undeniable core of ‘fact’” with which we can work and assume to be valid until shown to be false.

Heritage is a key site of politics in the Middle East. Recent episodes of the relentless destruction and construction of heritage in the region convey just how deeply intertwined it is with the making (and unmaking) of the postcolonial state. In Palestine/Israel, heritage has developed over a long history into an important site where both state power and resistance against it are produced, reshaped, and disseminated. A current proliferation of urban regeneration projects there is linked to the struggle against the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, as well as the incomplete, truncated emergence of a Palestinian state. Most of these heritage projects are carried out by semi- or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In this essay, I argue for the value of thinking about heritage in terms of government and state-making, or more precisely in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, to reveal the kind of work it performs in Palestine and beyond. States govern also by heritage, and both states and the local communities they attempt to control mobilize the language of heritage for a variety of different purposes in a variety of different settings. What is distinctive about Palestine is the central role NGOs play in the institutionalization of a heritage field. In their work, they collapse the divide between mobilizing heritage to defend vulnerable communities and resist the encroachment of the (Israeli) state, and using heritage to develop institutions and help build the (Palestinian) state.

The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.

The Saqaliba—a term that in medieval Arabic literature denoted the Slavic populations of central and eastern Europe (and possibly some of their neighbors)—offer a particularly insightful case study of the mechanisms of the early Islamic slave trade and the nature of the Muslim demand for slaves. What makes them such an ideal case study is their high visibility in texts produced in the Islamic world between the early 9th and early 11th centuries. Arab geographers and diplomats investigated their origins, while archaeological material, primarily hundreds of thousands of dirhams found in Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, contains traces of the trade in them. By combining these strands of evidence, we can build an exceptionally detailed image of slave trade systems that supplied Saqaliba to the Islamic markets, which, in turn, can be used to illustrate more general mechanisms governing the trade in and demand for slaves in the medieval Islamic world.

The study of the Middle East is experiencing an explosion in the dimensions through which scholars study space. The five new books reviewed in this essay stand out for pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualize the production of space and mobilize it as a methodological intervention. Through remarkably sensitive ethnography, creative use of sources, and an array of vibrant theoretical and methodological tools, they expand upon an earlier pioneering literature that centered spatial analysis in the study of the Middle East. In this essay, I focus on three dimensions they have opened up: analyzing space in time; drawing connectivities across spaces; and reframing the agency of spatial tactics and the nonhuman.

Artifacts that have experienced atrocities, even genocide, and survived, acquire the power to recall the horrors of the past, and to recollect the absent persons, things, and places that were lost. They symbolize violence, but also survival and resilience. Material objects that have endured looting, mutilation, displacement, and separation from the communities where they functioned as sacred relics, liturgical aids, or prized artworks form a special category. They are survivor objects.