The SSRC’s Joint Near and Middle East Committee has been organizing a series of workshops on the State in its Middle Eastern context. Its aim is to continue the discussions initiated at the Conference on State and Society which it organized at Aix-en-Provence in March 1988. The first workshop was held at Büyükada, Istanbul, in September 1989 under the general title of “State Creation and Transformation” and the second at Hanover, New Hampshire, in March 1990 under the title “Vocabularies of the State.” A third and last workshop will be held in Oxford in December 1990, after which it is hoped to publish most of the papers in book form.

This essay discusses the music of the Maronite Church, a Christian church based in Lebanon. It provides an overview of the chants used in religious services and examines their transmission and performance practice. The Maronites have always faced challenges to maintain their identity and preserve their heritage while adapting to their cultural milieu. Their religious music reflects the dichotomy between safeguarding tradition and accepting contemporary trends. Since the late nineteenth century, Maronites looking for better opportunities and political freedom have increasingly immigrated to the New World, where they face new challenges to preserving their religious identity while assimilating to the culture of their new homeland. Therefore, this essay reaches beyond the traditional geographic boundaries of the Maronite Church in Lebanon to examine issues in the transmission of Maronite music in the diaspora.

In Turkish Kaleidoscope, social anthropologist and novelist Jenny White has expanded her repertoire to the graphic novel format to create an account of the violence and political chaos that pervaded Turkey in the late 1970s.2 White builds here on her academic work and her own student experience at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Artist Ergün Gündüz has created visual interpretations of place, space, events, and emotions that bring the story to life. This review is a collaborative class exercise for “Turkey: From Atatürk to Erdoğan” at Brandeis University in the Spring 2021 semester. It reflects on the novel as a text for Turkish history; the format of the work; the aesthetic choices of artist and author; and the experience of encountering this work in the contemporary historical moment. The review incorporates student comments as direct quotations. It was co-authored by Chris Martin, a student in the course.

This introductory essay sets the stage for this special issue, which explores how online media has changed the Arabian Gulf region's politics, economies, and social norms.2 It provides an overview of the most important themes, arguments, and findings tackled in the four essays in this issue, as well as the intersections, overlaps, and divergences emerging from, and between, them. In doing so, it explains how the similarities and differences, as well as the most significant underlying themes, emerging from these four essays further our understanding of the online public sphere in the Gulf region as a space for contestation, creativity, and change. This introductory essay identifies three important, and overlapping, themes found in this special issue: techno-euphoria, cyberwars, and the public sphere. It concludes by proposing possible next steps and future research on the important, yet understudied, links between the online public sphere and the sociopolitical environment of the Gulf.

This study examines attributes associated with U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Omar's unique intersectionality of identities as a Black, immigrant, Muslim woman presents a rich case study for an examination of attribute agenda setting. A sample of Tweets, all Wall Street Journal articles referencing the congresswoman, and Google searches were obtained for the hashtags (“IlhanOmar,” “GoBack,” and “WelcomeHome.”) from May 2019 to January 2020. The Tweets and articles were then coded for a variety of dimensions. Analysis of the frequencies of words associated with the coding and the hashtags showed that the majority of the messages were negative despite the hashtag for which they were collected. A cross-correlation time series analysis showed that articles and editorials published by the Wall Street Journal predicted spikes in Google searches and Twitter messages. This article pinpoints underlying sociological phenomena about the representations of gender, race, religion, and immigration status to show the arguments that link attributes of Ilhan Omar together on Twitter.

The legacy of the 2013 Gezi Park protests has been controversial and its impact on Turkish politics difficult to assess. At the same time, there has been little reflection on contemporary Islamic feminist thinking in English sources. This essay argues that one important political and intellectual legacy of the Gezi movement has been the development of certain intersectional discourses in Islamic feminism in Turkey, whereby the shared experience of marginalization felt by pious Muslims, women, ethnic and religious minorities, and the LGBTIQ community has begun to broaden and complicate the scope of Islamic feminist discussions of liberation and social justice. By delineating and linking some important connecting threads of Islamic feminist theological thought in Turkey of the past 30 years, this essay will attempt to summarize key developments in the history of Islamic feminism in contemporary Turkey, demonstrating how they have led to new strands of intersectional feminist thinking in the post-Gezi era of Turkish politics.

I Begin this talk by telling you a story, that of a Spaniard who was living in the Moroccan city of Tangiers. One day he came to see the president of the local Council of Ulemas and said to him: “I feel attracted to your religion. I would have embraced it already but for one thing which disturbs me.”

“What is it?” asked the ‘Alim.

“I am a musician by profession,” answered the Spaniard, “and Islam forbids music.”

“Who told you that?” retorted the ‘Alim angrily. The would-be convert didn’t reply, which he would have done nowadays, as I hear it in the news; he simply pulled out of his pocket a sheet of paper and gave it to the man of religion who read it and understood everything. It was an ad for a book recently published by a local professor. The ‘Alim began to explain patiently that the book was five centuries old and that it was about a theological controversy known as the Sama’ Dispute over the way the Koran should be read in public. What was forbidden, at least in the eyes of some clerics, was to sing the words of the Holy message because the listener would be more interested in the music than in the meaning. But it was soon clear for the ‘Alim that he was speaking for nothing. His visitor had read in the article exactly what he was hoping to find, an Islam more rigorous, stern, severe than his own religion. Otherwise his conversion would be pointless. The kind of Islam the ‘Alim was offering him, simple, moderate, conciliatory, Jesuitical in a word, wasn’t the real thing.

Almost two years after the inception of the so-called “Arab Spring” some of its primary constituencies remain enigmatic. To a certain degree, this is an effect of previous scholarly interest in various regimes’ strategies for maintaining their monopolization of critical resources, and, ultimately, of state power. The literature on “durable authoritarianism” has taught us much about autocratic longevity and the structures and dynamics that underpinned the management of the populace, as well as marginalization of challengers in a variety of regimes throughout the region. As some scholars have recently observed, however, the focus on authoritarian regimes’ staying power led to overestimations of their strength and, correspondingly, to underestimations of their publics. Of course studies of social movements, resistant populations, and opposition groups are plentiful and trends like the growth of Islamist groups have received copious attention.

The terms “Islamic” and ‘Arab” are not ideal instruments for classifying modern or contemporary art, for they are meta-categories that can variously encompass Muslims and non-Muslims, and Arabs and non-Arabs. Nonetheless, as historians of modern art in Islamic regions, we seem to have inherited a longstanding commitment to Islamic art as an epistemologically unique practice that produced limitless abstract patterns and other “non-Western” visual expression. It is time to move beyond such overburdened lineages. In this paper, I aim to historicize the formulations of a specific Arabo-Islamic aesthetic that emerged in the 1970s. I do so by a study of a single event and its metacultural claims: the World of Islam Festival held in London in 1976. The Festival projected optimistic countercultural options for art and civilization that remain instructive today, while the complexity of its organizing structures demonstrates the limitations of the West/rest paradigm in interpreting its artistic products.

As researchers in Central Asian Studies, we discuss the different perspectives our methodological approaches provide to understanding the content and context of Islam, security, and the state in the region. We acknowledge the role of bias in creating narratives that dominate regional and international discourse and question mono-causal explanations of Islamic practice and the roots of radicalism. As such, we offer insights into the challenges and best practices of doing research on Islam and security and posit Central Asian Studies as a case for the value of multi-disciplinary research.

It is a good omen that an essay on the current study of Arabic philosophy is appropriate. In the first place, it is a sign that the field is flourishing. Indeed, there are now so many who pursue this kind of inquiry, and those hail from such far-flung locales, that hardly any single scholar is acquainted with all of his fellows or even with all of their research. Names of new scholars, announcements of long forgotten manuscripts, and novel interpretations of well-known works spring forth at each learned conference as well as in each issue of scholarly journals. What is more, it is a sign of the extent to which the field of Arabic studies in general has now become populous and diversified. No longer can an individual scholar aspire to keep up with all of the research being pursued in all of the various sub-disciplines of the field. Finally, it is a sign that even in the midst of such burgeoning activity and specialization there is an abiding interest in the field as a whole. It is the latter, above all, that warrants this general account of what is happening with respect to the study of Arabic philosophy.

In the past, the majlis or dıwanıyah a sitting room used for socializing in many Gulf homes, was often a place of music-making. In recent years, however, the ‘ud, duff, and tabl have been supplanted by satellite TV, Wi-Fi Internet connections, and video game consoles. Other long-established music-making contexts in the Gulf have also disappeared, particularly songs associated with maritime occupations that were such an intrinsic part of life in the recent past. Some of these songs were performed as accompaniments to tasks on ships, such as pulling up the anchor or setting the sail, whereas others were songs of supplication, asking God for protection from the perils of the seas (Al-Taee 2005). Traditional music in the region has also suffered from the breakdown of original patronage systems, as wealthy merchants now seek to invest in skyscrapers and artificially created islands rather than support musical ensembles. With the disappearance of these traditional music-making contexts and support networks, mass media has increasingly become the primary mode of experiencing music, both old and new, in the region.