The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cambridge University Library in 1897 under the auspices of Solomon Schechter. Less well known is the fact that hundreds of Genizah fragments were produced in the late nineteenth century, even as European collectors were scouring Cairo for ancient texts. This later corpus includes witnesses to the social and economic history of late Ottoman Cairo and provides copious evidence for the material history of Egyptian Jewish literary activity at that time. Despite this, it remains understudied for both Ottoman and Jewish history. Late Genizah material also raises questions about the integrity of “Cairo Genizah” manuscript collections around the world, as some fragments postdate Schechter's Genizah “discovery,” and others were never in Egypt at all.

Using a distant reading methodology, the article examines the thematic compositions of fetva compilations by four Ottoman şeyhülislams in the early modern era. Our analysis of the fetvas from the late 17th and early 18th centuries reveal that the majority of these opinions concerned a small number of issues, including women, family problems, contractual matters, and disputes and litigations. The article also demonstrates that the representation of fetvas with such concerns increased compared to what we find in the opinions of Ebussuud Efendi, a 16th-century şeyhülislam. But interest in religious issues, non-Muslims, and taxation declined over time. Finally, the article proposes computational procedures to identify the complex contextual characteristics of the şeyhülislams’ opinions.

In the Maghreb and the Mamluk sultanate during the 15th century, the production of books that encouraged devotion to the Prophet Muhammad—both commentaries on existing texts and new works—increased. This literary production was an expression of the intensification of the veneration of the Prophet that occurred under the influence of Sufis and the political elite. The Arabic devotional literature dedicated to the Prophet began to take shape during the 12th and 13th centuries with the rise of the great saintly sufi figures who laid claim to Prophetic descent and composed celebrated prayers and litanies of blessings upon the Prophet. This article looks at how such texts were critical in the diffusion to popular audiences of doctrinal concepts developed by sufis who placed the figure of the Prophet at the heart of spiritual life and the doctrine of sainthood (walāya). Specifically, it examines a well known but nevertheless understudied 15th-century Moroccan prayer book that is still in use today: Dala'il al-Khayrat (Proofs of Good Deeds). In studying this text, which is both emblematic and exceptional, my aim is to cast fresh light on the novel political, economic, and institutional conditions surrounding the international circulation of an Arabic literature of devotion to the Prophet during the early modern period, and to explore the religious and political implications of these circumstances for sufis of the time.

After the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War, the Ottoman Empire saw the rise of ethnic and sectarian clashes in Anatolia, the Balkans, and elsewhere, and the task of explaining that rise remains unfinished. Many have examined the intellectual formations of ethnic and sectarian solidarities after 1878, but the availability of new ideas cannot alone account for their widespread uptake. Why after 1878 did ordinary people respond more to calls upon ethnic and sectarian solidarity? Drawing on sources surrounding the 1879 famine in the Ottoman East, this article steps away from imperial metropoles to examine overlapping environmental, financial, and technological disjunctures. Adopting the methods of political ecology, the article underscores the simultaneous effects of drought, sovereign default, and an influx of modern weapons, each of which imposed uneven hardships along ethno-religious lines. Together, they created a climate of lived confessionalization that highlighted the communal categories upon which emergent movements called.

In Egyptian popular history and culture, Qasim Amin is often referred to the “father of feminism” or the “liberator of women.” However, this was not always the case. Upon his death in 1908, a different legacy emerged in many early eulogies, speeches, biographical sketches, and commemorations of Amin's life. In this early framing of Amin's legacy, his two most famous books were celebrated in ways that minimized the “woman question” while highlighting other aspects of his reforms and work. This allowed Amin's 1908 contemporaries to overlook the divisiveness of his earlier positions in favor of a new sort of fraternal solidarity—one that served the interests of certain political and intellectual male elites. For many of these writers—with a few notable exceptions—Amin was a quintessential reformer and thinker whose interest in the status of women was important insofar as it spoke to the ethos of his intellectual and political projects, not what it could do for women.

These essays grew out of a roundtable discussion at the 2021 MESA (Middle East Studies Association) Annual Meeting sponsored by the Society for Armenian Studies, entitled “Fault Lines and Fractures in the 2020 Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh War,” which addressed the representation of the Fall 2020 war and the failure of scholars within Middle East studies to engage with it. This introduction offers a short background to the roundtable, and a brief conceptual and discursive framework for the essays that follow.

For decades Armenian studies has been marginalized in Middle Eastern, Turkish, Iranian, and Ottoman studies for political and ideological reasons.1 Ignorance and reluctance to understand the field also have contributed to this marginalization. Some scholars viewed the field as an archaic one, remote from the above-mentioned fields. Whereas some only thought of Armenian studies as part of Caucasian studies, others did not want to be associated with Armenian studies due to its research focus on the Armenian Genocide, concerned that any such association might endanger their access to the Ottoman archives or be tainted as advocating an “Armenian point of view.” However, in the past two decades the situation has started to change, as a new generation of young scholars, few in number and mostly based in the West (with a few in Turkey), have embarked on diverse research projects to understand the history and the culture of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. Although these have only scratched the surface, they should be welcomed as an honest approach to understanding the history and contribution of the Armenians to the region that goes beyond the approach of “good Armenian, bad Armenian” that was endemic to Ottoman and Turkish studies during the Cold War period.2 Although the new trend tends to concentrate on the 19th and early 20th centuries, it should be considered a welcome step.

Several decades ago, Gayatri Spivak asked the pertinent question about whether the subaltern can speak.1 Posed in the distinct context of Western colonial empire, her interrogation remains relevant to this day: Can those confined to the lower rungs of an informally hierarchical, Western-dominated liberal international order be expected to speak, and be heard, in ways that respect their agency? The 2020 war around Nagorno-Karabakh raised this issue in stark relief. In media reports, think tank analyses, seminar and conference panels, and policy pronouncements, clear hierarchies appeared at play.

Every June, Coptic Solidarity, a lobbying organization, holds an annual conference in Washington, DC, with the aim of raising awareness of the persecution of Coptic and other Middle Eastern Christians. The Copt-run organization reaches out to American politicians, religious leaders, and advocates of human rights and religious freedom. During their 2016 conference, a panel entitled “What is the Future of Egypt's Minorities?” sparked a heated debate. Panelist Fatima Naoot, a secular, liberal Muslim activist from Egypt, was firm in her commentary that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are an integral part of its character. “It's impossible to say that there is a Coptic minority in Egypt because Coptic is not simply a religion, but also an ethnic category that forms the basis of Egyptian identity. Therefore, if Copts are citizens [of Egypt], they cannot be part of a minority.” An organizer for Coptic Solidarity emphatically disagreed with Naoot, speaking from the audience during the Q&A period: “We are the indigenous people of Egypt, of course! But we are also a minority in Egypt and we are persecuted, whether we are citizens or not. Because of persecution, we are here [in the US] because our people are a persecuted minority there!” Naoot responded, admitting that there was discrimination but insisting that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are integral, as one of the ethno-religious peoples of Egypt, to the abstract idea of the Egyptian nation and therefore to Egyptian citizenship. She concluded with the following clarification: “In Egypt, you are not [a minority], but here in America you are!”

The relative ignorance of Armenian narratives in the analysis of current affairs in the Middle East raised by several authors in this roundtable is symptomatic of a larger problem facing ethno-religious minorities in the region. Until the 1990s, Western exposure to Middle Eastern Christianity in both academic and popular contexts was minimal at best. Outside specific studies of notable groups, scholars largely ignored non-Muslim religious sects. At the level of popular discourse, political Islam had illuminated the majoritarian religious impulses of the region, contributing to common Orientalist stereotypes of Arab and Muslim political culture.1 The presence of several million indigenous Christians, the vast majority of whom represented ancient indigenous communities, was largely ignored among academics and journalists. The notable exception was Lebanon, where Christian participation in the drama of the civil conflict of the 1980s was often noted in the press and occasionally scrutinized in academia.

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.

On 29 April 2022, the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson published “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine” in support of divestment from Israel.1 In it, the editorial board cited the importance of global solidarity and charges leveled by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch against Israel, of “crimes against humanity.”2 The Crimson clearly had changed its position from 2002, when its staff had published “Do Not Divest from Israel,” regarding the comparison between Israel and “Apartheid-era South Africa so fundamentally flawed as to be offensive.” In twenty years, the conversation on college campuses has indeed changed.3

On October 16, 2020, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a powerful letter about the war on Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) that was signed by scholars who are considered to be among those most actively engaged in postcolonial theory and political activism, including Tariq Ali, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Noam Chomsky, Amitav Ghosh, and Cornel West. This letter read:

One late morning in June 2019 I sought refuge from the blazing sun within the magnificent structure of the 10th-century Church of the Holy Mother of God, better known as the cathedral of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani.1 The cathedral, the masterpiece of the celebrated architect Trdat, is located inside the walled city, today a sprawling site of ruins perched at the extreme edge of the modern Republic of Turkey on its still-closed border with neighboring Armenia. Despite having lost its dome to the ravages of time and to earthquakes, its edifice still stands monumental, with exterior and interior walls marked with hundreds of crosses and inscriptions in the distinct Armenian script, a history carved in stone. In its shade, I had stumbled into a group of two dozen Turkish tourists, who, visibly in awe of their surroundings, were attentively listening to their guide attribute the building to, and praise the splendors of, Seljuk architecture. The surreal experience took me right back to the travel writer Jeremy Seal's recollections of his visit, some twenty-five years prior, to the then-ruined (now renovated) Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aghtamar (renamed Akdamar) near Van. Perplexed at the structure being described as Seljuk, Seal had confronted his companion-guide as to why the Seljuks, of Muslim faith, would have built themselves a church in that place, centuries before their arrival to the region. He recognized having been “taught a lesson in forgetting,” on how to airbrush “the awkward realities enshrined in this building.” “How had it come to this,” Seal wondered, “that decent Turks . . . could refashion the evidence of bricks and mortar so that their absolving view of national history might prevail?”2

The “crossroads” is a recurring trope in popular and academic writing on the South Caucasus. This trope can conjure simplistic explanatory frameworks of timeless “silk road” connectivity, or of the region as a meeting point of East and West, democracy and authoritarianism, or Christianity and Islam. However, it also is evocative of the powerful ways that the movement of people, goods, and ideas across the region have shaped its past and present. In this contribution I explore how histories of migration and refugees connect the South Caucasus and the Middle East, and what these histories may tell us about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

In thinking about the prompt for this forum—on the ways in which Armenia and Armenians sit within Middle East studies and the ways in which they are often occluded from the sights of Middle East studies—what comes to mind is the critical necessity for internationalism and solidarity. This might at first seem only tangentially or indirectly relevant to the object of investigation here; after all, we are talking about geography, history, and facts. However, I think that it is relevant to how (as in with what sense, orientation, and from what perspective) we approach the question of scholarly regional belonging. Like any topic of intellectual inquiry, how we imagine and define regions has implications on what we find in those regions: the sites of importance and focus; the connections between different groups, persons, and events; and the scope of investigations. Internationalism and solidarity as frameworks for understanding Armenia and Armenians as a part of the Middle East orient us to the region by way of connections to the various peoples of that region with a political and ideological commitment to the well-being of all peoples there and everywhere. Many of the commentaries in this forum focus on the marginalization of particular minorities in Middle East Studies (Armenians, Copts, and Assyrians in this forum, and we also could think about the marginalization of Kurds and other minoritized populations in the region).1 This in itself is a critical and necessary point of departure. I would like to approach the question from another angle, however. How might we think about this problem from the other side? How does Armenian studies see itself in connection with Middle East studies? Here, although I recognize that Armenian studies is a changing field and is not monolithic, with various differences between the field as it developed in Europe and the United States and that which developed in the Republic of Armenia, there are a few continuities that I would like to problematize and imagine differently. What might the future of Armenian studies be if it were made through politically committed questions, articulations, and collaborations? How might this produce a (different) sense of belonging to Middle East studies?