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Between 1830 and 1870, French army officers serving in the colonial Offices of Arab Affairs profoundly altered the course of political decision-making in Algeria. Guided by the modernizing ideologies of the Saint-Simonian school in their development and implementation of colonial policy, the officers articulated a new doctrine and framework for governing the Muslim and European populations of Algeria. This book shows the evolution of this civilizing mission in Algeria, illustrates how these forty years were decisive in shaping the principal ideological tenets in French colonization of the region, and offers a rethinking of nineteenth-century French colonial history. It reveals not only what the rise of Europe implied for the cultural identities of non-elite Middle Easterners and North Africans, but also what dynamics were involved in the imposition or local adoptions of European cultural norms, and how the colonial encounter impacted the cultural identities of the colonizers themselves.

This book is about a barber, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Budayr (fl. 1761), who shaved and coiffed, and probably circumcised and healed, in Damascus in the eighteenth century. The barber wrote a history book, a chronicle of the events that took place in his city during his lifetime. Examining the “life and work” of Ibn Budayr, the book uncovers the emergence of a larger trend of history writing by unusual authors—people outside the learned establishment—and identifies a new phenomenon: nouveau literacy. In addition to offering a microhistory of the barber and his work, this book discusses the social and literary aspects of nouveau literacy within the context of a changing social, political, and urban topography in the eighteenth-century Levant. Nouveau literacy is about the emergence of authority among various social groups as a result of new material and cultural wealth. Like the barber, the other nouveau literates use their chronicles to display their improved positions and to navigate a new social order. Finally, the book examines a later edition of the barber's history by the nineteenth-century scholar, Muḥammad Sa`īd al-Qāsimī (d. 1900), to show how the editorial interventions by a figure of al-Nahḍa (Arab Renaissance) served to silence the barber's voice.

Between Iran and Zion analyzes the responses of Iranian Jews to the social, political, and cultural developments of the twentieth century. The book examines their integration into the nation-building projects of the twentieth century (by the first and second Pahlavi monarchs, and then by the postrevolutionary Islamic Republic); it analyzes their various reactions to Zionism from the early twentieth century, through the state years, and until the end of that period; and it analyzes the social and cultural transformations this community underwent in a relatively short period of time, growing from marginal and peripheral community into a prominent and visible one. Between Iran and Zion examines the different groups that constituted this community—for example, the Jewish communists who became prominent activists in the left-wing circles in the 1950s, or the revolutionary organizations that won the community elections in 1978 and participated in the 1979 revolution. It also sheds light on a wide range of responses to Zionism: from religious Zionism in the early 1900s to political Zionism in the 1950s, and a combination of the two from the 1970s onward. Between Iran and Zion shows the rich ethnic, social, and ideological diversity of a religious minority in Iran amid rapid transformations.

Though now remembered as an act of anti-colonial protest leading to the Egyptian military coup of 1952, the Cairo Fire that burned through downtown stores and businesses appeared to many at the time as an act of urban self-destruction and national suicide. The logic behind this latter view has now been largely lost. Offering a revised history, this book looks to the decades leading up to the fire to show that the lines between foreign and native in city space and commercial merchandise were never so starkly drawn. Consumer goods occupied an uneasy place on anti-colonial agendas for decades in Egypt before the great Cairo Fire. Nationalist leaders frequently railed against commerce as a form of colonial captivity, yet simultaneously expanded local production and consumption to anchor a newly independent economy. Close examination of struggles over dress and shopping reveals that nationhood coalesced informally from the conflicts and collaboration of consumers “from below” as well as more institutional and prescriptive mandates.

This book is a cultural and social history of Egypt from 1870 to 1930 that examines the way in which Egyptian men and women began reading, writing, and perceiving the Arabic language in ever more public ways. It argues that the emergence of modern Egypt was predicated on the changing literacy practices of the turn of the twentieth century, fundamentally altering the way audiences and writers related to each other, society, schooling, and the Arabic language itself. This restructuring of various literacies gave birth to a dynamic era of Egyptian history as individuals undertook new kinds of engagements with the written word, particularly in their civic participation and gendered roles in various public spaces. However, the impact of these new writing practices went well beyond the elite or the highly literate of Egyptian society. Students who wrote petitions, women who frequented scribes, children who memorized the Quran and studied little else, and communities who gathered to hear the reading of newspapers, all participated in literacies that were taking on new import as Egyptians sought to improve their society. The conclusion this book draws is that these new literacies not only changed the way people interacted with the written word, but also became a touchstone for the many who believed it would be central to the future of the nation and its people. Both the discourse and practices of literacies allowed new ideas about nationalism, education, and modern subjectivity to reach vast segments of society, irrespective of literate ability.

This book offers a new reading of the political and intellectual culture of Egypt during the interwar era. Though scholarship has commonly emphasized Arab political and military support of Axis powers, this work reveals that the shapers of Egyptian public opinion were largely unreceptive to fascism, openly rejecting totalitarian ideas and practices, Nazi racism, and Italy's and Germany's expansionist and imperialist agendas. The majority (although not all) of Egyptian voices supported liberal democracy against the fascist challenge, and most Egyptians sought to improve and reform, rather than to replace and destroy, the existing constitutional and parliamentary system. The book places Egyptian public discourse in the broader context of the complex public sphere within which debate unfolded—in Egypt's large and vibrant network of daily newspapers, as well as the weekly or monthly opinion journals—emphasizing the open, diverse, and pluralistic nature of the interwar political and cultural arena. In examining Muslim views of fascism at the moment when classical fascism was at its peak, this book seriously challenges the recent assumption of an inherent Muslim predisposition toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and “Islamo–Fascism”.

This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to Islam from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and conversions to Islam peaked. Because the Ottomans ruled over a large non-Muslim population and extended greater opportunities to convert than to native-born Muslims, conversion to Islam was a contentious subject for all communities, especially Muslims themselves. By producing narratives about conversion, Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors sought to define the boundaries and membership of their communities while promoting their own religious and political agendas. This book argues that the production and circulation of narratives about conversion to Islam was central to the articulation of Ottoman imperial identity and Sunni Muslims' “orthodoxy” in the long sixteenth century. Placing the evolution of Ottoman attitudes toward conversion and converts in the broader context of Mediterranean-wide religious trends and the Ottoman rivalry with the Habsburgs and Safavids, this book also introduces new sources, such as first-person conversion narratives and Orthodox Christian neomartyologies, to reveal the interplay of individual, (inter)communal, local, and imperial initiatives that influenced the process of conversion.

This book follows electric wires as they extend to new contact points and asks about the social significance of being permanently attached to an electrical network (’the grid’). The argument is that the construction of an electric grid is a process that creates social differences, new subjectivities, distinct geographical areas, and new social classifications and categories (types of ’electric consumers’). The method of inquiry adopts some insights of actor-network-theory, which accounts for social processes in terms of the joint assembly of human actors and non-human entities. The case-study is of electrification in 1920s Palestine. The book offers a material sociology of the roots of separatism between Arabs and Jews, discusses how electrification facilitated the construction of a distinct “Jewish Economy” and how electric wiring played its part in urban segregation. The historical case is used as means of exploring broader implications for sociological theory in general and for the future direction of the sociology of infrastructures in particular. Specifically, the book outlines a theoretical framework for treating humans-on-grids as entities that transcend the subject/object opposition: attachment to grids is not conceived as a new form of ’addiction’ but rather a relational and productive way for understanding agency and group formation.

Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

Desert Borderland is an investigation of the historical processes that transformed the local experience of place and political identity in the easternmost reaches of the Sahara Desert over the half century before World War I. Lying at the intersection of social and political history, the book shifts perspectives between an array of state and non-state actors to chart the region’s gradual evolution as a contested borderland between two distinct territorial domains—what would ultimately become the modern nation-states of Egypt and Libya. Desert Borderland challenges powerful nationalist assumptions about Egypt’s historical fixity as a bounded political space—assumptions that have been perpetuated in the standard historiography of modern Egypt, due to its overwhelmingly Cairo-centric nature. The book seeks to subvert this prevailing wisdom of Egypt’s timeless geographical unity by adopting, instead, the view from the margins—taking the reader on a tour of key sites throughout the country’s Libyan borderland, such as the oasis of Siwa, where a range of state- and nation-making projects were unfolding throughout the period in question. It argues that national territoriality was not simply imposed on Egypt’s western (or Ottoman Libya’s eastern) domains by centralizing state powers, but rather emerged through a complex and multilayered process of negotiation with the region’s predominantly bedouin and oasis-dwelling inhabitants, who were animated by their own local conceptions of space, sovereignty, and political belonging.

This book charts the development of the human sciences—anthropology, human geography, and demography—in late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, it examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum, to architectural designs, to that pinnacle of social scientific research—“the article.” The book explores the interface between European and Egyptian social scientific discourses, and interrogates the boundaries of knowledge production in a colonial and post-colonial setting. It examines the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in the Egyptian colonial context, uncovering the new modes of governance, expertise, and social knowledge that defined a distinctive era of nationalist politics in the inter-and post-war periods. Finally, the book looks at the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians.

This book provides a novel perspective on the relationship between institutions, the position of individual historians in relation to the state, and the contours of specific interpretations of the past in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran. It advances debates about Iranian nationalist historiography beyond a consideration of a few “great men” by discussing the complex sets of interactions among a wide cross section of Iranian society—scholars, schoolteachers, students, intellectuals, feminists, government, and poets—who were crucial in defining Iranian nationalism. In order to show these interactions, the book draws on a rich array of primary sources including published histories, textbooks, newspaper and magazines, yearbooks, memoirs, school curricula, pedagogical manuals, and unpublished letters. Using critical social theories on the public sphere and institutions, it argues that the relative autonomy of historians, educational institutions, and voluntary associations had a direct bearing on the degree to which history upheld the status quo or became an instrument for radical change.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman state identified multiple threats in its eastern regions. In an attempt to control remote Kurdish populations, Ottoman authorities organized them into a tribal militia and gave them the task of subduing a perceived Armenian threat. Following the story of this militia, the author explores the contradictory logic of how states incorporate groups they ultimately aim to suppress and how groups who seek autonomy from the state often attempt to do so through state channels. In the end, Armenian revolutionaries were not suppressed and Kurdish leaders, whose authority the state sought to diminish, were empowered. The tribal militia left a lasting impact on the region and on state–society and Kurdish–Turkish relations. Putting a human face on Ottoman-Kurdish histories while also addressing issues of state-building, local power dynamics, violence, and dispossession, this book engages in the study of the paradoxes inherent in modern statecraft.

This book inquires into the composition, function, and meaning of Islamic tradition, and by extension, into the larger question of the relationship between tradition and historical change. It is commonplace to characterize Islamic modernism as a rupture with tradition. This characterization maintains that modern Islamic reformist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promulgated a sharp critique of the classical Islamic scholarship, rejection of the principle of legal schools, and condemnation of taqlīd. Focusing on al-Mahdī al-Wazzānī's New Miʻyār (1910), the book demonstrates that fidelity to a madhhab and the authoritative rulings and opinions that had accumulated over centuries of juristic creativity did not exclude the reform, transformation, and re-creation of tradition. A detailed analysis of the five fatwās that were carefully designed by al-Wazzānī and assembled in his New Miʻyār shows how he negotiated with the new needs, norms, and sensibilities shaped by Moroccan modernity from within Islamic legal tradition. In elaborating his interpretation, al-Wazzānī, in effect, composed a new Islamic orthodoxy infused with meaning relevant to his changed world.

To better understand the diverse inheritance of Islamic movements in present-day Turkey, we must take a closer look at the religious establishment, the ulema, during the first half of the twentieth century. During the closing years of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Republic of Turkey, the spread of secularist and anti-religious ideas had a major impact on the views and political leanings of the ulema. This book explores the intellectual debates and political movements of the religious establishment during this time. The author reveals how competing visions of development influenced debates about reforms in religious education and the modernization of the medreses. He also explores the reactions and changing attitudes of Islamic intellectuals to the religious policies of the secular republic, and provides an understanding of the changes in the relationship between religion and state. Exposing division within the religious establishment, the book illuminates the ulema's long-lasting legacies still in evidence in Turkey today.

This book is about the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Revolutions, between 1760 and 1820. Like many polities around the world in this period, the Ottoman Empire experienced a series of institutional shakeups, political crises, popular insurrections, and different pursuits for settlement. While the old order was collapsing, possibilities for a new order emerged. Old institutions vanished. New institutions were tested and contested. Istanbul and many cities and regions within the Ottoman Empire, in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab lands, became political theaters where various actors struggled, collaborated, and competed over conflicting agendas and opposing interests. Examining some of these episodes, actors, and institutions, this book describes the transformation of the Ottoman Empire in this radical age.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the shape and impact of piracy in the eastern half of the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire’s administrative, legal, and diplomatic response. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, piracy had a tremendous effect on the formation of international law, the conduct of diplomacy, the articulation of Ottoman imperial and Islamic law, and their application in Ottoman courts. Piracy and Law draws on research in archives and libraries in Istanbul, Venice, Crete, London, and Paris to bring the Ottoman state and Ottoman victims into the story for the first time. It explains why piracy exploded after the 1570s and why the Ottoman state was largely unable to marshal an effective military solution even as it responded dynamically in the spheres of law and diplomacy. By focusing on the Ottoman victims, jurists, and officials who had to contend most with the consequences of piracy, Piracy and Law reveals a broader range of piratical practitioners than the Muslim and Catholic corsairs who have typically been the focus of study and considers their consequences for the Ottoman state and those who traveled through Ottoman waters. This book argues that what made the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin the Ottoman Mediterranean, more than sovereignty or naval supremacy—which was ephemeral—was that it was a legal space. The challenge of piracy helped to define its contours.

This book traces the emergence of modern Egyptian national identity from the mid-1870s through the 1910s. During this period, a new class of Egyptian urban intellectuals—teachers, lawyers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and journalists—came into prominence. Adapting modern ideas of individual moral autonomy and universal citizenship, this group reconfigured religiously informed notions of the self and created a national sense of “Egyptian-ness” drawn from ideas about Egypt's large peasant population. The book calls into question the notion, common in historiography of the modern Middle East and the Muslim world in general, that in the nineteenth century, “secular” aptitudes and areas of competency were somehow separate from “religious” ones. Instead, by tying the burgeoning Islamic modernist movement to the process of identity formation and its attendant political questions, it shows how religion became integral to modern Egyptian political, social, and cultural life.

The Proper Order of Things demonstrates how early modern Ottoman territorial control, both in general practice and in the specific contexts of Greater Syria and occupied Hungary, was enabled through the creation of a particular web of textual authority. The book therefore focuses attention on an Ottoman paper trail of legal edicts, administrative reports, and reflective treatises that extended the jurisdiction of sovereign power through an evolving textual corpus. This corpus sublimated anxieties of fragmented regional power to assertions of imperial universalism. Formalized registers and circulated protocols fostered the development of a trifecta of imperial order: the emergence of an elite administrative class defined in and through an emerging court bureaucracy; the circulation of a documentary corpus of edicts that promulgated and registered imperial supremacy via a specific idiom of power; and the establishment of a dynastic linguistic and legal medium that defined the shape, even if it did not control the content, of intellectual activity, speculative inquiry, and literary stylizations. The Proper Order of Things thus argues that a link between territorial and textual authority also formalized a particular discourse that became the means by which the Ottoman establishment managed distance and organized diversity into an ordered system of state power. This discourse created a particular orientation to authoritative texts and bridged the divide between conceptual or ideological frameworks and administrative practices.

A Taste for Home is a cultural history of the middle-class home in late Ottoman Beirut that is at once global and local. Focusing on the period from the second half of the nineteenth century until World War I, the book shows how middle-class domesticity took form amid changing urbanity, politicizations of domesticity in public debates, and changing consumption patterns. Engaging with postcolonial theory, works on material culture, and consumption and gender studies, the book uses the notion of taste in both its aesthetic and political sense to critique the idea of “Westernization,” showing instead how “Europe” and the “West” are actively produced as places of difference. The privileged place the home occupied in discussions over the nature of the private and public spheres turned it into a model for members of the middle class in Beirut attempting to create a cultural niche and seeking greater influence in society. They strove to distinguish themselves not only from the class above, but also from a putative Western or European culture. The idealized home was forwarded as a model where modernity could be localized and an “Oriental” identity could be cultivated. The book argues that this model was in no way hegemonic, and that even as the home served to discursively localize difference, taste tied its most intimate spaces to modern forms of urbanity and to globalized modes of production.