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The Portrait of an Alla Franca Shaykh: Sufism, Modernity, and Class in Turkey International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Feyza Burak-Adli
This paper illustrates the heterogeneity of Islamic publics in early 20th-century Turkey by examining the life and thought of Ken'an Rifai, a Sufi shaykh and high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ottoman Ministry of Education. It argues that Shaykh Rifai endorsed state secularization reforms on religious grounds and shows how he reformulated Sufi Islam by imbricating Sufi ethics with other social imaginaries
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Revolution and Counterrevolution in Egypt International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Hossam el-Hamalawy
Why did the Egyptian revolution happen? How did it happen? Was it planned? What did it achieve? Was it defeated? These are some of the questions that usually surface in January each year, and during grim anniversaries of the infamous massacres that Egyptians witnessed after the 2013 military coup against Egypt's first elected president.
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Boom Cairo: Egypt in Disaster, 1787 International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-06-03 Alan Mikhail
During the month of Ramadan, on Tuesday, June 26, 1787, two hours after the afternoon prayer, or about 5:30 p.m., an “alarmingly dreadful event” (ḥāditha mahūla muz‘ija) occurred in Cairo. An explosion ripped through the heart of the city's commercial district, sparking a massive fire, toppling buildings, killing dozens, and pulsing buckling ripples and emotional shockwaves through the city. Late 18th-century
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Hyper-exegesis in Persian translations of the Qu'ran: On the Disjointed Letters as Translational Challenges International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Kayvan Tahmasebian, Rebecca Ruth Gould
Although translation and commentary are often treated as distinct, separable activities in literary and intellectual history, the Persian tradition of Qur'an exegesis demonstrates that they are best understood in relation to each other. Introducing the concept of hyper-exegesis as a mode of interpretation that approximates translation, we examine the dialectical relationship between translation and
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Palestinian Football and the Struggle for Identity International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Nadia Naser-Najjab, Shireen Abu Akleh
Although it is customary to end an article with an acknowledgment, I would like instead to begin by recognizing the contribution of my close friend and coauthor, Shireen Abu Akleh, who was known to both Arab and international audiences as “the face of the Second Intifada,” reported on Palestinian suffering and resistance with the utmost professionalism and courage, and was shot dead by an Israeli sniper
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The Banality of Disruption: Diagnosing Order International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Erol Köymen
In a seminal essay, Lila Abu-Lughod addresses “The Romance of Resistance,” suggesting that widespread scholarly interest in unlikely and quotidian forms of resistance is romanticizing. Rather than identifying resistance as proof of the ineffectiveness of systems of power, she contends that scholars might more productively consider how resistance is embedded in, and can serve as a diagnostic of, power
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Dynamics of Disruption: Ethnographic Practice in Contemporary Turkey International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Eric W. Schoon, Danielle V. Schoon
This roundtable explores how recent social and political upheavals in Turkey have impacted ethnographic research in and about the region. We propose that an analysis of ethnographers’ experiences in contexts of disruption and uncertainty can offer important insights into both research methodologies and contemporary politics and society in Turkey. The past twenty years have been a time of transformation
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Ethnography in War and Peace International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Anoush Tamar Suni
What is ethnography in times of war? How does war shape the conditions and possibilities of ethnographic research? How do the exigencies of daily life in a war zone ultimately prescribe and restrict what kinds of research can be done? In the following essay, I reflect on my experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Turkey in unexpected wartime conditions. During the two years that
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Ethnography under Authoritarianism: Notes from Medical Anthropological Fieldwork International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Seda Saluk
What is perceived today as “living in an unknown moment” with global pandemics and ecological disasters has long become the “new normal” that structures everyday life at the margins of Europe and the Middle East, particularly in places with rising authoritarian regimes. As scholars working in and on Turkey, for instance, we have witnessed or experienced firsthand several moments of crisis over the
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Managing Uncertain Times in Turkey: Refugee Healthcare Research during a Global Pandemic International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Nihal Kayali
When I entered graduate school in September 2016, Turkey was mired in a series of successive crises. I had spent the first half of the year living in Istanbul, writing about the country's reception of Syrian refugees as a journalist and researcher. During that stretch, a series of suicide bombings and, in my last week in the country, an attempted coup, were formative for the way I made sense of future
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Navigating the Dynamics of Private Security in Turkey: Reflections from a Field in Flux International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Gökhan Mülayim
Any fieldwork is inherently filled with tension arising from two fundamental yet conflicting obligations: first, the need to treat the field as an already constituted research object, and second, the requirement to continuously reframe, remake, or essentially reconstitute this object during the fieldwork. This double bind places the fieldworker in a blurred position, navigating between the certainty
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Orders and Disorders of Marriage, Church, and Empire in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Armenia International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Dzovinar Derderian
The Ottoman state and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople during the mid-19th-century Tanzimat reform era relied on ethno-confessional and gendered differences, new administrative organization, and coercive institutions like the police to centralize and expand their power. Yet Armenian men and women used those same tools of power to seek justice in ways that created instances of disorder for
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Shariʿa and Governance in Ottoman Egypt: The Waqf Controversy in the Mid-Sixteenth Century International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Abdurrahman Atçıl, Christopher Markiewicz
In the mid-16th century, the Ottoman government sought to expand its tax revenue from Egypt through a controversial initiative to levy taxes on endowments (waqf). The controversy produced a diverse range of responses from Ottoman scholar-bureaucrats, such as Ebussuud Efendi, who supported the initiative; Egyptian scholars, including Ibn Nujaym and al-Ghayti, who opposed it; and the Ottoman governor
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War on the Desert: The Militarization of the Sinai and its Greater Syrian Sacrificial Frontier during World War I International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Önder Eren Akgül
On November 21, 1914, Ahmed Cemal Pasha departed Istanbul's Haydarpaşa railway station for Damascus. A few weeks prior to his departure—after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary on October 29—Enver Pasha, the minister of war, invited Cemal Pasha to his mansion. At this meeting, Enver Pasha requested that Cemal Pasha, who was then minister of the navy, take
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“Why Is America Interested in Islam in Turkey?”: Fieldwork and Problems of Gaining Trust in a Low-Trust Society International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Zeynep Ozgen
When researchers think of access disruptions, they tend to think of factors exogenous to a field site, those emerging from nationwide events or global crises. Especially in semiauthoritarian contexts, such as Turkey, where ongoing historical contestations (over human rights, minority rights, and freedom of expression) as well as current political polarizations have created a volatile institutional
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Tarantino in the Ottoman Empire: Glorious Viziers, Pulp Fiction, and Scrambled Narratives International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Olivier Bouquet
I wanted to break up the narration, not to be a wise guy, a show guy, but to make the film dramatically better that way. . . . A novelist would think nothing about starting in the middle. And if characters in a novel go back and tell past things, it's not a flashback, it's just telling a story. I think movies should benefit from the novel's freedoms.— Quentin Tarantino1I wrote a prosopography twenty
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Egyptian Fan Culture and the Afterlife of ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Nicholas Mangialardi
When the Egyptian singer ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz passed away in 1977, a group of fans began meeting at his tomb to celebrate his memory and music. Since then, their gathering has become an annual multi-day event attracting thousands of the singer's devotees from across Egypt and the Arab world. This article explores the unique fan culture around ʿAbd al-Halim, tracing its emergence after his death and
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Efendilik: Civility, Urbanity, and Homohistoricism in Contentious Istanbul International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Onursal Erol
This paper forwards the concept of homohistoricism as a historicism that narrativizes the nation's past as the site of illicit or authentic relations/affections that have the power to pervert or rescue the public sphere in the present-now. In the case of contemporary Turkey, I identify republican, Islamist, and queer homohistoricisms as divergent political projects with interconnected rationales. I
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The Partisans of Peace in Lebanon and Syria: How Anti-Nuclear Activism in the 1950s Revitalized the Arab Left International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Masha Kirasirova
The global confrontation between the Axis and Allied powers during World War II accelerated decolonization in the Middle East. Axis propaganda supporting certain nation-state aspirations pushed the British to support nationalist Lebanese and Syrian leaders’ claims to independence from the French. After declaring independence, the leaders of the new Lebanese and Syrian governments sought to further
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The Birth of a University Music Genre in Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Nahid Siamdoust
Aside from the obvious and central role of women in Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) uprising that began in the fall of 2022, two other (f)actors have played a crucial role in defining the movement's demands and propelling it forward, namely, students and music. University students have a long tradition of serving as righteous agitators of uprisings in Iran, both before and after the
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Discord in the Diaspora: Agonism in the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement for Democracy International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Sahar Razavi
The death of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 sparked a movement that immediately captivated the Iranian diaspora around the world. The morality police had detained Amini in Tehran for allegedly improper hijab. Protests began in Iranian Kurdistan, where Amini was from, and spread across the country to regions and sectors of society that have historically been
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Internal Colonialism in Iran: Gender and Resistance against the Islamic Regime International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Sarah Eskandari
Appraising the roots of the Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) movement requires a different framework of power: internal colonialism. Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova argues that internal colonialism results when the direct domination of foreigners over natives disappears, and the domination and exploitation of natives by natives emerges.1 This process, I contend, has occurred in
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Introduction: Activism, Scholarship, and Shaping History International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Neda Bolourchi, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
The idea for this roundtable emerged from a special session held at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) in Denver in December 2022. As nationwide protests swept over Iran, many MESA members voiced support for organizing a public conversation that addressed various aspects of the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) uprising. We thank MESA president
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Jin, Jiyan, Azadi and the Historical Erasure of Kurds International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Farangis Ghaderi
Following the murder of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini on September 16, 2022, her parents decided—despite the threats and intimidation by security forces—to hold a public funeral. Protests were ongoing outside Kasra Hospital in Tehran as word spread across the capital of Jîna's murder.1 The family transferred her body to their hometown of Saqez the next day. Hundreds of people traveled to the Ayçî cemetery within
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(Mis)translating the Life Stories of the “Heroes of the Year 2022: Women of Iran” International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Ladan Zarabadi
“Woman, Life, Freedom” (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) is the main motto of the 2022 Iranian uprising that started in September. This revolutionary movement began after Mahsa Amini's murder while in custody of the Islamic Republic's “morality police” due to not wearing hijab “properly.” Iranian women have resisted the sexist policies of the Islamic Republic since its inception. They are protesting in the streets
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“A Nation in Turmoil, A Field in Crisis: The Upshots of Woman, Life, Freedom” International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
By now, it is well known that the murder of the Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, last fall sparked nationwide protests in Iran. Aside from Jina, many other young protestors were killed, imprisoned, or permanently disabled, as security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran began blinding demonstrators by firing rubber bullets at their eyes.1 These ghastly scenes were accompanied by other disturbing
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Politics of Vengeance in Iranian Diaspora Communities International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Nasrin Rahimieh
The death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, on September 16, 2022 following her arrest by Iran's now-suspended Gasht-i Irshad (guidance patrol or morality police) for apparent lax conformity to the Islamic dress code ignited protests across Iran. The protests, known as Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Azadi) quickly spread to Iranian diaspora communities across North America
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Revolutionary Politics of the Normal International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Maryam Alemzadeh
The “longing for a normal life,” (hasrat-i yik zindigi-yi ma'muli) as lyricized in what became the Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) movement's favorite anthem, has been front and center in the recent wave of social protests that has rocked Iran from September 2022 onward.1 At the same time, the movement's frame has been crystal clear in aiming for the rarest and most disruptive of social
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What's in a Name? To Call or Not To Call the Revolutionary Guards a Terrorist Organization International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Neda Bolourchi
To make sense of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF), some have asked straightforward questions: Why now? What are the reasons for it? Who is behind the uprising? The Islamic Republic of Iran, its supporters, and its allies have responded to the last question by labeling protestors as spies or provocateurs influenced and supported by foreign governments or activists. By raising
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Woman, Life, Freedom, and the Question of Multiculturalism in Iranian Studies International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Yalda N. Hamidi
The vast uprisings across Iranian cities in the fall of 2022 caught many of Iranian studies scholars and academic feminists in the diaspora off guard. My first confrontation was with trauma. Like many others, I worried about the lives and safety of my loved ones, political dissidents and prisoners from different ethnic backgrounds, feminists and queer activists on the ground, and, of course, the millennials
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Navigating “Sensitive” States: How Surveillance Practices Affect Research Development between the United States and Iran International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Nat Nesvaderani
I had completed two months of exploratory dissertation research in Tehran in the winter of 2015 when I was called in for questioning by two men who declined to provide me with their names or that of the office they called from. We met in an unmarked building adjacent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in downtown Tehran. They were middle-aged and sat on opposite sides of a table with a framed picture
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A Tale of Three Brothers: Ezra, Meʾir, and Hayyawi Sawdaʾi and the History of an Iraqi Jewish Cinema Business International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Pelle Valentin Olsen
In Iraq, like elsewhere in the region, cinemagoing became a popular form of leisure in the 1920s and 1930s. The emergence of permanent indoor and outdoor cinemas during this period gave rise to new consumption practices, ways of inhabiting the city, opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs, and the creation of a leisure and entertainment economy that was both modern, international, and Iraqi.
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Changing Capitalist Structures and Settler-Colonial Land Purchases in Northern Palestine, 1897–1922 International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Kristen Alff
By tracing Zionist and German Templer efforts to buy arable private property in Palestine between 1897 and 1922, I show the ways in which the changing balance of Ottoman and Levantine forces over land and labor—as well as political and economic institutions and social structures—facilitated settler-colonialism in northern Palestine. In this article, I examine official records of the Ottoman state,
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Threats to Academic Freedom are Global, and So Must Be Its Defense International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Ilana Feldman
As I sit down to write the introduction to this IJMES roundtable on threats to academic freedom in the Middle East and the multiple consequences of these threats for scholars from and of the region, I also am reading news about proliferating restrictions in the United States. In Florida, professors are changing their courses due to prohibitions on teaching about race issued by the state's governor
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The AKP-Era Higher Education Strategies for Establishing Hegemony over Turkish Universities International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Nihat Celik
“Your political hegemony ended; your cultural hegemony, too, will end.”1
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Democratic Backsliding and Universities: Between Control and Resilience International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Selin Bengi Gumrukcu
A third wave of autocratization is manifest today.1 Universities are no exception to the institutions that are affected by democratic backsliding in a given country: according to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, academic freedom has declined by 13 percent in autocratizing countries in the 2010–20 period, whereas almost no change has been recorded in other countries.2
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Industrialization and Academy in Contemporary Turkey International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Utku Balaban
The dinner I was invited to was held after the monthly meeting of the Kayseri Chamber of Industry on a pleasant summer night in 2015. The spacious dining hall on the top floor of the chamber headquarters was filled by over a hundred industrialists from large and small companies. Kayseri's nationally celebrated cuisine was lavishly represented on our table. I was in a good mood because I had been looking
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Displaced Scholars as a Contribution to Academic Diversity International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Evren Altinkas
Academic diversity has been an important consideration in hiring processes within academia since the late 2010s. The term diversity encompasses race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, geographical representation, and political beliefs. There are three significant considerations during the hiring process. To put it simply: “equity is the promotion of fairness and justice for each individual
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Decolonizing Displacement Research: Betweener Autoethnography as a Method of Resistance International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Katty Alhayek, Basileus Zeno
Over the past decade, there have been increasing numbers of displaced scholars from the Middle East and Africa who have come under sustained pressures and threats from their governments; only a few of them have been able to relocate to European and North American academia through scholarships and grants.1 Even these temporary solutions for displaced scholars rarely result in sustainable institutional
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The Politics of Stardom, Entertainment and Industry: New Studies in Egyptian Cinema History International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Ifdal Elsaket
Since at least the 1970s, Egyptian cinema has animated scholars of the Middle East; a by-product of a cultural turn in the discipline and broader interest in using film as a scholarly source. No doubt, Egypt's rich history of film production—often (and perhaps misleadingly) referred to as the “Hollywood on the Nile”—has encouraged scholars to use its films to examine broader political issues or capture
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From “Atomic Spies” to Turkish-American Relations: The Cold War in Turkish Children's Magazines in the 1950s International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Nadav Solomonovich
This article examines the representation of the Cold War in Turkish children's magazines in the 1950s, contributing to the current literature on children in the Middle East and the cultural Cold War. My main argument is that Turkish children's magazines played an important role in educating and indoctrinating children to support Turkey's pro-Western stance during the early part of the Cold War in two
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Gnawa Mirror: Race, Music, and the “Imperialism of Categories” International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-22 Hisham Aidi
It was a routine winter night. Men sat gathered at the Café Fuentes, one of the fabled coffee houses in the medina of Tangier. A chilly gust blew up from the port, dispersing the aroma of tea and cannabis in the air. During the colonial days Hotel Fuentes, owned by the famed Spanish painter Antonio Fuentes, was a favored brasserie for high society. As European and American expats departed, Café Fuentes
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The “Poetic Chaos” of Gardens and Genres in Colonial Tbilisi International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Paul Manning
One summer afternoon in Tbilisi, my friends Elizbari and Malkhazi, both native Tbilisians, and I bought some beer from a local store near Malkhazi's home in the hillside residential Tbilisi neighborhood of K'rts’anisi. For various reasons I can no longer recall, it would not do for us to drink in his home, so we randomly chose a deserted spot nearby: a patch of gravel next to a decrepit building with
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Between Mezhep and Minority: Twelver Shiʿism in the Turkish Public Sphere International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Stefan Williamson Fa
Despite the growth in scholarship on diverse religious communities in Turkey, little attention has been paid to Twelver Shiʿi Muslims. Since the founding of the Republic, the Turkish state's foundational secularist agenda has attempted to control and promote a single hegemonic form of Islam, and Shiʿa have faced continuous issues practicing their faith in public as a result. While the liberalization
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The Past is Never Dead. It's Not Even Past: History and Memory in Iraq Studies International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Achim Rohde, Eckart Woertz
The history of modern Iraq has been marked by violence, oppression, and foreign interventions to a degree that stands out even among other war-torn countries. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, many retrospectives were still dominated by a US-centric navel gazing of the chattering classes inside the beltway, but more Iraqi voices and alternative viewpoints were
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Post-Tishreen Online Feminism: Continuity, Rupture, Departure International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Balsam Mustafa
Iraqi women's struggle for equal rights has been shaped by similar circumstances and factors in both past and present. Since the founding of the Iraqi nation–state, ruling elites have repeatedly traded women's rights for building alliances with tribal and religious conservative forces in the interest of sustaining power. There was some progress in the areas of personal status and family law as well
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The Archives of Saddam Hussein's Baʿth Party and the Politics of Remembering and Forgetting the Baʿthist Era in Iraq International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Michael Brill
On August 31, 2020, a US military plane returned the archive of the Baʿth Party Regional Command, more commonly known as the Baʿth Party Archive, to Iraq from California, where it had been held by Stanford University's Hoover Institution Library and Archives since 2008. A leftover issue from the 2003 Iraq War, it had been static as a policy matter for years, but appeared on the agenda of the US–Iraq
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State and Religion in Iraq: The Sufi Insurgency of the Former Baʿth Regime in Historical Context International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 David Jordan
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Iraqi society has experienced profound crises in its transition from a strong centralized state under secular Baʿth Party authoritarianism to a new weak but still authoritarian federal state that is dominated by Shiʿi Islamist parties and plagued by factionalism, open sectarian competition, and conflict. A comprehensive scrutiny of the country's recent
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The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Baghdad: A Comparative Neighborhood Study International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Alissa Walter, Ali Taher Al-Hammood
Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Ba‘thist regime, what kinds of historical narratives are starting to emerge among residents of Baghdad about the events of the recent past? How have their experiences with the new Iraqi state over the past twenty years colored Baghdadis’ perceptions of what their lives were like under Saddam Hussein, and how are they making sense of
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The Form of Remembrance: Prison Writing and the Memory of the Ba‘th in Dreaming of Baghdad and I‘jaam International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Hawraa Al-Hassan
In his 2019 critical study, Husayn Sarmak Hassan complained that not enough attention has been given to the production of Iraqi prison writing even after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and its censorship apparatus. He notes, for example, that during the 2017 Cairo book fair, he found thirty (presumably new) prison novels, none of which were written by Iraqis. The relative scarcity of prison
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Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron's Old City International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Sophia Goodfriend
This article provides an ethnographic account of automated surveillance technologies' impact in the occupied West Bank, taking Blue Wolf—a biometric identification system deployed by the Israeli army—as a case study. Interviews with Palestinian residents of Hebron subjected to intensive surveillance, a senior Israeli general turned biometric start-up founder, and testimonies from veterans tasked with
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A Latin Alphabet for the Arabic Language: Romanizing Arabic in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt and Beyond International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Olga Verlato
This article explores early attempts to romanize the Arabic language in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt and situates them within a global history of script reforms in the modern period. I focus on the models to write Arabic in the Latin script developed by the Cairo-based magazine al-Muqtataf between 1889 and 1897 (which, to the extent of my knowledge, have never been examined before)
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Sovereignty and Nationalism in Contemporary Iraq through the Memory of the 1991 Uprising International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Amir Taha
Modern nation–states typically strive to define the cultural memory of a society by promoting certain historical narratives through mass media, museums, monuments, education, national holidays, and the like. Although huge differences exist between states in the realm of cultural policies, they usually entail the marginalization of certain groups or collective memories and often mark their exclusion
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To the Nation, Belong the Archives: The Search for Manuscripts and Archival Documents in Postcolonial Morocco International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Sumayya Ahmed
The trajectory of the Hassan II Prize for Manuscripts, a government initiative begun in the late 1960s to locate rare manuscripts in private collections, is a potent example of the role Arabic-script manuscript culture played in post-colonial nation-building in Morocco. This article presents the history of the Hassan II Prize for Manuscripts, demonstrating how Moroccan bureaucrats used the recovery
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“Filling in the Blanks”: Jaffa's Oranges, an English Suit, and the Rememorying of Palestinian History International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Mark LeVine
Like great port cities throughout history, Jaffa has always welcomed strangers; enough of them to earn its sobriquet “mother of strangers” (umm al-gharīb). The gateway to Palestine and the Levant since ancient times, Jaffa is not only the site of multiple events of biblical or broader religious significance. With the incorporation of Palestine in the late 18th century into the still developing modern
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From Cisr-i Mustafa Paşa to Svilengrad: The Ethnic Homogenization of a Thracian Town in the Balkan Wars International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Eyal Ginio
The transformation of Ottoman Cisr-i Mustafa Paşa to Bulgarian Svilengrad was the outcome of a combination of both local violence and state-policy that took place throughout the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and within the framework of state-building efforts in both Ottoman imperial and Bulgarian post-imperial contexts. This sequence of mass violence stands at the core of this article. Based on Ottoman, Jewish
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Counting Kisses at the Movies: The Screen Kiss and the Cinematic Experience in Egypt International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Ifdal Elsaket
In this article, I use the 1969 Egyptian film Abi fawq al-Shagara and the motif of the kiss as a launch pad to explore broader cinematic experiences and cultures in 1960s Egypt and beyond. I argue that the deployment and debates around screen kisses not only represented wider conflicting and shifting impulses around questions of audience tastes, sexuality, and the role of the cinema, but became central
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A Case of Multiple Identities: Uncanny Histories of the Arabic Typewriter International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-07 Hannah Scott Deuchar
Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna
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Combating the Double Erasure: Can a Jew (Kalimi) be an Iranian in the Islamic Republic? International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-23 Lior B. Sternfeld
Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian Jews have faced two powerful and inherently contradictory calls to compromise their voice and identity. From one side, Israel has consistently held the opinion that as an at-risk community they should be evacuated and resettled. On the other, Iran's revolutionary regime has made “Islamic” a centerpiece of Iranian identity, placing Jewish identity directly at odds
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Possessed or Insane? Diagnostic Puzzles in Contemporary Egypt International Journal of Middle East Studies (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Ana Vinea
“At the heart of this topic is a puzzle (lughz),” my long-term friend and interlocutor Ahmad often said. I long thought Ahmad's interest in questions of disease at the intersection of psychiatry and Islam was only intellectual until I learned about one of his cousins’ past ailments. A skillful narrator, Ahmad had colorful ways of depicting that puzzle. “Imagine,” he once told me, “a young pious woman