Shaykh al-Qusi is a charismatic spiritual leader in Cairo whose followers have been recording their dream visions and waking visions in a handwritten collection since 1997. Drawing on the shaykh's dream-inspired poetry and his followers' vision narratives, I describe the ways in which this community of believers understands the relationship between authorship and authority, as well as between imagination (al-khayamacr;l) and tradition. Dreams and visions do not circumvent idioms of the textual tradition, but in their narrative form they often mirror and reinscribe its genres. Some of the group's vision narratives emulate the face-to-face encounters of the hadith whereas others signify eruptions of a timeless truth from elsewhere, similar to the Quran. Through mirroring the sacred genres, dreams and visions bring believers closer to these texts. Just as dreams are understood through the tradition, the tradition is understood by some through dreams.

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This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political power during the second decade of Nasserist rule in Egypt. The essay focuses on two film classics that bookend the 1960s—“family melodramas” starring singer ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the pop icon intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Each film turns upon a single dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap delivered by an outraged father across the cheek of a rebellious son. Released in 1962, still a time of heady optimism, al-Khataya raises troubling questions about paternity and social status yet resolves them in classic genre style. Abi fawq al-shagara, released in 1969, in the aftermath of the June 1967 “naksa” (setback), reflects a growing generation gap and suggests—if it does not quite deliver—a countercultural reading of patriarchal authority, as well as sexual and political liberation.

This article examines Arab photography in Ottoman and Mandate Lebanon. It begins to explain how the photographic image naturalized the discourses of individualism, class identity, and nationalism that were germinated in the political economy and the organic intellectual culture of the late Ottoman Empire. Inspired less by Orientalist imagery or mimicry of the West than by specific ideological planks of capitalism and modernity, images produced by professionals Sabunji and the Kovas and such amateurs as Salim Abu Izz al-din and Marie Khazen instituted a new process of desiring capitalist production, accumulation, and commodity consumption in Lebanon. Photography reified the imago (the discursive imagined self) of the Lebanese bourgeois as a composite of private and public and sectarian and secular identities—but first and foremost as an individual. However, theWestern narrative that associates photography with the secularism of the bourgeois self finds its limits in the sectarian political economy and power sharing of Lebanon.

This article contributes to the history of Shiء Islam in Lebanon under the French Mandate by looking at Shiءi religious and cultural engagements with the problem of gender. In the first section, religious treatises written by ءulamaʿ in the context of a politicized “culture war” waged over the proposed reformation of ءAshuraʿ mourning practices during the 1920s and 1930s are analyzed to elucidate the relationship between idealised gender behavior and religious practice. In the second section the Shiءi modernist monthly journal al-ءIrfan is utilized to show how it advocated certain “proper” roles for men and women in an adequately pious Shiءi society. Finally, jokes and other materials published in al-ءIrfan are examined to demonstrate how multifaceted gender norms were in Shiءi Lebanon. These sources paint a rich historical portrait of Shiءi cultural politics by complicating conventional conceptualizations of Shiءi society under the Mandate and illustrating how Shiءi cultural identities have been produced and negotiated over time.