The cover image for this issue, from Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi's installation Modern Times, depicts architectural structures and the cogs of a machine filled in with Arabic calligraphy, representing rapid architectural development and industrialization across the modern and contemporary Middle East. The title derives from the eponymous 1936 Charlie Chaplin film in which Chaplin's character Little Tramp is a factory worker during the Great Depression who, trying to keep up with the acceleration of the assembly line, is quickly overcome and succumbs to a nervous breakdown. Like the film, Fatmi's installation critiques unbridled development and draws attention to its human toll. It also explores two related features of the modern epoch: ceaseless motion and the acceleration of time.

It is with humility that we begin our tenure as editor and managing editor of IJMES. Given the breadth and depth of scholarly and editorial expertise within MESA, we feel privileged to have been chosen as the team to oversee the continuing publication of the flagship journal in Middle East studies. We are also mindful of the challenge of building upon the enormous momentum achieved by our predecessors, Professors Beth Baron and Sara Pursley, over the past five years. They and their team raised the profile of IJMES to make it one of the top area studies journals in the United States and, indeed, the world. This accomplishment is attributable to their remarkable work ethic and coordination, keen awareness of the field, vigorous editorial work, and attention to every detail of the journal's production. Daunting though their legacy may be, we are excited about the editorial team that we have assembled and comforted by the speed with which it has developed rapport and a common purpose. We also find solace in the outstanding scholars who make up the new editorial board and in the knowledge that they are as devoted as us to making sure that IJMES continues to thrive. But we are most heartened by the superb scholarship that abounds in Middle East studies. With so many outstanding young and established scholars in the field, we are certain that the pages of IJMES will continue to be filled by intellectually engaging essays that not only enrich existing areas of research, but also push the field toward new terrains of scholarly inquiry.

How to realize your self? This question, reflective of neoliberal understandings of individual subjectivity and the sacred, is the basis of the Egyptian self-help guide whose artwork graces this issue's cover. The book is one among hundreds like it that can be bought in Egypt's bookstalls and bookstores, from where they circulate through the homes and workplaces of readers. This growing and popular corpus is the focus of Jeffrey T. Kenney's “Selling Success, Nurturing the Self: Self-Help Literature, Capitalist Values, and the Sacralization of Subjective Life in Egypt,” the first of two articles that make up the section “Therapeutic Discourses.” Kenney argues that as capitalism has expanded in Egypt, it has given rise to a pervasive consumer culture and, relatedly, a self-help literature that competes with Islamic etiquette manuals. Mixing modern ideas and ethical practices to form varied and unpredictable combinations, self-help has become a flat universal idiom, but what has given it its legitimacy in Egypt is its association with local tradition. “The inherent message of self-help,” Kenney writes, “is not simply the glorification of the individual but, more pointedly, the sacralization of the self and subjective life choices—an interpretive trend that, in Egypt, simultaneously functionalizes Islam and fosters new understandings of what it means to be Muslim.”

This issue opens with two articles that explore “Ottoman Belonging” during two significant moments bookending the Ottoman past. The first of these moments is the Ottoman Empire's incorporation of Arab lands after its defeat of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1515–17; the second is the emergence of Ottoman imperial citizenship in the period between the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and World War I, which precipitated the empire's collapse. Helen Pfeifer's article, “Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman Damascus,” traces the intellectual component of the Ottoman Empire's absorption of formerly Mamluk subjects after rapidly conquering an immense territory stretching from Damascus to Cairo to Mecca. As Western European states expanded to control new territories and peoples, the Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) had new encounters of their own—with the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz. The conquest transferred the seat of political power in the Islamicate world from Cairo to Istanbul. Yet, as Pfeifer discusses, the Ottomans understood that their newly acquired political power had no parallel in cultural and religious domains, where prestige belonged predominantly to Arab scholars. Focusing on majālis (sing. majlis), or scholarly gatherings, in Damascus, Pfeifer traces “one of the greatest instances of knowledge transmission and cultural encounter in the history of the Ottoman Empire,” through which this asymmetry was overcome. By facilitating the circulation of books and ideas, she argues, scholarly gatherings—two depictions of which are featured on the issue’s cover—gave rise to an “empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.”

This article examines the extensive intellectual and social exchange that resulted from the Ottoman imperial incorporation of Arab lands in the 16th century. In the years immediately after the 1516–17 conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate that brought Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz under Ottoman rule, Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) found that their political power was not matched by religious and cultural prestige. As the case of Damascus shows, scholarly gatherings called majālis (sing. majlis) were key spaces where this initial asymmetry was both acutely felt and gradually overcome. As arenas for discussion among scholars on the move, literary salons facilitated the circulation of books and ideas and the establishment of a shared intellectual tradition. As occasions where stories were told and history was made, they supported the formation of a common past. In informal gatherings and in the biographical dictionaries that described them, Rumis and Arabs came together to forge an empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.

The growing strength of self-help literature in Egypt represents a new cultural expression of accommodation with capitalism, and markedly expands the mix of modern ideas and ethical practices rendered legitimate through association with tradition. The ideas and practices found in self-help, however, are anything but traditional. In its style and content, self-help expresses the values of individualism and neoliberal understandings of subjectivity. Informed by modern insights into the self and its formation, the genre blurs the boundary between psychology and religion, valorizing the process of self-exploration and self-fulfillment. The inherent message of self-help is not simply the glorification of the individual but, more pointedly, the sacralization of the self and subjective life choices—an interpretive trend that, in Egypt, simultaneously functionalizes Islam and fosters new understandings of what it means to be Muslim.

During the long 19th century, British coal proliferated throughout the Ottoman Empire in increasing quantity, rapidity, and regularity via junctions and political arrangements that became evermore stable and dominant. The British used coal export to project their power elsewhere, offshoring the Industrial Revolution by building an infrastructure that could support it overseas and connect it to existing facets of the imperial project. Examining this “outsourcing” and the importance of foreign coal markets to industrialization helps provincialize the steam engine and anchor it in a global context. It also allows us to explore the impact of fossil energy on the Middle East and the ways coal both set the stage for the arrival of oil and informed the possibilities for translating carbon power into politics. Coal, the article suggests, animated political participation in England while reinforcing authoritarian tendencies in the Middle East.

In the early 17th century, the Shiʿi juristic tradition experienced the first coherent refutation of uṣūliyya, the ijtihādī rationalism used by the mujtahids, at the hands of Mulla Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1626–27). The latter rejected the efforts of leading Iraqi and Syrian jurists to apply ijtihād (rational legal inference), hadith categorization, and dirāya (scrutiny and stratification of accounts) in deriving Shiʿi law. The main studies on Astarabadi's akhbārī (traditionist) movement treat it as a reaction to the “influence” of Sunnism on the mujtahids or to their excessive “borrowings” from it, and stress the traditionists’ abhorrence of assimilating any aspect of Sunnism. Underlining the shortcomings of these explanations, this article presents Astarabadi's thought as a discursive development within the Shiʿi juristic tradition, which is part of the grand Islamic tradition. Astarabadi became skeptical of the mujtahids’ epistemology and methodology and was concerned that they jeopardized God's law and hence the believer's salvation. He protested the Safavid monarchs’ legitimation of uṣūlī legal authority, the latter's hierarchical features, and, ultimately, the sociopolitical domination of the ʿAmili mujtahids from Jabal ʿAmil in Syria (or modern-day South Lebanon), starting with al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki (d. 1534).

This article examines the growing interest in questions of memory, trauma, and justice in Turkey, with a special focus on the notion of “coming to terms with the past.” Through an analysis of key academic and popular texts published between 2002 and 2013, it argues that “coming to terms with the past” is a therapeutic public discourse that rewrites national history through the temporality of trauma. In other words, this discourse reconfigures the sequence of past, present, and future as the beginning, development, and end of a case of collective trauma, applying the psychotherapeutic terminology of victimhood, healing, and forgiveness to social realities. The article offers new perspective on existing debates over “coming to terms with the past” by analyzing the limits of this therapeutic discourse and by exploring the potential and open-endedness of the politics of memory in Turkey.

This article explores a covert partnership between a prominent Zionist agronomist, Menashe Meirovitch, and the Christian Arab editor of the newspaper Filastin, ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, a founding father of Palestinian nationalism. Under the literary guise of an Arab Muslim peasant called Abu Ibrahim, the two men produced a series of Arabic-language columns in 1911–12 that exhibited imperial citizenship par excellence, demanding political and agrarian reforms in Palestine in the name of strengthening the Ottoman Empire. The article explores their short-lived political alliance to interrogate historiographical uses of the press as a source for social history. Moreover, it challenges the portrayal of cooperation between Jews and Arabs as “collaboration” in its pejorative sense. Far from a simple story of betrayal or corruption, the partnership between the two men demonstrates how a shared commitment to Ottoman modernism brought them together more than nationalism, language, or religion pulled them apart.

Following the 1990–91 Gulf War and the subsequent March 1991 uprising, the Iraqi government launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the marshes of southern Mesopotamia. Alongside mass killing and forced population resettlement, the state used hydrological infrastructure to divert water from the wetlands, permanently desiccating the area. Using newly available Iraqi government archives, this paper argues that the destruction of the marshes was the result of a complex interplay between sectarianism, development planning, and security imperatives. Inhabited by peripatetic Marsh Arabs (Maʿdan), the marshlands stood out as an impenetrable wilderness. Baʿth policies in the marshes combined measures meant to promote social and economic modernization with counterinsurgency tactics meant to achieve control over the marsh region. After 1991, the regime set out to obliterate a terrain it deemed a strategic liability and a population that seemed an obstacle to modernization.

This article analyzes how Saudi Shiʿi historians have adapted tools associated with nationalism to create distinct historical narratives for the Shiʿa of Eastern Arabia. State-sponsored narratives have either left out Shiʿi Muslims or cast them as unbelievers and alien to the Saudi body politic. In contrast, historical narratives written by Shiʿi authors emphasize the Shiʿa's long history of sedentarization, their cultural heritage, and their struggles against foreign occupation. The article is based on fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and a close reading of hundreds of articles and books on local history published mainly since the 1980s. Through the Saudi Shiʿi case, I show that “identity entrpreneurs,” or activists who create, politicize, and profit from identities to further political aims, understand local historiography to be crucial to their overall projects.

Focused on the contest over water management in Nazareth during the early years of Israeli statehood (1948–56), this article traces the negotiations that took place between Palestinian residents of Nazareth and Israeli state authorities. I argue that the struggle over this vital natural resource, in a region where it is in short supply was in some measure a matter of fulfilling practical needs, but it was also part of the process of negotiating citizenship. The story of Nazareth's water in the early Israeli period is thus a microcosm of the incorporation of Palestinians as undesired and marginalized citizens into a self-defined Jewish state. Challenging the Palestinian resistance/collaboration dichotomy and the notion of a monolithic Israeli state, I show how both Palestinian citizens and Israeli authorities adopted wide-ranging positions on water management and its broad political implications. Although Palestinian citizens were able to use the space made available through citizenship to further their collective interests, they were ultimately unable to overcome the exclusions inherent to a political system that maintained the dominance of a Jewish majority over a Palestinian minority.

This article examines the significant yet largely overlooked role of the Mzabis, a community from the northern edges of the Algerian desert, in Algerian and Tunisian anticolonialism and nationalism. In so doing, it pursues two aims: first, to shed light on the importance of Tunis to the politicization of the Mzabis in the 1920s and to their induction into local and regional anticolonial and national movements; and second, to highlight the tensions of subsuming regional identities into overarching national identities by focusing on Mzabi political activists’ negotiation of the relationship between the Mzab and Algeria as a national project. The article also explores the spectrum of political possibilities and alternatives envisioned by Mzabis as they participated in religious reform, anticolonial, and nationalist movements. This spectrum, I argue, conveys the fluid relationship between local, national, and regional identities, thus undermining teleological readings of national identity formation.

While the idea that Saudi Arabia has functioned as a beacon of ultraconservative religious influence since the 1970s oil boom is commonplace, the modalities of this influence have rarely been seriously interrogated. As a window onto this issue, this article considers the history of the Islamic University of Medina, an influential Wahhabi missionary project with global ambitions. It pays particular attention to the role played by non-Saudi staff, who for long periods made up a majority of the university's faculty. Previous accounts of migrants working in Saudi religious educational institutions have tended to focus on the contested question of their contribution to the rise of politically activist modes of Islamism within the kingdom. In contrast, the account offered here draws on the concept of spiritual capital to argue that they also played an important part in legitimizing the expansion of the Wahhabi mission to diverse Muslim communities around the world.

This article explores the complex interplay between masculinity and nationalism among Palestinians living in a refugee camp in Jordan. Youth masculinity in the camp is widely perceived in Jordan as an expression of either immoral behavior or unthinking radicalism, and as a symbol of cultural and political difference and the failure of camp dwellers to embrace assimilation. However, camp dwellers’ masculinities are not uniform. I argue that young men's ability to navigate and master diverse and sometimes contrasting registers of manhood enables them to reproduce a Palestinian national identity in exile while achieving socioeconomic integration in Jordan. In pursuing this argument, the article has two goals: to challenge popular stereotypes about Palestinian refugees in Jordan today; and to problematize the discursive mutual dependency between nationalism and hegemonic masculinity in the study of Palestinian masculinity.

This article focuses on Islamist conscientious objectors (COs) in Turkey who have resisted both mandatory conscription and the Turkish state's use of Islamic discourses of jihad and martyrdom to legitimize it. Examining military conscript training and the post-1980 coup national school curriculum, the article first outlines the Turkish state's production of a particular interpretation of Islam and its dissemination of it through nationalist and militarist discourses and practices. The article then pursues an ethnographic analysis of Islamist COs’ resistance to conscription through nonviolent civil disobedience based on antiauthoritarian and antinationalist interpretations of Islam. Weaving together their own interpretations of jihad and martyrdom with transnational theories and ideologies, Islamist COs present a powerful critique of Turkish militarism and its religious claims. A focus on Islamist COs potently highlights the diversity of Islamic groups and sensibilities in contemporary Turkey, and the difficulties faced by nationalist projects to discipline religious imaginaries and put them to the service of the modern state.

Soon after its founding in the early 1980s, the Lebanese political organization Hizbullah developed a specific practice of remembering its dead. In this article, I argue that through this practice Hizbullah constructed an elaborate conception of time and history that gave ideological coherence to the movement's main political project, al-muqāwama al-islāmiyya (Islamic Resistance). Examining early writings in the Hizbullah weekly al-ʿAhd published during the organization's formative period, I show how such writings were instrumental in producing ideological templates that have continued to be replicated until today. Through a set of ritualistic practices, Hizbullah-affiliated intellectuals have archived everything related to martyrs and other kinds of human legacies, a process that has fed into the notion of an ever-present, and at times anticipated, era (ʿahd) of resistance. Moreover, the project of Islamic Resistance has gained salience each time the past is relived in the present, producing political action. Hizbullah's efforts at history writing have involved a transmission of ethics through martyrs' act of witnessing and their testimony to a way of life. Analyzing this phenomenon sheds light on the way political Islamic groups such as Hizbullah articulate national imaginaries through specific kinds of ideological production.

This article draws on extensive fieldwork and original data to trace the transformation of civil–military relations in Tunisia during the tenure of the former president Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli (1987–2011). The republican ethos of the Tunisian Armed Forces (al-Quwwat al-Musallaha al-Tunusiyya) is often stressed to explain its traditional political quiescence. However, I maintain that it was the active hostility of the military's rivals within the Bin ʿAli regime that prevented Tunisian generals from playing a greater role in their country's public life. I disaggregate Bin ʿAli's regime into its fundamental institutional components—namely, the presidency, the party, the police, and the military—and investigate rivalries and alliances that structured the struggle for influence and power between Bin ʿAli's rise to the presidency and his downfall. I argue that there is a direct and causal relationship between the 2010–11 uprising and inter- and intrainstitutional dynamics within the regime. In other words, the study of contemporary Tunisian civil–military relations is critical to understanding the breakdown of the Bin ʿAli regime.

This article explores the role of the ʿulamaʾ in shaping the use of mechanical timepieces in Cairo in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ottoman interest in new technologies in this period is often understood in relation to the emergence of modernization projects and new scientifically trained actors, with a corresponding decline in the status of the ʿulamaʾ. However, the vogue of mechanical timepieces in Cairo allowed ʿulamaʾ trained in the very old tradition of mīqāt (astronomical timekeeping) to make their knowledge speak in new ways to new audiences. Based on several manuals and tables that such scholars wrote “on the position of the watch hand,” this article shows how ʿulamaʾ not only facilitated distinctively Ottoman timekeeping conventions, but also furthered an understanding of watches as instruments of precision. The article builds on a growing literature on Ottoman temporality, while expanding our historical view of ʿulamaʾ and their authority, of the material culture of Cairo, and of science and technology in an Islamic context.