Niyazi Sayın is an Istanbul-born ney (reed flute) virtuoso, and the most acclaimed musician of a musical tradition controversially called “Ottoman-Turkish classical music.” Now 94 years old, Sayın has been called insan-i kamil (a perfect human), kutb-ı nayi, (the musical spiritual axis of his age), and hezarfen (master of a thousand arts). What do such titles mean? Building upon the work of Martin Stokes on popular music and its fashioning of intimate publics, this paper explores Sayın's musical life. We argue that it provides an exemplary expression of cultural intimacy for listeners and students, one that (as reflected in his titles) demonstrates a particular way of becoming a person, a Muslim, and a model citizen. In contrast with more official constructions of citizenship, as well as with the political neo-Ottomanism of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Sayın's life and music open up alternative possibilities of self-alteration for those who engage with it.

Using the unique and historic Islamic cemetery of Mamillah in Jerusalem as a primary example, this essay discusses the ethno-necrocratic order that led to the 2008 Israeli High Court of Justice's codification of the supremacy of Jewish bodies and afterlives over non-Jewish ones, on the basis of advancing Israel's values. Hundreds of Palestinian burial grounds, starting with village cemeteries, have been destroyed since 1948. Indeed, funerary sites have testified to the omnipresence and millenarian existence of a population that the state has sought to erase from memory. In a few decades, the deathscape was radically altered, in cities as in the countryside. Although real estate corruption plagues Israeli politics, land use planning and real estate capitalism are inseparable from the ethno-racial politics of exclusion, which affect both the dead and the living.

In 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization.

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.

This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place amongst Alevi and Sunni focus group participants, primarily in Istanbul. These conversations illustrate how sectarian difference can be made in the relations between neighbors as differences become coded as sectarian and taken up within systems of power and domination. At the same time, our research also shows how, in the entangled relations between neighbors, questions of ethics and mutual responsibility arise, though these relations sometimes become uneasy or even unbearable. Finally, we show how the question of “knowing” difference is taken up within a power-laden discourse of sectarianism, one that is tied to the history of Alevis (and others) in Turkey while also extending well beyond this context.

The gender history of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) has so far focused on the study of female figures. In an attempt to widen the scope of analysis, this article reconsiders the role of the Lebanese army in war-torn Lebanon through the lens of gender. Based on interviews with retired officers and noncommissioned officers, I argue that the military—the combat personnel in particular—never relinquished its claim to an exclusive militarized masculinity, despite the rise of contending actors. By maintaining this claim, these men strove to confront both the new standards of masculinity imposed by the militias and the anxiety caused by the disruption of gender roles throughout the conflict. To make sense of this confrontation, the article investigates how the veterans have engaged in a social performance, during both past and present, to (re)enact their manliness in front of an audience. This diachronic approach allows me to further untangle the combat officers’ trajectories during the war, using gender to bring them into conversation with their milieu.

Student unrest under Italian rule in Rhodes reveals youth's contribution to the transformation of Mediterranean politics in the 20th century. A condition of possibility for this unrest was the precolonial infrastructure of Rhodes, where new schools emerged in the last decades of Ottoman rule. During the Italian military occupation (1912–23), schools reflected identifications such as Ottoman patriotism and Greek irredentism. Student activism expanded beyond school issues and intersected with Italy's uncertain attitude concerning Rhodes's future, the warfare ravaging the Eastern Mediterranean, and the unmaking of Ottoman authority. Italian governors considered youth politicization to be influenced by elder politicians and limited to communal factionalism. After a decade of reforms under Italian sovereignty following the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), unrest reappeared in the 1930s. Students sympathized with ideas like pro-fascist Zionism and anticolonial Greek nationalism. They addressed issues of loyalty and belonging linked to Italian rule's dilemmas of fascist assimilation and colonial separation. Contrary to the 1910s, the authorities repressed student unrest and admitted that youth politicization was autonomous from the influence of the elders, conflicting with the fascist colonial order. Discussing student activism during this imperial transformation goes beyond narratives centered on state policies or one exclusive confessional group, highlighting interconnections between communal affairs, colonial governance, and regional geopolitics.

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.

This article examines the work and trajectory of ʿAbd al-Salam al-Diyuri, a Moroccan engineer educated in Egypt who became a nationalist writer, editor, and publisher during the last decade of the French Protectorate (1912–56). One of only a few Moroccan engineers trained in Arabic during this period, al-Diyuri developed a vision of modernization rooted in the popularization of technical knowledge that distinguished him from colonial engineers as well as nationalist elites. French experts exercised an epistemic dominance over the practice of engineering under the protectorate as well as after Morocco's independence. In this context, al-Diyuri's arguments traced the contours of an alternative future for the country—one that tied decolonization to the cultivation of technical competencies among the public at large. This article follows the path of a nationalist engineer and intellectual whose work both embodied and attempted to move beyond a contradiction between the democratization of knowledge and the demands of development.

In the wake of Israeli Black Panther activism in the mid-1970s, the Arab League invited Mizrahi (Afro-Asian) Jews, especially those in Israel, to return to their homeland. Some Israelis used the invitation as an opportunity to highlight the extent of anti-Mizrahi discrimination by departing for the Arab world. Albeit small in number in comparison to those who left Israel for other destinations, those who repatriated made a huge impact on perceptions of Israeli emigres. Their importance rested not in their numbers but in the significant threat posed to the Israeli establishment. Afro-Asian Jewish repatriation sent a message that the Zionist project, particularly as the opposing nationalist movement to Pan-Arabism, was a failure.

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.

Agricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetables produced through “Hebrew self-labor,” with generous assistance from the state. In the 1990s the region was again transformed as the importation of migrant workers from Thailand enabled farmers to expand cultivation of bell peppers for global markets. But today ecological destruction, depletion of water resources, and global warming cast doubt over the viability of settlement in this climatically extreme region. I locate the settlements of the Arabah within the historical political ecology of the Zionist movement, arguing that their current fragility exposes the essential precarity of capitalist colonization.

Available essays on Pashtunwali describe this system of customary laws and ethics for the most part as a static model of ideal conduct, without a diachronic perspective. Offering a historical approach to Pashtunwali, this article introduces and analyzes fragmentary data on the nənawāte custom from early modern Pashto sources—historiographical narratives of the Khatak chieftains in the Tarikh-i Murassaʿ (finished 1724) and the romantic poem Adam Khan aw Durkhaney (1706/7). Recorded cases of resorting to nənawāte, considered among the main pillars of Pashtunwali but still variously interpreted, prove that this is a complex legal custom based on the right to appeal for protection, mediation, and reconciliation. As a common means of dispute settlement, nənawāte originates with a binding request for help and favor in a conflict situation. The discussion of nənawāte is preceded by a brief overview of the existing scholarly definitions of Pashtunwali, underscoring its emic perception as an ethnic identity marker.

The 17th century was a period of transition in world history. It was marked globally by social movements emerging in response to widespread drought, famine, disease, warfare, and dislocation linked to climate change. Historians have yet to situate Safavid Iran (1501–1722) within the “General Crisis.” This article, coauthored by an environmental historian and a climate scientist, revisits primary sources and incorporates tree-ring evidence to argue that an ecological crisis beginning in the late 17th century contributed to the collapse of the imperial ecology of the Safavid Empire. A declining resource base and demographic decline conditioned the unraveling of imperial networks and the empire's eventual fall to a small band of Afghan raiders in 1722. Ultimately, this article makes a case for the connectedness of Iran to broader global environmental trends in this period, with local circumstances and human agency shaping a period of acute environmental crisis in Iran.

In most Middle Eastern jurisdictions, the applicable family law is determined based on the religious affiliation of the parties involved. Whereas Jordanian Islamic family law has last been reformed in 2001, 2010, and 2019, and the law that regulates the shariʿa courts has been amended several times since 1972, the family laws of Christian communities and the church courts have largely been exempted from this reform dynamic. Based on semi-structured interviews as well as the review of written sources, this article investigates why it is difficult to reform the church courts and even more difficult to reform the family laws of Christian communities, using the Greek Orthodox community in Jordan as a case study. I argue that conflicts within the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the fact that the jurisdiction of the patriarchate over family law transcends Jordanian state boundaries have made state-led reform challenging and presented obstacles for Jordanian Christians lobbying for change.

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 the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian officials embraced natural gas as a new energy source for their rapidly industrializing society, seeing it as a readily available substitute for the lucrative oil products their country's citizens were consuming in increasing amounts. Reacting to the growing concentrations of smoke and haze in cities, and unable to alter the mountainous terrain and semiarid climate that intensified them, gas seemingly promised to be a technical savior upon which to build an Iran as environmentally sound as it was prosperous, technologically sophisticated, and energy hungry. Pahlavi-era developmental choices were shaped by officials’ concern for deteriorating environmental conditions, the natural factors that compounded the issue, and the interests of private industry. Using archival and published materials collected in Iran, this article focuses on urban air pollution and the fitful efforts to mitigate it through the conversion of industrial facilities to gas.

This paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17th-century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn, nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint at any taboo concerning male love for beardless boys, it does display a remarkable asymmetry between male and female same-sex desire; it also displays distinct views of legitimate and transgressive sexuality. Thus, this poem encourages a more historicizing view of the gendered and sexual dimensions of modern (Kurdish and other) nationalism, and a greater attention for the distinct characteristics of vernacular literatures within the premodern ‘Persianate cosmopolitan.’

The Ottoman Empire introduced the muhtar system in Istanbul in 1829, appointing lay headmen, called muhtar, to the lowest levels of urban administration: Muslim neighborhoods; Orthodox, Armenian, and Catholic parishes; and Jewish congregations. This reform resulted in the overlapping of state responsibilities and those of non-Muslim religious authorities, later leading to disputes between the groups. This article investigates such disagreements in an effort to understand how state officials perceived non-Muslim religious authorities’ participation in imperial governance. In so doing, this article argues that, as non-Muslim political movements began developing during the late nineteenth century, state officials adopted a cautious attitude toward non-Muslim clergy, viewing the latter as requiring more careful handling than the layman. This take on clergymen was a shift, a reconsideration of the exceptional treatment they had previously enjoyed, and ignited a growing desire to sever the ties, formerly tolerated, between muhtars and religious authorities.

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.