“They say the city never sleeps, they say it bursts at the seams. The city rotates and revolves. The city branches out. The city beats, the city bleeds.” This unnamed city is Cairo, Umm al-Dunya or “mother of the world,” at once a vibrant character and the pulsating backdrop of Ahmed Naji's scandal-rousing Istikhdam al-Hayat (Using Life) and countless other works in Egyptian literature. Cairo, Amitav Ghosh has argued in his autobiographical chronicle of historical research and anthropological fieldwork in the Egyptian Delta in 1980 and beyond, is “Egypt's own metaphor for itself.” If that is the case, what does this sprawling and pervasive synecdoche reveal and what does it obscure?

In this article, I argue that audiocassette technology decentralized state-controlled Egyptian media long before the advent of al-Jazeera and the Internet. By enabling any citizen to become a cultural producer, as opposed to a mere consumer, the mass medium and its users sparked significant anxiety in the mid-to-late 20th century, when contentious cassette recordings led many local critics to assert that “vulgar” tapes were poisoning public taste, undermining high culture, and endangering Egyptian society. This article breaks down these arguments and shows that audiotapes actually broadcast a vast variety of voices. Thus, underlying many criticisms of cassette content, I contend, was not simply a concern for aesthetic sensibilities but a desire to dictate who created Egyptian culture during a time of tremendous change. By unpacking these discussions, this article harnesses Egypt as a case study to enhance prevailing investigations of sound, popular culture, and mass media in Middle East studies.

Incorporating descriptions and analyses of sound into Middle Eastern history offers a wealth of opportunity for enriching our understanding of the historical record. But sometimes we need to get back to the basics: the “five w's and one h” of sound studies, so to speak. In what follows I would like to run this simple exercise with radio in the Mandate-era Levant, in order to lay out the basic data and begin to reflect on how it might aid scholars in better understanding other aspects of life in this period. I will do this by first addressing some of these basic what, who, when, where, why, how questions, and then by examining one day's programming of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1937: the day immediately following the release of the Peel Commission Report. What can we learn from examining this day's programming?

Scholarship has long held that Islamic reform was a preparatory stage for nationalism in the Muslim world. In challenge to this view, this article shows how in the context of 20th-century Algeria Islamic reformers and nationalists continued to maintain distinct political ideas, visions, and projects. The article examines the internal framework of the Association of Algerian Muslim ʿUlamaʾ, an Islamic reform movement founded in 1931 when Algeria was under French colonial rule, and its interactions with other local movements, especially the Algerian nationalist movement. Through a comparison of the discourse of the Algerian ʿulamaʾ to that of the nationalists, it argues that while both groups claimed to be successors of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, their understanding of politics (siyāsa) was different. Whereas the ʿulamaʾ associated politics with their own spiritual leadership, the nationalists associated it with institutions. The study situates these distinct visions within the post–World War II historical context, in which the expanding nationalist movement undermined the ʿulamaʾ’s popular appeal.

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

Psychologists attribute great significance to slips of the tongue. In such moments, the train of normal speech is interrupted by a word that seems to be out of context. Yet analysts say that this interruption actually betrays an inner truth hidden, consciously or not, behind the screen of “normal” speech. I suggest here that the 1931 Arab–Jewish transportation strike against the Mandatory government in Palestine can be seen as a historical slip of the tongue in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The environmental history of the post-1500 Mediterranean (including the Middle East) has the potential to add significantly to our understanding of the history of the region. However, this is only if it is understood as a perspective (and not just a new specialization) that has the power to transform how we view familiar subjects. A ghettoized environmental history takes us nowhere nor do environmental histories that claim to explain everything. Let's take the role of pastoralism as one example of how an environmental perspective can reshape our understanding of the history of the modern Middle East.

In a tweet posted on 29 March 2018, a bidūn activist—who was later jailed from July 2019 to January 2020 for peacefully protesting against the inhumane conditions under which the bidūn are living—shared a video. The brief video zooms in closely on an ID card, recognizable as one of those issued to the bidūn, or long-term residents of Kuwait who are in contention with the state regarding their legal status. More precisely, the mobile phone camera focuses on the back of the ID card, on one line with a special mention added by the Central System (al-jihāz al-markazī), the administration in charge of bidūn affairs. Other magnetic strip cards hide the personal data written above and below it. A male voice can be heard saying that he will read this additional remark, but before even doing so he bursts into laughter. The faceless voice goes on to read out the label in an unrestrained laugh: “ladayh qarīb … ladayh qarīna … dālla ʿalā al-jinsiyya al-ʿIrāqiyya” (he has a relative … who has presumptive evidence … suggesting an Iraqi nationality). The video shakes as the result of a contagious laugh that grows in intensity. In the Kuwaiti dialect, the voice continues commenting: “Uqsim bil-Allāh, gaʿadt sāʿa ufakkir shinū maʿanāt hal-ḥatchī” (I swear by God, it took me an hour to figure out the meaning of this nonsense), before reading the sentence again, stopping and guffawing, and asking if he should “repeat it a third time,” expressing amazement at its absurdity. The tweet, addressed to the head of the Central System (mentioned in the hashtag #faḍīḥat Sāliḥ al-Faḍāla, or #scandal Salih al-Fadala), reads: In lam tastaḥī fa-'ktub mā shaʾt (Don't bother, write what you want).