This issue of IJMES features seven full-length articles and a roundtable on “theorizing violence.” While we were preparing the articles for publication in June and early July, the conflict in Syria was escalating, the Turkish state was suppressing protests in Gezi Park, and the situation in Egypt took a precipitous turn when the military killed more than fifty Muslim Brotherhood supporters. As our colleagues writing in more time-sensitive venues such as Jadaliyya, Facebook, and personal blogs scrambled to keep up with events, we decided to take a broader look at scholarly approaches to the study of violence. For the roundtable, we asked seven political scientists, historians, and anthropologists working on the Middle East and South Asia to reflect on “violence” as a theoretical category across the disciplines. The responses move from introductory reflections on studying, teaching, and writing about violence by our new board member Laleh Khalili, who helped us organize the roundtable, to conceptualizations of violence “from above” employed by colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal states (Khalili, Daniel Neep), through everyday and crisis-linked forms of sexual violence (Veena Das) and violence “from below,” whether in the forms of communal riots and suicide bombing (Faisal Devji) or self-immolation, hunger strikes, and other acts of self-destruction (Banu Bargu), to reflections on violence and nonviolence in Gezi Park (Yeşim Arat). The roundtable concludes with a broad-sweep analysis of most of the above in relation to (inter)disciplinarity and to Middle Eastern modernity by our board member James McDougall.
Choosing a cover image for this issue was a challenge. We wanted one that would resonate with the theme of the roundtable without looking like just another violent image of the Middle East, which would not do justice to the roundtable authors’ careful explorations of the complex range of public and private experiences and events that commonly get, or do not get, categorized as violence. Our board member Omnia El Shakry directed us to the work of artist Mona Hatoum, who graciously let us reproduce a photograph of her sculpture “Nature mortes aux grenades.” The work presents a collection of colorful glass objects in the shape of hand grenades, laid out on a steel trolley that vaguely resembles a hospital gurney or an autopsy table. The contrast between the candy-like colors and the threatening shapes of the glass pieces evokes both seduction and repulsion, perhaps pointing to the ways in which violence, as Das puts it in her roundtable essay, can “travel from one threshold of life to another,” becoming, for example, “both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy.”
The first two research articles in this issue explore relations between the Ottoman state and particular subjects who were marginalized in different ways during the 18th and long 19th centuries. Elyse Semerdjian, in “Naked Anxiety: Bathhouses, Nudity, and the Dhimmī Woman in 18th-Century Aleppo,” looks at increasing interventions by the central government, shariʿa courts, and the bathkeepers’ guild to restrict the co-confessional bathing of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women in Aleppo's public bathhouses. Among other juristic explanations for the new regulations was that the “non-Muslim woman is gendered male at the moment she sees a Muslim woman nude.” Yet Semerdjian suggests that the insistent repetition of these legal rulings, guild agreements, and bathhouse schedules over the 18th century indicates that authorities may have encountered difficulties enforcing them.
The article by Hala Fattah and Candan Badem, entitled “The Sultan and the Rebel: Saʿdun al-Mansur's Revolt in the Muntafiq, c. 1891–1911,” turns to a very different kind of increasingly marginalized subject, one struggling to regain what was once considerable power within the decentralized Ottoman system of rule over tribal regions on the empire's periphery. In “one of the last rebellions against Ottoman central authority in southern Iraq,” the Muntafiq shaykh Saʿdun al-Mansur led a series of uprisings over the course of two decades in a failed attempt to reclaim land he considered his tribe's—and his own personal—birthright. Fattah and Badem argue that while scholars have largely ignored such “desperate campaigns” against centralization—in spite of a considerable number of reports available in the archives “from the vanquished shaykhs themselves as well as from Ottoman commissioners sent to the tribal districts to restore order”—they form “an important part of the story of reform” during the empire's last decades.
The next two articles, paired under the subtitle “Moroccan Texts,” reflect what we hope will be a sustained increase in the number of submissions to IJMES both from scholars working on the Maghrib and from those in literary disciplines. Jonathan Smolin's “Didactic Entertainment: The Moroccan Police Journal and the Origins of the Arabic Police Procedural,” explores short fictional pieces published in the official journal of the Moroccan police force starting in the early 1960s. Smolin argues that these stories were unique in the Arab world at this time for employing the genre of the police procedural, in which the central police characters “investigate cases based on objective criteria such as science and forensics” rather than intuition or violent interrogation. If the sense that “the police were so disliked in Arab society” and “so lacking in credibility as literary figures” contributed to the absence of this genre in other Arab countries of the time, Smolin views its precocious appearance in Morocco's Police Journal as partly an effort to distance the country's postcolonial police force from that of the Protectorate past, a challenging project given the many institutional and individual continuities linking the two.
Alexander Elinson, in “Dārija and Changing Writing Practices in Morocco,” explores the recent increase in uses of dārija or Moroccan colloquial Arabic in a wide range of written texts. Especially over the past decade, and partly due to the spread of new communication technologies such as email and texting, “writing in dārija has gained support as serving the practical, political, and artistic needs of a dynamic and multilingual society.” This shift is occurring within “an already complex linguistic landscape,” in which political and cultural battles are waged over the written and spoken uses of French, English, Modern Standard Arabic, dārija, amāzīghiyya or Berber, and the ḥassāniyya dialect of Arabic used in the Western Sahara. The article provides readings of a number of important recent publications in dārija across a range of genres, including print media, fiction, and translated works, to explore how this increasingly common practice is conceived and articulated by those who engage in it.
The last three research articles in the issue, grouped under the subtitle “Modern Politics,” all provide timely reflections on contemporary politics and political histories of the region. Janine Clark and Bassel Salloukh, in “Elite Strategies, Civil Society, and Sectarian Identities in Postwar Lebanon,” set out to account for the persistence of sectarian identities and affiliations in Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990. Examining three case studies of Lebanese nongovernmental organizations—focused on labor rights, women's rights, and antisectarianism, respectively—over the past two decades, the authors identify a “recursive relation between sectarian elites and civil society actors” that has resulted in “the preclusion of any effective mode of cross-sectarian affiliation or political mobilization and the sabotaging of antisectarian initiatives in Lebanon.”
Michael Wuthrich's “An Essential Center–Periphery Electoral Cleavage and the Turkish Party System” takes aim at the notion that Turkish politics from the foundation of the republic to our own time can be explained by reference to a continuous split between modernizing, secular, central elites and powerless, religious, peripheral masses. Focusing specifically on whether the “center-periphery cleavage” model can explain electoral behavior in Turkey since the advent of multiparty elections in 1945, as some scholars have claimed, Wuthrich argues that it fails on a number of conceptual and empirical levels. These include the “perplexing” fact that “the so-called ‘peripheral’ parties have held the reins of government” in Turkey for most of this time, as well as the lack of evidence for such a cleavage in Wuthrich's empirical analysis of voting behavior in the multiparty period.
The final article in this issue, Haydar Darıcı's “‘Adults See Politics as a Game’: Politics of Kurdish Children in Urban Turkey,” analyzes the political mobilization of “stone-throwing” Kurdish children in urban areas of Turkey since 2006, focusing on a lower-class neighborhood of Adana. While young Kurdish activists have been portrayed in Turkish and Kurdish mainstream discourse as violent and out of control and/or as victims either of political abuse by Kurdish adults or the refusal of the Turkish government to negotiate with adult Kurdish leaders, Darıcı—drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork and oral-history interviews—explores “how they narrate and make sense of their own politicization, and the relationship between the memory and the postmemory of violence in the context of their mobilization.” In contrast to frameworks that scholars have used to explore the political mobilization of children and youth in other contexts, Darıcı argues that for “stone-throwing” Kurdish children in Turkey, where the adult Kurdish movement has become increasingly professionalized, “childhood is not lost but rather constituted and reclaimed through participation in violent resistance. To put it differently, childhood . . . refers to a space of morality and resistance and a distinct political subjectivity that is not available to adults.” The article thus serves as an apt transition to the roundtable on scholarly approaches to violence.
Historians have long been disproportionately represented on the pages of IJMES, so we are pleased that high-quality submissions from scholars in other disciplines seem to have been increasing in recent years. The nine authors of the seven peer-reviewed articles in this issue—echoing proportions of historians and nonhistorians seen in previous issues this year—include three historians, three political scientists, two literary scholars, and one anthropologist. We hope that the journal's deepening interdisciplinarity will turn out to be an ongoing trend.
