We continue celebrating the fortieth volume of the International Journal of Middle East Studies with an excerpt from an article of yore recommended by a former IJMES editor.

The previous excerpt is taken from a column by Syrian journalist Hakam al-Baba, published in the London-based Pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-ʿArabi. Al-Baba, a middle-aged Syrian journalist known for his biting sarcasm, has written some of the most perceptive critiques of Syrian and Arab media, including a famous 2005 article in the Syrian daily Tishreen, in which he relates his experience of harassment by the mukhābarāt. In the excerpted column, al-Baba uses the raging Pan-Arab controversies over reality TV for a critique of Arab political dependence on the United States.

This carefully composed portrait of a high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat is striking for several reasons. First, at nearly 16 by 13 inches, it is at least four times larger than most portraits of this period and lacks the ornamental cardboard frame into which portraits were commonly placed, instead being pasted directly onto a cardboard support. Second, although there is a long tradition of documenting men at work or places of business in the photography of the late Ottoman Empire, these images tend to privilege traditional occupations (e.g., itinerant merchants or craftsmen) and sites of commerce, such as outdoor markets, the covered bazaar, or shops along the Grande Rue de Pera in Istanbul. Third and finally, in its setting, the objects chosen to be included on the desk, and the pose of the central figure, the portrait insists upon the modernity of the subject as its primary message, raising questions about its intended audience.

Incomes and inequality in the Ottoman Empire can be estimated from the information recorded in tax registers called tahrir defterleri, arguably the most prized, heavily used, but still underutilized sources of Ottoman history. Although generations of prominent scholars have been fascinated by these registers and numerous historians have used them for a variety of regional and historical studies, their full potential has not been fully utilized in quantitative analysis of questions with a broader comparative dimension, wider geographic coverage, and larger historical significance.

More than twenty-five years ago, a small group of South Asianists challenged the bourgeois-nationalist and colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism. Based mostly in India and critical of “economistic” Marxism, they aimed to recover the occluded histories of what Antonio Gramsci calls “subaltern social groups” and to put into question the relations of power, subordination, and “inferior rank” more generally. The influence of subaltern studies quickly became international, inspiring research projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

As explained by one of its founders, subaltern studies seeks to counteract histories written by elites, about elites, and for elites that ignore the majority of society. Through this examination, the urban poor, workers, and peasants of India, the original focus of attention, are agents in the formation of their subaltern consciousness: the “agency of change is located in the insurgent or the ‘subaltern.’”

These words of an elderly Jewish man in Istanbul relate his memory of neighborhood life with Greeks, Armenians, and Muslims in the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk. In this place, there were no arguments between people of different religious backgrounds; Muslims shared “his” language, and he, as a Jew, knew Greek. As I examine his narrative for what it emphasizes and for the silences in between, I read Kuzguncuk as exceptional: describing an absence of argument in the past suggests that tension exists today; sharing multiple ethnic languages is understood now to be an old-fashioned rarity. His statement “Because we are Kuzguncuklu Jews, our Muslims over there loved us very much” suggests that in Kuzguncuk, he and his Muslim neighbors shared a common tie to place, a unique identity as Kuzguncuklu (of Kuzguncuk) that superseded any difference based on religion or ethnicity. As he describes a culture that remained from Ottoman times, his story illuminates indirectly the current Turkish national context that conditions the telling of his narrative.

The irruption of Persian-language blogging since 2001, known to its participants as Weblogistan, has been accompanied by enthusiastic claims that weblogs are promoting previously nonexistent forms of expression, thereby rupturing traditional Iranian social, cultural, religious, and political norms. The political scientist Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone juxtaposes Weblogistan against the conditions of theocratic rule as “a public social space that allows free expression of self outside the confines of the politically manipulated physical space.” In a 2005 book, which includes translated weblog postings, Nasrin Alavi takes this line of interpretation even further, asserting that by making “it possible for young Iranians to express themselves freely and anonymously,” Weblogistan “is nothing less than a revolution within the Revolution.”

On 10 June 1738 Maria Qari wrote her Catholic Melkite bishop, Athnasius Dahhan, an emphatic letter rejecting the authority of the Melkite church to impose the Eastern rite Rule of Saint Basil upon her and her fellow ʿabidāt (devotees). She unequivocally states, “It is important that your Excellency knows once and for all that I will only adopt the Augustinian Rule with the Ordinances of Saint Francis de Sales. I will not become a nun under any other circumstances, for God has called me to be free from all that binds my spirit, and I will not accept any oversight [from the Melkite church] . . . Four Jesuit missionaries are in agreement with me on this point.” This is but one missive in a voluminous record of equally rancorous discourses that spanned the better part of two decades (1730–48) and entangled the ten Aleppan devotees, their Jesuit confessors and supporters, the Melkite Church, and the Vatican.

The lines dividing history, ideology, and politics are thinly drawn. Researchers of Iraq have observed that over the years institutions and ideological movements, both inside the country and in the West, have “hijacked” the country's history. The Iraqi state's grand narratives have excluded competing histories from the days of Satiʿ al-Husri, the “father of Iraqi education,” who introduced Arab history into the curriculum in order to foster Arab nationalism, up to the massive project of rewriting Iraqi history under the Baʿth regime. Western interests, too, from the time of the British-backed monarchy until the present day, have influenced the writing of Iraqi history—utilizing it in a way that would justify their foreign policies.

It has long been recognized that much of the richness of Muslim women's ritual lives has been found outside of both the mosque and the “five pillars of Islam,” in a wide set of devotional practices that have met with varying degrees of affirmation and censure from male religious scholars. This recognition has given rise to a valuable literature on such practices as shrine visitation, spirit-possession rituals, and Twelver Shiʿi women's domestic ceremonies. The prevalence of such noncanonical rituals in Muslim women's lives, although waning in many parts of the contemporary world, raises questions about the relationship between women's religious practices and the constitution of Islamic orthodoxies. Have women, often given lesser access to mosque-based and canonical rituals, historically resorted to autonomous and rewarding religious practices that are, nevertheless, fated to be marginalized in the male-dominated construction of Islamic normativity—a normativity that women may ultimately internalize and master only at great cost to their religious lives?