We are thrilled to present this special issue of IJMES on “Maghribi Histories in the Modern Era” with guest editor Julia Clancy-Smith. The issue was conceived as an effort to bring scholarship on the Maghrib and Mashriq into closer dialogue. We issued the call for papers in December 2010, weeks before the self-immolation of Muhammad al-Buʿazizi in Tunisia triggered the string of upheavals often referred to as the Arab Spring. That North Africa took the lead in upending authoritarian regimes makes this issue especially timely. Although none of the pieces deals directly with contemporary events, they provide innovative ways for thinking about historical transformations and genealogies.

This special issue originated in a series of conversations two years ago with IJMES editor Beth Baron regarding the Maghrib's positioning in historical scholarship on the Middle East generally and in our field's flagship journal more specifically. While IJMES has published a number of solo articles devoted to North Africa from a range of disciplines, we concluded that the journal's readers would welcome a corpus of recent work in the historical sciences for the modern period from roughly the late 18th century on. Emphasis upon the modern does not imply that other eras in North Africa's long history have languished for lack of renewed scholarly interest—far from it. The Punic and Roman empires are currently subject to vigorous reinterpretation in order to dismantle dominant colonial and Orientalist interpretations. Moreover, the literature on Muslim Spain and on medieval and early modern North Africa and Iberia, particularly the hotly contested idea of convivencia, has gone from artisanal to industrial production in terms of output. The regionalist frame for the special issue admittedly acknowledges a form of geographically informed “otherness,” but it does so in order to question that distinction. And although the call for papers had invited research whose primary (but by no means sole) focus was the peoples, societies, and states in what we now know as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, regrettably no submissions on Tripolitania/Libya were received.

The story of the Oran-based Jewish merchant Jacob Lasry (1793–1869) illustrates how preexisting North African business practices survived and adapted to the radical dislocations of the French conquest of Algeria. In the 1830s, French political turmoil and indecision helped foster a chaotic situation where French generals with nebulous goals “outsourced” financing and even military campaigns to local experts in Algeria. Lasry's business success in the economy of the early conquest invested him with a degree of power vis-à-vis the French administration, whose other proxies sometimes ended up in severe debt to him. With the rise of a “civilizing mission” discourse in the 1840s and 1850s, aspects of this mission, too, were outsourced to local experts. Despite his Moroccan birth, Gibraltarian family, and British subjecthood, Lasry used his stature to secure the official position of president of the province's consistoire israélite, charged with advancing French civilization among Oran's indigenous Jews.

After France's 1830 invasion of Algeria, Algerians residing outside of the new French colony could potentially be considered French subjects. A number of Moroccans, eager to partake of the legal and financial advantages of foreign nationality, crossed the border into Algeria and obtained documentation falsely attesting to their Algerian origins; they then returned to Morocco, where they convinced French consular authorities to register them as French subjects. This article uses the story of one such pseudo-Algerian, Masʿud Amoyal, to explore the phenomenon of Moroccans who assumed the legal identities of Algerians. In Morocco and elsewhere in the Middle East, the responses of individuals like Amoyal to new legal categories created by European colonization point to the importance of expanding colonial historiography beyond the borders of imperial states. Examining the strategies of pseudo-Algerians in Morocco demonstrates the value of a transnational approach for understanding the full impact of European imperialism.

Edmond Yafil was a key figure in the early 20th-century Algerian revival of Andalusi music, a high-prestige urban performance tradition linked to medieval Muslim Spain. Yafil's experiments with printing, transcription, audio recording, amateur associations, concert-hall performance, and new composition helped transform the production, consumption, and circulation of Andalusi music. Although Yafil was widely respected, his reputation was fraught with ambiguity during his lifetime and has remained so since. While not divorced from his position as a Jew in turn of the century Algiers, Yafil's ambiguity is best understood within the context of the complex Andalusi musical milieu of his day. This study of Yafil shows revival to have been a gloss for a partial but far-reaching shift in the social basis of Andalusi music making and calls for a broader rethinking of the familiar concept of revival in North Africa and the Middle East and beyond.

This article presents a microhistory of an early 20th-century Tunisian intellectual, Salih Suwaysi, within the context of cross-regional (Maghrib–Mashriq) literary and intellectual trends. Analyzing Suwaysi's use of the conventional literary genre of maqāmāt illustrates his deep understanding of the problems caused by France's occupation of Tunisia and highlights the significance of historical and contemporary urban space for the author. Revitalized during the nahḍa period, maqāmāt were employed by writers to address issues and problems facing contemporary society, in contrast to some of the earlier maqāmāt that focused on language and language structure more than on narrative content. Suwaysi followed his eastern Mediterranean, especially Egyptian, contemporaries in turning to this genre to convey his critical commentaries on social, religious, and political life under the French Protectorate in Tunisia.

This article explores the vitally important yet often neglected role of medicine and health care in the conduct of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Using French, Swiss, and recently opened Algerian archival materials, it demonstrates how Algerian nationalists developed a health-service infrastructure that targeted the domestic and international arenas. It argues that they employed the powerful language of health and healing to legitimize their claims for national sovereignty and used medical organizations to win local support, obtain financial and material aid from abroad, and recast themselves as humanitarians to an increasingly sympathetic international audience. This research aims to situate Algerian efforts into a broader history of decolonization and humanitarianism and contributes to rethinking the process through which political claims were made at the end of empire.

This article explores the role that Christianity played in the decolonization of Algeria and in particular how the complex relationship between Christianity and colonialism under French rule shaped the rhetoric and actions of Christians during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Using the case of a 1957 trial in the military tribunal of Algiers in which twelve Europeans were charged with crimes ranging from distributing propaganda for the National Liberation Front to sheltering suspected communist and nationalist militants, I demonstrate how “Christian” rhetoric became one of the major means through which the conduct of the war and the defense of French Algeria were debated. While conservative defenders of French Algeria claimed that actions such as those of the Christians on trial led to the erasure of Christianity in North Africa, I argue that such actions and moral positions allowed for the continued presence of Christianity in Algeria after independence.

This article examines the activism of Tunisian university students in the late 1960s. During the series of events surrounding the student protests of March 1968 at the University of Tunis, political activists across Tunisia and France forged communication networks or drew upon existing ones in order to further their political claims. The objectives of this article are to investigate the historical roots of these transnational networks in the colonial and postcolonial periods as well as to integrate Tunisia within the “global 1968.” Through an analysis of student protests and government reactions, I argue that ties with the former metropole shaped students’ demands and that a strictly national perspective of events is insufficient. In response to state repression, Tunisian activists shifted their struggle from global anti-imperialism toward the expansion of human rights on the national level. The networks proliferated over the course of 1968 and beyond as concrete realities shaped the direction of new claims.

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa in all disciplines can learn much about their favored topics of interest through the study of music and related cultural practices. However, professional and often personal limitations have precluded awareness of the rich potential that music offers for analyses of Middle Eastern and North African societies. Typically music and the performing arts have been the purview of specialists in ethnomusicology, anthropology of music, and performance studies. Music and other sonic phenomena have been routinely marginalized if not ignored by scholars in Middle East studies, who, to a surprising extent, have reproduced conservative Muslim opinion regarding music by leaving it out of their analyses. Even the majority of ethnographic texts on the region depict Middle Easterners as living in near silence. When scholars have explored the ways in which music and expressive culture might shed light on their areas of expertise, they have tended to apply the conceptual tools of their home disciplines to the study of music: hence we have the sociology and anthropology of music, the history and politics of music and performance, and so on. Music in these studies remains a (usually passive) expression of more fundamental forces, reproducing the marginal position that music, and the arts in general, typically enjoy in Western societies—at best serving as an analytic tool but too seldom understood as an agent itself.

In the present climate of political and social change in North Africa, studying music offers exciting new possibilities for enhancing our understanding of the region. Scholars in ethnomusicology and related disciplines are conducting archival and ethnographic research on music, often integrating sound and video recordings, transcriptions, and musical and textual analysis into their studies. Their work highlights how music not only reflects cultural change but also predicts and creates it.

Music, as sound, physically and figuratively transcends previously erected or conceptualized boundaries. Artists and listeners each have the ability to aurally extend their values into new spaces, where others hear them. Passions and ideas gain traction through a constant aural negotiation that exists within the music that individuals use to soundtrack their public and private lives. As argued by the contributors to this roundtable, music both resides within the larger societal and cultural constellations that surround it and helps to shape those dynamics in active ways. Music, as a loosely defined social practice, plays an important role in self-identification. Musical aesthetics provide an avenue through which listeners and performers place themselves within specific social groups. Al-āla and Andalusian genres typically associated with North African elite classes constitute one prominent example that is threaded throughout this roundtable. These social groups are rarely exclusive, however, and musical aesthetics provide a significant set of data through which scholars might read (or, perhaps better put, listen to) the dynamic nature of social institutions and the cultural formations that mold them.

Music is not only an art form defined by certain formal elements, such as rhythmic and melodic modes. It is also a cultural form that implies significant social interaction. Music naturally evokes deeply felt emotions and can touch upon important social identities, because it helps people to experience feelings and express insights into their own lives. Moreover, the fact that it is performed situates any given musical genre within a specific set of sociocultural frames. Unpacking the social, economic, and political contexts surrounding musical genres can deepen our understanding of larger processes at work. An obvious North African example is Rai music, whose explosion in popularity in the 1980s underscored very important social and economic transformations taking place in Algeria and among migrant Algerian communities in France.

The 1987 publication of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the first anthology on the topic of women and music in the field of ethnomusicology, marked a critical turn in the scholarship. The ethnographic-focused essays on women's genres and roles in music in diverse societies around the world, including the Middle East, presented new analytical frameworks and research on authority, gender and access, and notions of power and performance. Today, research on the musical practices of women continues to expand in ethnomusicology and in fields such as anthropology. Many scholars now acknowledge the centrality of gender for locating “how society is in music and music is in society.” This is a particularly important approach for the Middle East and North Africa, where the undervaluing or silencing of women's musical practices and abilities had continued to dominate ethnomusicology. An important study to break from the paradigm was Virginia Danielson's 1997 monograph on Umm Kulthum. Danielson analyzes the development and the construction of a musical and a social “voice,” looking at what it means for this particular artist to both be the voice of and have a voice in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. In the discussion that follows I outline the academic trajectory of writings on women and music in Morocco, which I have divided into three distinct historical moments, each exemplifying different approaches to the subject matter: work by 20th-century French colonial scholars, by contemporary European and American scholars, and by contemporary Moroccan scholars.

The proliferation of technologies in use for popular music in Morocco points to cultural interactions beyond the most local or national influences that inform musical practices there. Examining the integration of technologies from outside Morocco—including musical instruments, recording media, and distribution systems—sheds light on negotiations of novelty and difference in contemporary Moroccan social and political life and thus on multiple facets of how late modernity has played out there. Among other broad areas of significance that musical practices help illuminate are the social and economic effects of colonial and postcolonial interactions, including the development of cash economies, globalized exchange, and cultural tourism; nationalist initiatives to define culture; and large-scale migration to Europe and elsewhere in recent decades, following a longer population shift in 20th-century Morocco from primarily rural locales to burgeoning urban centers.

It has become something of a commonplace to argue that music played an important role in the revolutionary upheavals that overthrew the Bin ʿAli regime in Tunisia and forced Husni Mubarak from power in Egypt. This recognition let the larger scholarly community—indeed, the world—in on a secret that a small group of MENA scholars have for decades been trying to share: it's not merely that music is society, as Jonathan Shannon argues in his contribution to this roundtable; it's society in “Real 3D,” at once a microcosm, mirror, and prism of “all the social forces and contradictions of culture, politics, and history.” As a mirror, music reflects society's contending forces back onto itself. Under the right conditions it also refracts them prismatically, acting as a filter and an amplifier that brings (and sometimes forces) subaltern sentiments into the public consciousness. Music, like other art forms, can help foster and sustain social and political change.

In recent decades historians specializing in the Middle East and North Africa have studied endemic and epidemic diseases as well as evolving medical and public health knowledge and policy to better understand major historical transformations. The study of gender and empire, class and ethnicity, and civil society and government in the determination of medical and public health policy has yielded new insights into questions of state power, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, modernity, and globalization. Historians have asked why, when, and how Western medicine took root in Muslim societies, which had their own complex and longstanding medical traditions.