The cover image for this issue, from Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi's installation Modern Times, depicts architectural structures and the cogs of a machine filled in with Arabic calligraphy, representing rapid architectural development and industrialization across the modern and contemporary Middle East. The title derives from the eponymous 1936 Charlie Chaplin film in which Chaplin's character Little Tramp is a factory worker during the Great Depression who, trying to keep up with the acceleration of the assembly line, is quickly overcome and succumbs to a nervous breakdown. Like the film, Fatmi's installation critiques unbridled development and draws attention to its human toll. It also explores two related features of the modern epoch: ceaseless motion and the acceleration of time.

During the long 19th century, British coal proliferated throughout the Ottoman Empire in increasing quantity, rapidity, and regularity via junctions and political arrangements that became evermore stable and dominant. The British used coal export to project their power elsewhere, offshoring the Industrial Revolution by building an infrastructure that could support it overseas and connect it to existing facets of the imperial project. Examining this “outsourcing” and the importance of foreign coal markets to industrialization helps provincialize the steam engine and anchor it in a global context. It also allows us to explore the impact of fossil energy on the Middle East and the ways coal both set the stage for the arrival of oil and informed the possibilities for translating carbon power into politics. Coal, the article suggests, animated political participation in England while reinforcing authoritarian tendencies in the Middle East.

Following the 1990–91 Gulf War and the subsequent March 1991 uprising, the Iraqi government launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the marshes of southern Mesopotamia. Alongside mass killing and forced population resettlement, the state used hydrological infrastructure to divert water from the wetlands, permanently desiccating the area. Using newly available Iraqi government archives, this paper argues that the destruction of the marshes was the result of a complex interplay between sectarianism, development planning, and security imperatives. Inhabited by peripatetic Marsh Arabs (Maʿdan), the marshlands stood out as an impenetrable wilderness. Baʿth policies in the marshes combined measures meant to promote social and economic modernization with counterinsurgency tactics meant to achieve control over the marsh region. After 1991, the regime set out to obliterate a terrain it deemed a strategic liability and a population that seemed an obstacle to modernization.

Focused on the contest over water management in Nazareth during the early years of Israeli statehood (1948–56), this article traces the negotiations that took place between Palestinian residents of Nazareth and Israeli state authorities. I argue that the struggle over this vital natural resource, in a region where it is in short supply was in some measure a matter of fulfilling practical needs, but it was also part of the process of negotiating citizenship. The story of Nazareth's water in the early Israeli period is thus a microcosm of the incorporation of Palestinians as undesired and marginalized citizens into a self-defined Jewish state. Challenging the Palestinian resistance/collaboration dichotomy and the notion of a monolithic Israeli state, I show how both Palestinian citizens and Israeli authorities adopted wide-ranging positions on water management and its broad political implications. Although Palestinian citizens were able to use the space made available through citizenship to further their collective interests, they were ultimately unable to overcome the exclusions inherent to a political system that maintained the dominance of a Jewish majority over a Palestinian minority.

This article explores the role of the ʿulamaʾ in shaping the use of mechanical timepieces in Cairo in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ottoman interest in new technologies in this period is often understood in relation to the emergence of modernization projects and new scientifically trained actors, with a corresponding decline in the status of the ʿulamaʾ. However, the vogue of mechanical timepieces in Cairo allowed ʿulamaʾ trained in the very old tradition of mīqāt (astronomical timekeeping) to make their knowledge speak in new ways to new audiences. Based on several manuals and tables that such scholars wrote “on the position of the watch hand,” this article shows how ʿulamaʾ not only facilitated distinctively Ottoman timekeeping conventions, but also furthered an understanding of watches as instruments of precision. The article builds on a growing literature on Ottoman temporality, while expanding our historical view of ʿulamaʾ and their authority, of the material culture of Cairo, and of science and technology in an Islamic context.

This article analyzes the ideas of the Turkish sociologist and political activist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) in order to reevaluate the secularization politics of the Young Turks. A close reading of Gökalp's publications on Islamic institutional reform challenges homogenizing modernist interpretations of late Ottoman reform in general. Gökalp's legacy has often been judged through a secularist-Islamist binary. This article suggests that Gökalp's approach to the problem of Islam and of religion more broadly within the modern state was more complex than generally argued. His understanding of concepts such as shariʿa, dīn, and the Islamic state was not yet subordinated to a secularist episteme that juxtaposes the religious and the secular. Rather, Gökalp strove for a social and political order in which religious norms and modern institutions complemented each other harmoniously.

In this article, I argue that shifting development discourses have shaped the meaning and function of vakıfs (religious endowments) in Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923. I identify three periods defined by their distinctive development discourse, and show how each of these discourses made vakıfs into both an object and a site of development. In the etatist discourse of the 1930s, vakıfs were articulated as national treasures tasked with financing state-led economic development. With the shift to a mixed economy discourse in the 1960s, vakıfs were reconfigured as private philanthropic foundations expected to create a skilled labor force. The neoliberal development discourse of the 1980s transformed vakıfs into welfare organizations focused on poverty. This article shows that in all three of these periods, the relationship between state, Islam, economy, and society was articulated, legitimized, and consolidated with reference to a seemingly stagnant but in fact malleable institution inherited from the Ottoman Empire—the vakıf. I refer to this process as the “local production of development,” a conceptualization emphasizing how global discourses of development are formed and transformed at the local level.

This roundtable brings together a diverse group of scholars to ask how a critical engagement with science studies, writ large, might allow us to rethink the modern history of the Middle East. They speak in the name of a number of disciplines, including: archaeology, agriculture, engineering, geography, medicine, natural philosophy, public health, psychology, sociology, and urban planning. And they cover a wide array of local, regional, and even international networks of expertise and experts. These included (to name a few) a British engineer who worked in colonial Egypt and India calculating the future demography of water supplies and sewage systems; American, Palestinian, and Zionist agricultural researchers and proponents of dry-land cultivation and colonization in Ottoman Palestine; Ottoman Arab and Turkish nationalists in Istanbul who debated the metaphysical and political implications of positivism; and, finally, the various experts and political actors who fought over the preservation (and destruction) of antique material artifacts and objects in Iraq and Egypt from the 19th century to the present. What we might claim they have in common, however, is a concern with the rise of the “modern state”—another broad category here encompassing a range of imperial, colonial, and national states in the region, and the multiple claims for legal and political sovereignty that they spawned. Of course, interlacing these questions of sovereignty, particularly in this context, as the essays show, is a further set of questions organized around the various forms of power that both these new states and these new sciences exercised. We could say, therefore, that collectively these essays reflect upon the coterminous rise of epistemic, material, and political orders in the region, and that, in the process, they contribute to our understanding of the ideas and practices claimed on behalf of both “science” and the “state.”

On 24 January 2015, Shaymaʾ al-Sabbagh, a thirty-two-year-old mother of one and a member of the Egyptian Socialist People's Alliance Party, was walking with flowers in hand alongside her colleagues in a preauthorized march to Tahrir Square to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the January Revolution. Suddenly the police opened fire at close range and within a few minutes Shaymaʾ dropped dead. Despite strong evidence implicating the police, who were present at the scene in overwhelming numbers, and despite the wide circulation on social media of a video clip showing a masked policeman aiming in Shaymaʾ's direction, the attorney general initially refused to arraign the police officer in question and instead decided to charge Shaymaʾ's colleagues. After a massive public outcry, the suspected police officer was finally arraigned (although his identity was never revealed); however, he was charged not with manslaughter or excessive use of force, but with the much lesser charge of “beating that results in death.” Most crucially, the official cause of Shaymaʾ's death was slimness. In a TV interview, Dr. Hisham ʿAbd al-Hamid, the spokesperson of the Egyptian Medical Forensics Authority (EMFA), said that the birdshot that hit Shaymaʾ “was not fatal given that it was fired more than eight meters away, but since she was too skinny, the birdshot was able to penetrate her body easily and ended up hitting the lung and the heart. This is a very rare case.”

Medicine and healing are intertwined with history, because the body is the precondition of human sovereignty. The body is the base of the body politic.

My starting point is the present—certainly a critical and loaded moment for scholars of the modern Middle East. It is incumbent upon us to take a step back and to rethink how to create new concepts, new narratives, new explanatory schemes, new historicities, and new visions of the future. An engagement with science studies, understood broadly, is one possible way to begin such critical rethinking. It is an exercise that could also be mutually illuminating, as scholars of science studies have been debating the global nature of science and technology for the last decade, undoubtedly in reaction to the once European-dominated narrative of the history of science. The field of science studies has moved well beyond “diffusion” and “core-periphery” models toward more eclectic examinations of various processes of epistemic encounters, translations, mediations, and conflicts that shaped societies. These processes also shaped science and technology. Here, I would like to provide a brief outline of one mutual engagement inspired by the injunction to follow scientists, doctors, and engineers and to probe what was at stake in the knowledge they produced and how they “made society.”

At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

My roundtable contribution inevitably starts with a critique of the field the scholarly utility of which we as contributors wish to defend. The study of the antique sciences (including the history of archaeology and heritage) still has marginal standing in science studies. So does the Middle East as a geographical region, which until recently enjoyed little scholarly interest in the field. The persistent Eurocentric research agenda of science studies has been questioned, however, with the recent call for a “global history of science.” This ambiguous term has triggered new methodological challenges, but it has also created new trenches.

In the midst of World War I, a group of Ottoman scientists published a debate entitled “National Education” in the 1916 issue of the periodical Muallim (The Teacher). The exchange between the sociologist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) and the psychologist Satiʾ al-Husari (1882–1968) started out with different agendas for imperial education and culminated with an outburst regarding the definition of modern science. In his conclusive remarks, al-Husari declared: “I consider [his] way of thinking to be a form of metaphysics and mystics that resembles pantheism.” Al-Husari was a positivist who professed the exclusive authority of empirical data over all immaterial evidence acquired through metaphysics and mystical experience. Yet, his opponent was nothing less, and the accusation was all the more provocative because Gökalp believed that his positivist sociology could become the organizing principle of educational reform.

This short essay focuses on three issues: how science studies may facilitate the rapprochement between the philological study of scientific texts and Middle East history; how it may help us reconsider ambiguous if not “black-boxed” terms such as the “state,” “Islam,” and the “West”; and finally, how it may build thematic and theoretical bridges with other histories and geographies of science currently emerging from a more global, and not merely local, perspective.

What was science, who was involved in it, and where did it unfold in the modern Middle East and North Africa? These are the three questions raised in this piece. The following notes echo my past research on the growth and societal relevance of biomedical sciences in Iran, and are also informed by a new interest in social sciences and, more particularly, in the establishment in 1927 of the Social Science Research Section at the American University of Beirut (AUB; called Syrian Protestant College until 1920) and its subsequent work. A handful of social scientists led by the American Stuart Dodd and financed by the US Rockefeller Foundation, which was active worldwide, helped turn AUB into a hub not only of education, but more than before, of research too. Covering wide swathes of the “Near East,” these social scientists framed that region as an extraordinary “laboratory” for social science research.

The last few decades have seen a rise in the number of studies on Christian missions. These studies are located within a wide range of fields and are written from different perspectives. They tend to abide by national boundaries and to focus on mission organizations and missionaries, not least because of the availability of source material in Western languages. Recent historiography on Christian missions to the Middle East, however, has seen a profound change in approach, methodology, and sources. We can locate three main shifts: a national to a transnational approach, a reevaluation of local agency, and a new emphasis on unintended consequences.