Using the unique and historic Islamic cemetery of Mamillah in Jerusalem as a primary example, this essay discusses the ethno-necrocratic order that led to the 2008 Israeli High Court of Justice's codification of the supremacy of Jewish bodies and afterlives over non-Jewish ones, on the basis of advancing Israel's values. Hundreds of Palestinian burial grounds, starting with village cemeteries, have been destroyed since 1948. Indeed, funerary sites have testified to the omnipresence and millenarian existence of a population that the state has sought to erase from memory. In a few decades, the deathscape was radically altered, in cities as in the countryside. Although real estate corruption plagues Israeli politics, land use planning and real estate capitalism are inseparable from the ethno-racial politics of exclusion, which affect both the dead and the living.

The gender history of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) has so far focused on the study of female figures. In an attempt to widen the scope of analysis, this article reconsiders the role of the Lebanese army in war-torn Lebanon through the lens of gender. Based on interviews with retired officers and noncommissioned officers, I argue that the military—the combat personnel in particular—never relinquished its claim to an exclusive militarized masculinity, despite the rise of contending actors. By maintaining this claim, these men strove to confront both the new standards of masculinity imposed by the militias and the anxiety caused by the disruption of gender roles throughout the conflict. To make sense of this confrontation, the article investigates how the veterans have engaged in a social performance, during both past and present, to (re)enact their manliness in front of an audience. This diachronic approach allows me to further untangle the combat officers’ trajectories during the war, using gender to bring them into conversation with their milieu.

This article examines the work and trajectory of ʿAbd al-Salam al-Diyuri, a Moroccan engineer educated in Egypt who became a nationalist writer, editor, and publisher during the last decade of the French Protectorate (1912–56). One of only a few Moroccan engineers trained in Arabic during this period, al-Diyuri developed a vision of modernization rooted in the popularization of technical knowledge that distinguished him from colonial engineers as well as nationalist elites. French experts exercised an epistemic dominance over the practice of engineering under the protectorate as well as after Morocco's independence. In this context, al-Diyuri's arguments traced the contours of an alternative future for the country—one that tied decolonization to the cultivation of technical competencies among the public at large. This article follows the path of a nationalist engineer and intellectual whose work both embodied and attempted to move beyond a contradiction between the democratization of knowledge and the demands of development.

Available essays on Pashtunwali describe this system of customary laws and ethics for the most part as a static model of ideal conduct, without a diachronic perspective. Offering a historical approach to Pashtunwali, this article introduces and analyzes fragmentary data on the nənawāte custom from early modern Pashto sources—historiographical narratives of the Khatak chieftains in the Tarikh-i Murassaʿ (finished 1724) and the romantic poem Adam Khan aw Durkhaney (1706/7). Recorded cases of resorting to nənawāte, considered among the main pillars of Pashtunwali but still variously interpreted, prove that this is a complex legal custom based on the right to appeal for protection, mediation, and reconciliation. As a common means of dispute settlement, nənawāte originates with a binding request for help and favor in a conflict situation. The discussion of nənawāte is preceded by a brief overview of the existing scholarly definitions of Pashtunwali, underscoring its emic perception as an ethnic identity marker.

This paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17th-century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn, nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint at any taboo concerning male love for beardless boys, it does display a remarkable asymmetry between male and female same-sex desire; it also displays distinct views of legitimate and transgressive sexuality. Thus, this poem encourages a more historicizing view of the gendered and sexual dimensions of modern (Kurdish and other) nationalism, and a greater attention for the distinct characteristics of vernacular literatures within the premodern ‘Persianate cosmopolitan.’

Movement is a defining feature of life, for humans, for other living beings, for the inanimate, and the Suez Canal is a place that resonates with a promise of mobilities. The discussions of this roundtable were inspired by conversations among participants at the 2021 MESA annual meeting around both the human and other-than-human that have channeled through the Suez Canal. For this roundtable, we combine the histories of fish, pathogens, prevailing winds, iron ore, sewage, and peoples—seemingly disparate and unconnected circulations and histories—all in motion through, above, under, and around the canal. Their afterlives highlight both the historical depth of the processes propelled by the canal and the unruliness of vibrant matter and living beings, each with their own life projects and interdependencies.1

A joke appearing in the folds of a Cairo-based newspaper published in Italian in 1895 must have fallen flat with Port Said's inhabitants. But the irony was not amiss. The jest suggested that the town, whose toponym could be translated to “happy port” given the Arabic meaning of saʿīd, ought to be renamed “unhappy” due to the sad state of its public services. Readers may have smiled mirthlessly in agreement with the author, who claimed the Egyptian government treated the city “as if it were less than a village.” Many were under the impression that Cairo wanted to scrap this “unhappy happy port” from the rest of Egypt. Continuing the wordplay, British journalist George Warrington Steevens wrote in 1898 that Port Said “would be wonderful if it were not unhappy,” stuck as it was between its riotous past and its doubtfully industrious future. Puns based on Port Said's name must have circulated for a while. Already in 1875, a French author had ironically remarked that this town's auspicious name seemed quite unjustified.

Returning by ship from the hajj in 1902, Aida and Fatma landed at the quarantine station of El Tor, 120 miles south of the city of Suez in the Sinai Peninsula.1 The El Tor station had been set up in the Egyptian town following international sanitary conferences convened to promote international standards for sanitary protections to safeguard Europe from “Asiatic” diseases, most notably cholera. Endemic in India for centuries, cholera had spread out of the Ganges basin in the nineteenth century through globalizing networks of trade and steam transport. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, with its shortening of travel times and distances, increased the danger of epidemics turning into pandemics. Although pathways of the cholera pathogen included routes across the Eurasian steppe and Russia into Germany, European authorities focused on the hajj as the catalyst for diffusion of the disease—a super-spreader event. El Tor was meant to be the linchpin in the system of stopping disease from passing through the Suez Canal to Europe.2

In January 1964, on the heels of its formal independence from Britain, the East African island of Zanzibar exploded in a violent uprising ousting the Al-Bu Saidi sultan—an Omani by descent—and his primarily “Arab” government. Though early reports of the revolution did not indicate targeted attacks against Arabs, it soon became clear that thousands of Arab-identified residents—settlers—were killed, mostly in rural areas.1 Others, including some families I came to know during my years in interior Oman, described being separated from their families or being captured and taken to detention camps, where they stayed a week or two before being reunited. Some found their way to these camps in search of relatives, shelter, and food.2 Decades later, the chaos and violence of that time was recounted to me with unnerving directness. Eventually, thousands of Arabs were deported or fled—to Kenya, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Muscat and Oman. Muscat, on the coast of Oman, was the seat of the other Al-Bu Saidi sultan—a cousin of the Zanzibar sultan—who had only recently taken control of “Oman proper,” the territory of the Imamate whose ruler was now in exile in Saudi Arabia having been defeated in a war with the Sultan of Muscat. In the meantime, those leaving Zanzibar required ships and documents.

Around the year 2015, new tidings began to be heard across the Lebanese coastline as local marine biologists—receiving reports from divers and fishermen—became aware of a new phenomenon in the coastal waters. Pterois miles, the lionfish, samakat al-asad, a species not usually found in the waters, were being encountered in rapidly increasing numbers. Over the following years, as other Mediterranean countries started reporting similar occurrences, a sense of alert slowly built. Dina, one of my interlocutors and a shining young marine ecologist, had been at work setting up a new NGO to conduct marine pedagogy and environmental awareness campaigns. As the invasion proceeded apace, she and her group reacted to the invading fish swarming the Lebanese coastal waters, putting together a counter-campaign. Meetings were called, ideas pitched, and plans convened. The invasion had to be confronted, just as Elias, another interlocutor from Dina's group, a hobbyist diver in his late 20s and active participant in civil society campaigns, told me during an interview in late 2018:

On June 24, 2015, a huge swarm of jellyfish clogged the cooling system of an Israeli coal-fueled power plants located on the Mediterranean shoreline, almost forcing a shutdown. Images from the event displayed tons of pale blue, translucent jellies, lumped together in a container and spread over the factory floor after being removed from the cooling system filter. The spectacular incident prompted speculation that the jellyfish were foreign agents sent from Egypt to sabotage Israeli security. It may seem laughable, but this is not the first time that non-humans have figured as agents and national security threats in geopolitical dramas in the Middle East. In 2010, following repeated shark attacks on tourists in one of Egypt's Red Sea resorts, Sharm El-Sheikh, the governor of South Sinai told the media he could not rule out the possibility of the attacking shark being remotely controlled by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. In this context, foreign, underwater jellyfish armies are nothing out of the ordinary.