This issue is focused on the politics of belonging/exclusion at the level of rhetoric and everyday practice. We open with two articles—Jonathan Shannon's “There and Back Again: Rhetorics of al-Andalus in Modern Syrian” and Ellen McLarney's “Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Adab”—both exploring linkages between culture and political ideas. In his article, Shannon analyzes the interweaving of a mythologized al-Andalus (the Arab-Muslim Iberian Peninsula) into Syrian popular culture, particularly music, in order to show how it was critical to the formation of Syrian memory cultures and, by extension, nation building. Yet within past- and future-oriented nationalist discourse, this rhetoric of nostalgia—whose genesis dates to the Pan-Arab halcyon days of the 1960s—posits “not only a lost paradise of past glory, but also a (utopian) vision of a future state of glory in the Arab world itself, a sort of neo-Andalusia.” Financed by petrodollars and fostered by Arab migration to and investment in Spain, literary, cinematic, and musical productions evoking al-Andalus and linking it intimately to Syria continued in the subsequent era of what one of Shannon's interlocutors describes as “political, economic, and cultural decline,” in part as a source of solace. With today's Syria tragically fractured, Shannon concludes by suggesting that “the rhetoric of al-Andalus, so closely tied not only to Arabism but also to a broad understanding of community, may yet again offer a way to reimagine the Syria of tomorrow as a ‘first rate place.’”

This article explores the rhetorical function of al-Andalus (medieval Spain) in modern Syrian popular culture, with a focus on music. The rhetoric of al-Andalus in Syria is intimately related to the project of nation building. The nostalgic performance of links between modern Syria and medieval al-Andalus assumed great rhetorical force in the 1960s as a result of ideologies of pan-Arabism, the loss of Palestine, the rise of Islamist threats at home, and the emergence of petrodollar regimes in the Arabian Gulf. As a result, the rhetoric of al-Andalus became “good to think” for wide audiences of Syrians. Musical genres linked to al-Andalus play an important role as potent vehicles for constructing Syrian memory cultures. Drawing on heavily mythologized and nostalgic visions of an Andalusian golden age, musical performance in Syria sonically reinforces forms of nostalgic remembrance and enacts claims on Syrian pasts, presents, and futures.

This article analyzes in depth four main writings by the pioneering nahḍa intellectual Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, who drew on classical kinds of adab to articulate new kinds of political subjectivities. He especially draws on the image of the body politic as a body with the king at its heart. But he reconfigures this image, instead placing the public, or the people, at the heart of politics, a “vanquishing sultan” that governs through public opinion. For al-Tahtawi, adab is a kind of virtuous comportment that governs self and soul and structures political relationships. In this, he does not diverge from classical conceptions of adab as righteous behavior organizing proper social and political relationships. But in his thought, disciplinary training in adab is crucial to the citizen-subject's capacity for self-rule, as he submits to the authority of his individual conscience, ensuring not only freedom, but also justice. These ideas have had lasting impact on Islamic thought, as they have been recycled for the political struggles of new generations.

Under the Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli regimes, the early 20th-century women's rights advocate Tahar Haddad (1899–1935) was a symbol of “state feminism.” Nationalist intellectuals traced the 1956 Personal Status Code to Haddad's work, and Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli claimed to “uphold” his ideals and “avenge” the persecution he suffered at the hands of the ʿulamaʾ at the Zaytuna mosque-university. Breaking with “old regime” narratives, this article studies Haddad as a reformist within Tunisia's religious establishment. Haddad's example challenges the idea that Islamic reformists “opened the door to” secularists in the Arab world. After independence, Haddad's ideas were not a starting point for Tunisia's presidents, but a reference point available to every actor in the political landscape.

Exploring generational changes and continuities among Palestinian families in Denmark, this article investigates why the children of the fidāᵓīn (fighters) and many of the fidāᵓīn themselves have turned their backs on secular politics and embraced Islam. The Palestinians who arrived in Denmark from Lebanon in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War were members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and were known as the generation of the revolution (jīl al-thawra). Extending Karl Mannheim's approach to generations, I argue that in order to explain the transition among Palestinians in Denmark from revolutionaries to Muslims we can rely on neither genealogy nor historical context alone, but need to pay equal attention to the structural continuities that crosscut generations. I suggest that rather than conceive of revolutionaries and Muslims as oppositions, we should think of them as substitutions, as liminal becomings that are actualized across historical generations.

The Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement (DWLM) played a central role in the Jordanian Popular Movement (al-Hirak al-Shaʿbi al-Urduni), commonly referred to as Hirak, from 2011 to the end of 2012. The large number of women who were active and took on leading roles in the DWLM contrasts with the absence of women's rights organizations in the Hirak. I argue that the DWLM was able to attract so many women because it developed a discourse and flexible structure that understood women to be embedded within communities and prioritized their economic needs. By studying this discourse and structure, it is possible to learn important lessons about gender-inclusive political and institutional reform.

Over the past decade, historians have finally started listening to the past. Mark M. Smith, an American historian and a leader in this wave of sensory and sound history, has said that historians today are “listening to the past with an intensity, frequency, keenness, and acuity unprecedented in scope and magnitude.” However, scholars of the modern Middle East have yet to join this auditory revolution. Whether working in history, political science, anthropology, or gender studies, they are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives.

For what is needed is a philosophy of listening. But is this a possibility? If philosophy has its very roots intertwined with a secret vision of Being that has resulted in the present state of visualism, can it listen with equal profundity? What is called for is an ontology of the auditory.

In a scene in Michal Goldman's documentary film Umm Kulthum: A Voice Like Egypt, two female friends of Umm Kulthum are reminiscing about her decision in the 1930s to purchase land for a villa in Cairo's Zamalek district. At the time, the women relate, Zamalek had very few buildings and was considered a remote location, far from the city center. “What were you thinking about to buy something so far away?” one of the women recalls her mother telling Umm Kulthum. At this point, the other woman, who had been distractedly knitting a scarf on her lap, suddenly brightens up and enters the conversation: “Do you remember the water wheel on the river in front of her house?” she excitedly asks her companion. “There was a waterwheel.” She imitates its high-pitched whirring sound as she turns her hand to trace the circular path of the wheel itself. “People used to say she kept it to remind her of the old days.”

In this thought piece, I use the recited Qurʾan as a case study for asking what it may mean to feel sound—and more specifically, “religious sound,” or sound in a religious context. A range of scholars, including myself, have asked related questions about what the recited Qurʾan sounds like, and why it may sound the way(s) it does. Here I consider the sound of the Qurʾan on the level of experience or nondiscursive meaning, asking what the recited Qurʾan feels like.

Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.” In the same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past.

On the evening of 14 July 2013, while living in Istanbul, I walked down Kumbaracı Yokuşu away from the sounds of protest to the city's contemporary art museum. As part of the Istanbul Jazz Festival lineup, the Istanbul Modern screened director Batu Akyol's documentary Türkiye'de Caz (Jazz in Turkey), which gathers interviews with Turkish jazz musicians intimate with the country's jazz scene from the 1940s onward. The emergence of a jazz ecology of musician-composers, entrepreneurs, jazz promoters, and collectors runs in tandem with the history of the Turkish Republic, beginning in the years leading up to and including World War I and gaining momentum in the 1930s and 1940s. The documentary does not present a hermetically sealed nationalist understanding of Turkish jazz, but rather affirms a vibrant celebration of the music. To date, Istanbul's arts organizations host international jazz summer festivals and yearlong jazz programs. There are jazz clubs, radio programs, and magazines that highlight international and local events. Turkish university music departments offer jazz studies and formal performance opportunities for musicians. But there are also informal venues, such as the streets, cafes, and bookstores. While out late in Istanbul when I lived there, I would frequently listen to a lone street musician stationed outside of Narmanlı Han playing “My Funny Valentine” on his trumpet. On more recent trips, I have come across a jazz band playing Dixieland tunes along İstiklal Avenue. This is all to say that Istanbul is a city where one can listen to jazz standards, Dixieland, bebop, cool, and fusion as well as take lindy hop dance lessons from a local group. Although Akyol's documentary uncovers a jazz soundtrack dating to the 1930s that is composed of personal stories of local musicians becoming jazzers, the post-Armistice period (1918–23) remains mute, mired in what I consider to be a standard version of the city's origin story of jazz. I want to consider the case of jazz in post-Armistice Istanbul to think about how master narratives erase some sounds and privilege others.

Incorporating descriptions and analyses of sound into Middle Eastern history offers a wealth of opportunity for enriching our understanding of the historical record. But sometimes we need to get back to the basics: the “five w's and one h” of sound studies, so to speak. In what follows I would like to run this simple exercise with radio in the Mandate-era Levant, in order to lay out the basic data and begin to reflect on how it might aid scholars in better understanding other aspects of life in this period. I will do this by first addressing some of these basic what, who, when, where, why, how questions, and then by examining one day's programming of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1937: the day immediately following the release of the Peel Commission Report. What can we learn from examining this day's programming?

We have no shortage of texts to recover representations of sound. There is also an underutilized, renewable—yet, if not recorded, ephemeral—source that can help us recover the sounds of the vanishing past: oral history. The discovery of soundways and historically contextualized soundscapes is a compelling project on its own. By “soundways,” I mean the “paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques—in short, the way—that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes or beliefs about sound.” Global culture can be thought of as flowing through technoscapes, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, and ideascapes, Arjun Appadurai has argued. The flow of global culture through these “scapes” would be represented in local soundscapes. Oral history interviews are one way to follow the flow to the level of the individual. And while sensory memories—especially echoic, haptic, and iconic—are being investigated in the context of medical and psychological research, they are not often considered in connection with social history.

The scene opens with the camera zooming in on a small raised stage where a group of muṭribs (minstrel performers) are enacting a rūḥawzī piece. At stage left, a young man is singing a love song that describes the physical features of his beloved, Chihilgis. He is accompanied by an ensemble that plays rhythmic music (in 6/8 meter) on traditional Iranian instruments—the tunbak, the tār, and the kamānchih. Standing next to the singer is Chihilgis, performed by a crossed-dressed performer (zanpūsh) who sports a long wig and moves flirtatiously to the song, making coquettish gestures with the eyes, lips, and shoulders. Chihilgis then joins the dance center stage with the two other main characters: the protagonist, enacted by the black-faced performer Mubarak, who has a tambourine (dāyirih) in hand; and Haji, Chihilgis’ old father, who sports a white cotton beard. With variations based on the characters, the dance consists of typical muṭribī moves, including exaggerated wrist and hip rotations, facial gestures such as blinking, and sliding head movements. This musical segment is followed by a witty, humorous dialogue between Mubarak and Haji with sexual undertones.

To write a review essay about three books on what at first glance appear to be very divergent topics may seem like an impossible task. Samera Esmeir's book, Juridical Humanity, is an exploration of colonial law as it conscripted Egyptians into the grid of humanity; Judith Butler's Parting Ways is a critique of Zionism and state violence from a Jewish perspective; and Hussein Agrama's Questioning Secularism is about the paradoxical nature of secular power as manifest in modern Egypt. Despite this divergence, I found a rich thematic resonance between the three books that was unexpected and illuminating. All three books are deep meditations on the nature of law, its violent and performative character, even as they are also about a lot more. In what follows, I discuss the central themes of each book with a short rumination on their shared themes.