This article analyzes the increased visibility and frequency of public weeping by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Building on the literature that conceptualizes populism as a particular political style, I argue that crying in public can be understood as a populist performative act of legitimation, serving to dramatize the basic components of the populist discourse. I also contend that the increased frequency of public weeping by Erdoğan relate to two major dilemmas that populists in power encounter. Both dilemmas stem from the growing discrepancy between populist rhetoric and practice, diminishing the credibility of the populist leader. Signaling emotional authenticity, Erdoğan’s tearfulness serves to communicate a message of closeness to the people and sustain the anti-elite rhetoric at a time when his political power and economic wealth increasingly set him apart from the politically and economically marginalized. It also attempts to justify authoritarian practices while sustaining the claim to rule in the name of popular power and mobilize constituents against the opposition.

The poet ʿAli ibn Jabala, also called al-ʿAkawwak, was a little known but significant poet who lived during the late 8th and early 9th centuries. This article examines his poetry in its political and cultural context to delineate the literary devices exploited by the poet in his poems of praise. Moreover, this paper interprets existing prose anecdotes claiming that al-ʿAkawwak's panegyric poem to the caliph al-Maʾmun's commander, Abu Dulaf al-ʿIjli, made the caliph so furious that he ordered the poet's execution, despite the poet having never composed any verses overtly criticizing the caliph. The argument is made that, within the tense political atmosphere of the time, the style that the poet embraced in praising the two commanders, Abu Dulaf al-ʿIjli and Humayd al-Tusi, intensified al-Maʾmun's anger toward the poet.

Despite mutual taboos against exogamy, memoirs and similar materials written by Jews from Yemen contain a number of anecdotes describing love affairs and sexual encounters between Muslims and Jews prior to the mass migration of the vast majority of Yemen's Jews to Israel in 1949–50. These stories associate these liaisons with vulnerability, poverty, and marginalization. In them, sex and conversion to Islam are intrinsically connected, yet this interreligious intimacy leads not to resolution but to ongoing identity crises that persist beyond the community's realignment with a majority-Jewish society. The staging of the anecdotes in rural areas where shariʿa norms held only nominal sway, in watering places and hostels where strangers might interact, and at dusk, when identity is difficult to discern, heightened their ambiguity.

This article explores the so far little explored animal dimension of the significant social, economic, and ecological transformations that occurred in Western Anatolia in the late Ottoman Empire. It focuses on how the use of the hybrid, one-humped “Turcoman” camel transformed the way in which trade and transport operated in the region. In light of Ottoman, Turkish, and European sources, it suggests that the camel was a visible yet often underestimated actor in the incorporation of Western Anatolia into global markets and integrating the camel as important history-shaping actor into the historical narrative allows us to better grasp the complex relationships that existed between humans, nature, and technology and to change the way we think about the Ottoman Empire.

Although mountainous regions remained relatively isolated and almost untouched by the Ottoman rule, labor migration connected the inhabitants of these regions to the socioeconomic and political processes in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Kruševo, a highland village located in present-day North Macedonia, provides an excellent case for understanding these connections. This paper presents systematic evidence from the Ottoman archives to document and analyze the social, economic, and demographic impacts of labor migration during this period. It provides an in-depth analysis of the Ottoman population and tax records of Kruševo in the 1840s, demonstrating the occupational profiles, migration patterns, and family and neighborhood networks of village residents during this period. Based on this analysis, it argues that labor migration was key to the transformation of social, economic, and demographic relations in rural communities and to the integration of even the most remote highland villages with the modernization processes that characterized the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

This article investigates the Ottoman state's endeavor to create the “second Egypt” by consolidating its imperial authority along the coastline and hinterland of Cyrenaica from 1897 to 1904. It examines the strategic settlement of Cretan Muslim refugees in territories situated between Benghazi and Derna and in al-Jabal al-Akhdar following the Cretan insurrection of 1897–98. I argue that Cretan Muslim refugees-turned-settlers served as skilled agriculturalists and experienced armed sentries who were integral to the Ottoman state's plans for economic development and expansionism in Cyrenaica. Focusing particularly on ‘Ayn al-Shahhat and Marsa Susa, this article contends that the establishment of Cretan Muslim agricultural colonies served to undermine the political and economic position of the Sanusi order by appropriating the order's properties and access to resources. This work offers a new perspective on how the Ottoman state reasserted its sovereignty in its frontier territory in Cyrenaica by harnessing the power of migration.

“They say the city never sleeps, they say it bursts at the seams. The city rotates and revolves. The city branches out. The city beats, the city bleeds.” This unnamed city is Cairo, Umm al-Dunya or “mother of the world,” at once a vibrant character and the pulsating backdrop of Ahmed Naji's scandal-rousing Istikhdam al-Hayat (Using Life) and countless other works in Egyptian literature. Cairo, Amitav Ghosh has argued in his autobiographical chronicle of historical research and anthropological fieldwork in the Egyptian Delta in 1980 and beyond, is “Egypt's own metaphor for itself.” If that is the case, what does this sprawling and pervasive synecdoche reveal and what does it obscure?

If a major city, the major administrative capital of the south and an integral part of how the system reproduces itself, is invisible beyond an occasional passing reference in the familiar narrative of the history of a country, something has gone amiss. Such is the situation of Asyut, a city so invisible that even the English spelling of its name is elusive—variably Asyut, Assuit, Assiut, Siout, or even Essiout—sometimes appearing to be a deliberate attempt to retain an ancient pharaonic or biblical rendering. So why is there this invisibility and how can it be overcome?

Every Ramadan, when Egyptian TV shows enjoy their prime season, at least one series about Upper Egypt is produced and millions of viewers across the country get hooked on it. Those popular dramas usually include a southern hero who is a good-hearted yet poor young man, and his reluctant turn to crime to stand up against corruption and oppression. With romantic depictions of dark and handsome outlaws, the protagonists of these shows always win the deep sympathy of their fans as they rebel against unfortunate conditions and resist local officials, rich elites, and/or corrupt police officers. One of the most iconic and memorable shows, which came out in 1992, was titled Dhiʾab al-Jabal (Wolves of the Mountain, Fig. 1). It narrated the story of Badri, a young man from Qena province, who faced police injustice and escaped to the mountains on the west bank of the Nile River to hide, and then joined a gang of bandits. The honest and kind mountain fugitives aided him until he proved his innocence, reunited with his lost sister, and married his sweetheart. For many viewers across the country, Badri and other lawless idols embody the only glimpse of resistance they experience in their repressed lives—albeit virtually on a TV screen.

Upon arrival at the Qasr al-ʿAyni Hospital in Cairo in 1908, a woman from a village in Qena province in Upper Egypt related her harrowing medical saga. It began when she developed a urinary fistula (nāsur bawlī) due to prolonged labor (a urinary fistula causes urine to leak from the bladder into the vagina, resulting in deep discomfort and social ostracism of those afflicted). She had gone to a hospital in the city of Qena, capital of the province with the same name, but medical officers there sent her to Asyut. There, in the government hospital, she underwent three operations without success, whereupon doctors instructed her to go to Qasr al-ʿAyni Hospital in Cairo to see Dr. Nagib Mahfuz (1882–1974), who had developed a reputation for his surgical prowess in treating fistulas. The woman from Qena traveled by foot, begging along the way, until, exhausted, she reached the city of Minya, halfway between Asyut and Bani Suwayf. There she was sent once again to the government hospital, examined, and once again told to go to Qasr al-ʿAyni.

What does a casual confrontation in a rundown shack between a landlady and her factory-worker tenant tell us about the history of gender and class relations in modern Egypt? Could a lost watch in a red-light district in the middle of the Nile Delta complicate our understanding of the history of sexuality and urbanization? Can an unexpectedly intimate embrace on a sleeping mat illuminate a link in the history of class, gender, and urbanization in modern Egypt?

Under a pseudonym in December 2011, I published an article titled “al-Jaysh wa-l-Iqtisad fi Barr Misr” (The Army and the Economy in Egypt) in Jadaliyya. I wrote it after months of participating in numerous protests in Cairo against the government of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which took power upon President Hosni Mubarak's abdication in February 2011, and of searching fervidly for the political sources that had allowed the military to prevail over civilian forces. In addition to the tanks and fighter jets, I found some of these sources hidden in a gigantic business empire that the military had clandestinely developed for years. In early 2012 the editor of an online edition of a widely read Egyptian newspaper, a revolutionary female journalist who would later be arrested and detained, invited me to write a series of articles on this business empire, this time using my real name. The first work in decades to be published on this taboo topic, this became the foundation for my later book-length study. As a scholar, this was my humble contribution to an ongoing revolution.