This paper forwards the concept of homohistoricism as a historicism that narrativizes the nation's past as the site of illicit or authentic relations/affections that have the power to pervert or rescue the public sphere in the present-now. In the case of contemporary Turkey, I identify republican, Islamist, and queer homohistoricisms as divergent political projects with interconnected rationales. I analyze two sets of primary materials on queer contention from Istanbul's Gezi Park uprising: Protest records (fliers, brochures, zines, pictures, banners, posters) from Kislak Center's “Gezi Park Protests 2013” collection and the meeting minutes from 657 neighborhood forums produced and archived by the protestors. I argue that queer homohistoricism in Turkey as a contentious repertoire of invoking nostalgic visions of Ottoman cosmopolitanism and urban civility may succeed in authenticating a certain kind of queer politics, but would do so at the expense of perpetuating just as authentic mechanisms of oppression.

In Iraq, like elsewhere in the region, cinemagoing became a popular form of leisure in the 1920s and 1930s. The emergence of permanent indoor and outdoor cinemas during this period gave rise to new consumption practices, ways of inhabiting the city, opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs, and the creation of a leisure and entertainment economy that was both modern, international, and Iraqi. In the early 1930s, three Jewish brothers, Ezra, Meʾir, and Hayyawi Sawdaʾi, began transforming their family's wealth from one based in regional trading to a modern cinema business. During the period of British colonial rule, Iraq was forcefully integrated into a global, Western dominated market economy and the brothers tried their hands at several import and local businesses before eventually finding their niche in entertainment. They rented movie theaters, built cinemas, established themselves as prime importers of foreign movies, and left a deep imprint on the Iraqi film industry.

The global confrontation between the Axis and Allied powers during World War II accelerated decolonization in the Middle East. Axis propaganda supporting certain nation-state aspirations pushed the British to support nationalist Lebanese and Syrian leaders’ claims to independence from the French. After declaring independence, the leaders of the new Lebanese and Syrian governments sought to further secure their national interests by asking the Soviet Union and United States for help, establishing diplomatic relations with both countries in 1944. This calculated move proved effective. Josef Stalin, at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, opposed the continuously privileged status France enjoyed in the region and, in 1946, Soviet representatives advocated in the UN Security Council for the removal of French and British troops. US representatives also supported Syrians’ right to determine their government, but in more moderate and cautious ways.

By tracing Zionist and German Templer efforts to buy arable private property in Palestine between 1897 and 1922, I show the ways in which the changing balance of Ottoman and Levantine forces over land and labor—as well as political and economic institutions and social structures—facilitated settler-colonialism in northern Palestine. In this article, I examine official records of the Ottoman state, Jewish organizations, and Levantine, Jewish, and Templer real estate papers. I argue that changing capitalist practices in northern Palestine, driven especially by interactions of Beirut-based companies with the changing global capitalist market, facilitated settler-colonialism in the region. Specifically, Ottoman state-sponsored violence during World War I increased peasant dispossessions in the fertile region of northern Palestine, already in progress since at least the mid-19th century, making settler colonies possible.

This article examines the representation of the Cold War in Turkish children's magazines in the 1950s, contributing to the current literature on children in the Middle East and the cultural Cold War. My main argument is that Turkish children's magazines played an important role in educating and indoctrinating children to support Turkey's pro-Western stance during the early part of the Cold War in two ways. The first was the production of new local content in the form of articles, stories, and comics that introduced terms and institutions relevant to the Turkish experience of the Cold War as part of the Western camp. Additionally, stories and comics reflected anxieties typical of the Cold War, such as fear of espionage and fifth columns. Second, American comics, translated into Turkish, or in some cases repurposed existing comics, instilled in Turkish children American concepts such as capitalism and consumerism.

The idea for this roundtable emerged from a special session held at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) in Denver in December 2022. As nationwide protests swept over Iran, many MESA members voiced support for organizing a public conversation that addressed various aspects of the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) uprising. We thank MESA president, Eve Troutt Powell, for supporting this last-minute addition to the program. We are also very grateful to IJMES editor, Joel Gordon, for publishing these essays and enabling ongoing conversations about the WLF movement.

Following the murder of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini on September 16, 2022, her parents decided—despite the threats and intimidation by security forces—to hold a public funeral. Protests were ongoing outside Kasra Hospital in Tehran as word spread across the capital of Jîna's murder.1 The family transferred her body to their hometown of Saqez the next day. Hundreds of people traveled to the Ayçî cemetery within hours of the announcement of the public funeral on social media. There, they helped bury Jîna among Kurdish chants and songs. Kurdish women threw their scarves in the air and chanted Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom), among other slogans. In addition to the initial print reports about Jîna's murder by journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi—both of whom remain imprisoned for their work— social media participated and propelled the protests. Photos, videos, and other types of testimony circulated online. The funeral, solidarity demonstrations in Kurdish cities, towns, and villages, and the observation of mass strikes in the following days captured the attention of Iranians all over the country.

The “longing for a normal life,” (hasrat-i yik zindigi-yi ma'muli) as lyricized in what became the Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) movement's favorite anthem, has been front and center in the recent wave of social protests that has rocked Iran from September 2022 onward.1 At the same time, the movement's frame has been crystal clear in aiming for the rarest and most disruptive of social events—a revolution. Revolutions never foster normalcy; neither do they comfortably settle into something “normal” in their later phases. Whatever normal is, it is quite certainly not the authoritarian rule into which most social revolutions have historically lapsed. Can the pursuit of normalcy be revolutionary in any sense? In this essay I analyze the central role of normalcy in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and discuss how it helps us understand the movement's past and imagine its potential revolutionary futures. I first allude to the struggle of some Iranians to find a semblance of normalcy under abnormal circumstances in past decades, and suggest that Mahsa (Zhina) Amini's death determined the futility of this struggle for normalcy in the minds of many Iranians. I then analyze what it means for the movement to strive for “a normal life” and a revolution at the same time.

To make sense of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF), some have asked straightforward questions: Why now? What are the reasons for it? Who is behind the uprising? The Islamic Republic of Iran, its supporters, and its allies have responded to the last question by labeling protestors as spies or provocateurs influenced and supported by foreign governments or activists. By raising the possibility of outside interference to bring about regime change through the participation of willing or even unsuspecting Iranians, the Islamic Republic defends its extreme responses to the WLF uprising and dismisses the international community's condemnations of human rights abuses.

Appraising the roots of the Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) movement requires a different framework of power: internal colonialism. Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova argues that internal colonialism results when the direct domination of foreigners over natives disappears, and the domination and exploitation of natives by natives emerges.1 This process, I contend, has occurred in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the forty-year rule of Iranian clerical elites has subjugated a dissenting populace, especially women. The repressive gender practices of the theocracy in Iran have over the course of the past year prompted a unique internal anticolonial protest.

The vast uprisings across Iranian cities in the fall of 2022 caught many of Iranian studies scholars and academic feminists in the diaspora off guard. My first confrontation was with trauma. Like many others, I worried about the lives and safety of my loved ones, political dissidents and prisoners from different ethnic backgrounds, feminists and queer activists on the ground, and, of course, the millennials and Gen Z, who unexpectedly emerged as the new revolutionaries. However, with the first wave of emotional encounters settled, the uprising unlocked another level of cognitive puzzlement critical to my academic life. I struggled to find comprehensive theoretical frameworks and supporting scholarship within Iranian studies or Iranian academic feminism to help my media and scholarly audiences grasp what was unfolding. In this reflective piece, I discuss how the scholarship of Iranian studies and feminism/s formulated the question of gender in liberal and radical essentialist multiculturalism and argue that Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) urges us to adopt an antiracist and radical democratic approach, deconstructing the imagined Iran in the scholarship, and reconstructing it as a welcoming and inclusive discursive space for racialized and queer Iranians.

The death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, on September 16, 2022 following her arrest by Iran's now-suspended Gasht-i Irshad (guidance patrol or morality police) for apparent lax conformity to the Islamic dress code ignited protests across Iran. The protests, known as Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Azadi) quickly spread to Iranian diaspora communities across North America, Europe, and Australia. Initially, diasporic Iranians organized their protests to support and amplify their compatriots’ calls for justice. As the protests continued in Iran and the demands for change grew louder, some members of the Iranian diaspora shifted their focus from the Islamic Republic to the public shaming of Iranians living outside Iran for their purported support of the Iranian regime. Some of the tactics employed by those engaged in public humiliations of suspected regime supporters recalled Gasht-i Irshad's methods of trapping and accosting individuals for perceived infractions. These public confrontations were aimed at isolating, shaming, and silencing perceived allies of the Islamic Republic and, by extension, denouncing the regime for its abrogation of women's and human rights. I refer to this phenomenon among diasporic Iranians as gasht-i intiqām, roving avengers, which reflects a frustration with the absence of justice in Iran and targets purported proxies for the regime. There have been many instances and types of denunciations aimed at silencing and ostracizing individuals, academics, and institutions. As Daniel Block points out in his analysis, “The attacks overwhelmingly target women, most notably in North America and Europe. The victims include gender equality activists, journalists, foreign policy analysts and a historian, each of whom has been accused of colluding with the authoritarian Islamist regime in Tehran.” Block further points out that many of the attacks are anonymous or originate from fake social media accounts. The common denominator he finds among those who target individuals is opposition to “Western-Iranian diplomacy or reporting information that adds subtlety to the debate over how the United States and its allies should handle the Islamic Republic.”1 Often those deemed regime collaborators are Iranian American individuals, journalists, or institutions that supported the 2015 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the nuclear deal.

The death of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 sparked a movement that immediately captivated the Iranian diaspora around the world. The morality police had detained Amini in Tehran for allegedly improper hijab. Protests began in Iranian Kurdistan, where Amini was from, and spread across the country to regions and sectors of society that have historically been less involved in political protests than major urban centers like Tehran. What began as a street protest became a full-throated rejection of the status quo. Merchants, teachers, and students organized coordinated labor strikes, while protesters and security services clashed in the streets. Additional economic sanctions were implemented against Iran's government by the United States and Europe; the United Nations Human Rights Commission initiated an independent investigation of the government's response to the protests; Iran was expelled from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women; and the European Parliament cut diplomatic ties with Tehran. The United States has nearly abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) even as it was in the final stages of renegotiation, while calls by activists and the European Parliament to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group are ongoing.1 We also saw significant global solidarity protests in numerous major cities in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

“Woman, Life, Freedom” (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) is the main motto of the 2022 Iranian uprising that started in September. This revolutionary movement began after Mahsa Amini's murder while in custody of the Islamic Republic's “morality police” due to not wearing hijab “properly.” Iranian women have resisted the sexist policies of the Islamic Republic since its inception. They are protesting in the streets again, endangering their lives to call for structural political change. They have been deservedly recognized as heroes of 2022 in a Time Magazine article by Azadeh Moaveni, journalist, writer, and associate professor of journalism at New York University.1 Moaveni's approach departs from the Western imperialist and Orientalist image of Iranian and Muslim women as docile individuals, clad in black chadors, and isolated from public spaces. Yet her analysis results in a new misrepresentation of Iranian women: a counterimage that looks anti-imperialist yet projects another one-dimensional reductionist representation that also risks serving the Islamic Republic and fulfilling its need for international legitimacy.2

Aside from the obvious and central role of women in Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) uprising that began in the fall of 2022, two other (f)actors have played a crucial role in defining the movement's demands and propelling it forward, namely, students and music. University students have a long tradition of serving as righteous agitators of uprisings in Iran, both before and after the 1979 revolution, as does music in inspiring and soundtracking them. But in this arguably greatest ideological and political threat to the Islamic Republic since its founding, something unprecedented happened: the fusion of student activism and song in the form of a recognizable genre, unattached to a specific political ideology although fully supportive of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising and its demands for liberation and freedom for all.

By now, it is well known that the murder of the Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, last fall sparked nationwide protests in Iran. Aside from Jina, many other young protestors were killed, imprisoned, or permanently disabled, as security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran began blinding demonstrators by firing rubber bullets at their eyes.1 These ghastly scenes were accompanied by other disturbing and violent acts that included the raiding of universities, sexual abuse of students, targeting of minority populations, and shockingly the execution of young men for their involvement in these fracases.2 The Woman, Life, Freedom (Persian: Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) uprising, which erupted in response to gender discrimination in the Islamic Republic, promptly embraced other social causes. What began as gender protests amplified people's strident cries against political repression in Iran. Despite raising awareness of a range of sociopolitical problems in Iran, the gender focus of this movement remains its singular achievement. This uprising,whose slogan (Kurdish: Jin, Jiyan, Azadi ) gained inspiration from the struggles of Kurdish women fighters, has put gender issues center stage and restored women's presence as primary agents of change in Iranian society.

I had completed two months of exploratory dissertation research in Tehran in the winter of 2015 when I was called in for questioning by two men who declined to provide me with their names or that of the office they called from. We met in an unmarked building adjacent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in downtown Tehran. They were middle-aged and sat on opposite sides of a table with a framed picture of Ayatollah Khomeini. When they offered me tea, I declined, remembering my cousins’ hurried advice an hour earlier. “God forbid someone puts something in your drink and they take you away to a different location,” he had said.

Since at least the 1970s, Egyptian cinema has animated scholars of the Middle East; a by-product of a cultural turn in the discipline and broader interest in using film as a scholarly source. No doubt, Egypt's rich history of film production—often (and perhaps misleadingly) referred to as the “Hollywood on the Nile”—has encouraged scholars to use its films to examine broader political issues or capture the “mood” of a particular historical moment. Scholarship has mainly focused on films of the post-1952 era, often ones that reflect a definitive ideological bent or didactic message. The early period of cinema in Egypt, from the 1920s to 1940s, is much less studied. The perception of early Egyptian films as mere “imitations” of Hollywood and devoid of blatant political messaging contributed to consigning it to the dustbin of cinema history.