How do history and literature create a sense of ethnic or imperial community? And how do social and legal normative and disruptive narratives contribute to drawing the boundaries of such communities? To provide some answers, this issue brings together three articles on “Historicizing Fiction” and two on “Early Safavids and Ottomans.” In the first section, David Selim Sayers's article, “Sociosexual Roles in Ottoman Pulp Fiction,” analyzes “premodern sociosexual roles” in the Ottoman Empire through the Tıfli stories, a form of lowbrow literature that narrates the everyday lives of their protagonists in Ottoman Istanbul. This genre seems to have appeared initially in the 18th century, but it peaked in the early 19th century amidst the expansion of Ottoman commercial printing. As Sayers points out, the early 19th century was also a period that witnessed a major transformation of the sociosexual order of the Middle East, perhaps explaining why the authors of the Tıfli stories reflected on the prior order in their writing. Sayers argues that whereas most sources on this subject are prescriptive and transgressive, seeking to “outline, defend, or undermine sociosexual norms,” the Tıfli stories “portray the conflict that ensues when these norms are compromised in suspenseful yet relatable ways.” Through his analysis of these stories, Sayers blurs the lines between roles such as the boy-beloved, the female adolescent, and the adult male and female pursuer, which in other sources and analyses appear self-contained. Yet he also makes an effort “to advance beyond a definition of the roles towards an understanding of how they were negotiated by subjects of history.”

The sociosexual world of the premodern Middle East has been studied through a variety of sources ranging from legal documents to shadow theater. Most such sources are either prescriptive or transgressive: they uphold or subvert a normative framework, telling us more about the framework itself than about how it was inhabited by subjects in everyday life. This study introduces the Tıfli stories as a descriptive source that transcends the prescriptive–transgressive dichotomy. An Ottoman-Turkish genre of prose fiction produced at least from the 18th to the 20th century, the Tıfli stories were a protorealist form of “pulp fiction.” Where most sources sought to stabilize specific sociosexual roles, the Tıfli stories explored the ambiguities inherent in these roles. This study employs the Tıfli stories to interrogate understandings of the Ottoman sociosexual world that rely strongly on normative sources and to stage an approximation of how norms were negotiated in practice.

This article examines modernist-nationalist thought on Sufi lodges during the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic via the controversial novel Nur Baba (1922) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu. Widely translated and the basis of the first-ever Turkish motion picture, Nur Baba depicts a debauched Sufi lodge in turn-of-the-century Istanbul where drug use, alcoholism, and illicit amorous liaisons run amok. The novel played an important role in shaping public perceptions of Sufi lodges in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire. This piece explores the novel's place among early 20th-century critiques of Sufism, its approach to national history, its historical setting (during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II), and its close relationship to the intellectual concerns of the Second Constitutional Period (1908–18). It argues for a revised understanding of the novel's historical setting and contends that the novel employs a combination of moralistic critique and romantic nostalgia that is central to modernist-nationalist treatments of Sufism that instrumentalize Sufi culture for nation-building purposes.

In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novel Jacob's Ladder (1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan subjects was Orientalized and relegated to the background where it served to highlight a European-like Levantine cosmopolitanism.

Armenian sources from the 15th century provide distinctive viewpoints on the history of the Safaviyyih Sufi order before the foundation of the Safavid Empire. The history of T‘ovma of Metsop‘ suggests an earlier intermediate step in the militarization of the order, which scholars have typically viewed as an unprecedented development beginning after 1447, and ascribes to the Safavi shaykh the idea of taxing non-Muslims to encourage conversion to Islam. A second Armenian text, a previously unknown colophon, describes Haydar's attack on Shirvan in 1488 and the suffering of the Muslim and Christian sedentary population, as well as an episode of interreligious mockery. It is probably the earliest extant source to identify the Qizilbash by their distinctive red hats. Together, these sources suggest ways in which the Safaviyyih order's development was conditioned by the multireligious environment. They are examples of the value of non-Muslim sources even for late medieval Islamic history.

This article investigates the opinions of three senior Ottoman jurists, Sarıgörez (d. 1522), Kemalpaşazade (d. 1534), and Ebussuud (d. 1574), on the subject of the Safavids and their supporters. Historians have treated these opinions as part of the vast polemical literature uniformly intended to justify an impending Ottoman attack against their Safavid rivals. Questioning the notion that all authors shared an undifferentiated attitude, this article underlines that, unlike most polemical literature, the opinions of these three jurists focused on the religiolegal aspects of the Safavid issue and varied and evolved in line with changing historical realities, the jurists’ divergent assessments of the Safavid threat, and their preference for different jurisprudential doctrines. Based on an analysis of the opinions, I argue that these jurists assumed a high degree of autonomy as producers and interpreters of the law and thus did not necessarily feel obliged to legitimate or excuse every imperial action.

In 1976, Michel Foucault gave a unique interview with the editors of the French geography journal, Hérodote. The interviewers pushed him to explicitly reflect on the many spatial concepts that pervade his writing, such as region, province, field, archipelago, and territory. In one reply, Foucault explained:

One of the first ways that many scholars of the Middle East encounter the region is precisely through the lens of “region” itself. Our ability to know the Middle East as a region today, we learn, is a complicated inheritance of imperialism, Orientalism, and Cold War area studies scholarship. To study the Middle East as the “Middle East,” in other words, is to be necessarily positioned within a contested and unequal field of knowledge, one whose contours are both historically and geographically specific. Much of the best research and teaching within Middle East studies continues to demonstrate that knowing about the region—and the world more broadly—is closely entwined with the politics of the region. The interdisciplinary spatial turn within Middle East studies has been and continues to be so fertile precisely because of that reflexivity.

In the summer of 2015, the UN reported that there were more than 60 million refugees worldwide, making the current refugee crisis the largest in history. Though the refugee crisis is global, it has a particular regional and local geography that demands attention. As readers of IJMES undoubtedly know, this crisis has disproportionally affected people in the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, a majority of the world's refugees have originated from this region. Five years of war in Syria is the most recent cause of displacement, but the American-led Iraq War in 2003 and the displacement of Palestinians with the establishment of Israel in 1948 have produced tens of millions of refugees.

Though a multidisciplinary field, Middle East studies has historically had little engagement with the theoretical and methodological contributions of the discipline of geography. In the wake of the Arab Spring, there was a turning point, as scholars of the region noted the importance of public space to the uprisings, thus sparking engaging debates about urban spatial politics. In fact, Middle East studies is not alone in its newfound affinity to geography; a shift to what many have called “the spatial turn” across the social sciences and humanities has put geography in the limelight. Geography is in fact the original “area” studies—geographers of the early 20th century saw the main rationale of their discipline as identifying and describing regions, and the region was the core geographical concept. The post–World War II area studies boom occurred much at the expense of the discipline; after Harvard University closed its geography program in 1948, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Columbia University, and other Ivy League schools soon followed and Title VI essentially led to the closing of numerous other geography programs around the country—including Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. A growing sentiment within the ivory tower found the discipline too ambiguous and asserted that a university did not need geography to be a great institution.

“Place matters,” geographers are fond of saying. And it seems this sentiment is more and more embraced by scholars in other disciplines. The current outpour of writing in Middle East studies that draws on geographic themes goes a long way toward showing how “spatial form can alter the future course of the very histories which have produced it.” At the same time, geography in Middle East studies is at risk of being provincialized over the long term, instead of taken seriously as a source for new approaches to studying the region. For the so-called spatial turn to endure, it must be transformed from a vague thematic concern to a more self-conscious analytical perspective, one that reveals the many competing visions and practices that constitute space. More reflection on the purposes, limits, and politics of thinking geographically in research on the Middle East is required.

Considering geography's potential to inform research and teaching in Middle East studies, it is necessary to acknowledge that the discipline's full potential in the United States—despite many accomplishments in recent decades—is yet to be realized. In American higher education, this lack of engagement always seemed to me a consequence of at least four factors in both fields’ institutional and disciplinary histories. As a matter of self-examination, we should first acknowledge that regional orientations in geography (e.g., the Berkeley/Sauer school's emphasis on Latin America and its indigenous and agrarian landscapes) often overlooked the area, leaving engagement with the Middle East more to the efforts of individual scholars and students. Second, despite recent surges in geography's importance and institutional presence on many American campuses, for a variety of reasons (not all of which are agreed upon) there were several periods in the 20th century when geography departments were eliminated from many of those universities regarded as leaders in Middle East studies. Third, forces of inertia—institutional, fiscal, pedagogical (e.g., offerings of language classes, particularly at advanced levels), and mental—set in place by the first two factors are impossible to overstate and difficult to overcome. Fourth and finally, American notions of how to define geography are often tenuous; this is true not only within the general population but also among scholars of other disciplines, compelling recurrent rediscoveries of the discipline. As a consequence—and apart from the contributions of individual scholars—only in the past two decades has geography witnessed significant exchanges with Middle East studies beyond select areas of inquiry in the discipline (e.g., urban studies), and a regional specialty group for Middle East geography within the American Association of Geographers (known until recently as the Association of American Geographers) did not emerge until the late 1990s. In the following paragraphs, therefore, I introduce geography as a discipline for scholars of the Middle East. This introduction provides a useful starting point as I proceed to engage with one (sub)subfield of the discipline that features routinely in both academic and policy-making engagements with the Middle East and its study: geopolitics.