During the month of Ramadan, on Tuesday, June 26, 1787, two hours after the afternoon prayer, or about 5:30 p.m., an “alarmingly dreadful event” (ḥāditha mahūla muz‘ija) occurred in Cairo. An explosion ripped through the heart of the city's commercial district, sparking a massive fire, toppling buildings, killing dozens, and pulsing buckling ripples and emotional shockwaves through the city. Late 18th-century urbanization produced countless such disasters around the world. This one occurred at a particularly trying time for Cairo, and Egypt generally, and serves as a barometer of Egyptian society and the economy in this period.

This paper illustrates the heterogeneity of Islamic publics in early 20th-century Turkey by examining the life and thought of Ken'an Rifai, a Sufi shaykh and high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ottoman Ministry of Education. It argues that Shaykh Rifai endorsed state secularization reforms on religious grounds and shows how he reformulated Sufi Islam by imbricating Sufi ethics with other social imaginaries of the time through the lens of an upper-class bureaucrat. This paper contributes to Turkish studies by highlighting the previously overlooked role of elite Islamic groups who collaborated with the early republic. It also challenges the dominant paradigm of a binary opposition between the secular ruling elite and pious masses. Additionally, this paper offers insight into broader anthropological and historical Islamic studies by demonstrating the diverse ways Sufi traditions adapted to modern governance.

The major project of Arab Nahda studies since the mid-2000s has been to develop an understanding of the Nahda that goes beyond the movement's own self-understanding; that is, beyond its rhetoric of “awakening” (the literal sense of nahḍa), national renewal, and rupture with the recent past. Scholars have approached this task in a variety of ways, notably by retracing continuities between 19th-century Arabic cultural production and that of earlier centuries; by analyzing the economic underpinnings of the culture of the Nahda and the salience of local class interests in its formation; by studying the relevance of transnational circulations of ideas; by investigating popular culture; and through detailed studies of individual figures and of subjective experience in the period.1 A central challenge in this reconceptualizing of the Nahda has been that of accurately identifying and explaining the shifts within the era; that is, in a way that neither simply reproduces the movement's conception of itself, nor fails to appreciate properly the social transformations of which the Nahda was a part. This challenge has been tackled with impressive results in certain domains of cultural production, notably the intersection between print culture and Islamic thought.2

Although it is customary to end an article with an acknowledgment, I would like instead to begin by recognizing the contribution of my close friend and coauthor, Shireen Abu Akleh, who was known to both Arab and international audiences as “the face of the Second Intifada,” reported on Palestinian suffering and resistance with the utmost professionalism and courage, and was shot dead by an Israeli sniper on May 11, 2022 while reporting from a Jenin refugee camp. This article is a personal and political commemoration of a dear and much-missed friend, and is intended to fulfill her personal wish to publish an academic article that related to her journalistic work.

The seventieth anniversary of the 1953 coup that toppled the government of Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran provides the opportunity to assess not only the history of Iran during Mossadeq's premiership and the consequential oil crisis, but also to examine Mossadeq's legacy, the oil nationalization, and the conflict between Iran and the West. Mosaddeq's personality and distinct profile, which continued to haunt the West for decades even after his death, contributed to the mythical place this affair has occupied in the Iranian national memory, but now, seven decades later, how do we use that period as a lens through which to examine other chapters in Iran's history? What can we make of the scholarship and sources about Iran before 1951 or after 1953? What is the impact of this affair on the collective memory of Iranians in and outside Iran as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century?

On May 17, 1924, Mohammad Mosaddeq stood up in the Majlis to complain about the government's inaction regarding a new oil concession for Iran's northern provinces. He could hardly have predicted the future course of his public life or how intertwined it would be with international questions about national sovereignty and natural resources. But he did know how he felt right then. The concession proposed for the Sinclair Oil Company was “of vital importance to the country and should no longer be delayed,” he said. “We should not come here only to take tea!”

Iran handed the world a surprise in 1951. That spring, its parliament voted to nationalize the country's lucrative petroleum industry. Euphoria spread as young Iranians tore down Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) signs and watched mighty Britain cower (temporarily) before the hero of Iran's oil nationalization, Mohammad Mosaddeq. Stunned by this brazenness, an American summary posed the question on the minds of many diplomats: “How did nine Persian politicians win sufficient power to destroy the concession of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company?” For the next two years the West tried to figure out how to confine this enormous shock to the petroleum market by focusing on the man it held responsible for the crisis. An aristocrat and seasoned politician, Mohammad Mosaddeq garnered the support he needed to break through the monopoly of the AIOC. With the world's attention on Mosaddeq and oil at the time, it was unclear to many (although not to Mosaddeq himself) that another monumental battle for the future of Iran was taking shape: the fight for women's suffrage.

On August 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq was removed from office by a coalition of Iranians, including Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79) and members of the armed forces, supported by the United States and Great Britain. The US provided considerable financial, logistical, and organizational support to the coup, which was code-named Operation TPAJAX by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although the British had been committed, in one form or another, to removing Mosaddeq since he first became prime minister and nationalized Iran's British-owned oil industry in May 1951, the US did not determine to overthrow Mosaddeq by coup d'etat until spring 1953, shortly after the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to office.

Even as it passed its seventieth anniversary, the 1953 coup in Iran has remained a hotly debated political topic. This is true in the public spheres of Iran, which saw its last democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, overthrown in the coup, and in those of the United States and the United Kingdom, which helped stage the ouster. There also has been an attempt at historical revisionism about the coup, usually by overemphasizing the domestic factors that led to the coup and placing less importance on the role of the CIA or questioning Mossadeq's democratic credentials. This revisionism has been robustly rebutted by the scholarly community, which has held to a general consensus on the basic narrative of the coup: that it overthrew a popular leader and that it took place with significant interventions from London and Washington. The release of the final batch of US documents related to the coup in 2017 (following many years of undue delay) also bolstered evidence for this consensus. But, although most public debates about the coup center on questions such as the constitutional process of Mosaddeq's dismissal or the relative weight given to domestic and international actors behind the coup, there is another historiographical question that has been subject to widely divergent perspectives in the field: the relationship of the coup to the Cold War. In other words, can the 1953 coup be considered a Cold War confrontation, or is this a misleading frame of reference? Both sides of this argument have often focused on the motivations of coup plotters (mostly those in Washington, DC, and London) and whether they are more readily explained by a genuine fear of the communist movement in Iran or whether this was a rhetorical smokescreen, masking the neocolonial drive for the control of Iran's resources. This tension is not limited to scholarship on Iran. Even as new global histories of the Cold War have grown in recent years, some have cautioned against the use of this framework for understanding politics in the Global South. Jeremi Suri, for instance, speaks of a “group of scholars” who have “questioned the very utility of the Cold War as an analytical concept” by pointing to “the ways in which this geopolitical term privileges state actors in the United States and Europe and neglects local forces of change, many of which had little apparent connection to the basic issues and personalities of the Cold War.” In his analysis of the global place of Algeria's drive for independence, Matthew Connelly suggests “taking off the Cold War lens,” arguing that such a lens did less to shape the views of historical actors (such as the Eisenhower administration) than “those of the historians who have studied them.”

A long history of political power struggles has shaped Iranian national identity. Each successive regime has sought to take control of Iranian political currents to reach its own objectives, and in the process has influenced Iranian identity in important ways. Few political figures in Iranian history have been as significant as Mohammad Mosaddeq in the shaping of Iranian identity, which he represents in ways that other political figures have failed to capture. His power to shape Iran's relationship with Western powers and his ability to project the image of Iran onto the world stage have enabled the endurance of his significance in the Iranian national psyche, which continues to show itself with his symbolic appearance in a range of political activities, including student rallies and public demonstrations.

A century ago, the Ottoman Empire finally ceased to be after a long reign that stretched back to the late medieval period, and, ostensibly, nobody really missed it. It was once possible to write about the fall of the Ottoman Empire as the overdue culmination of a process that gave rise to independent nation–states. But, increasingly, the empire casts a long shadow on the historiography of the Middle East, and its last days emerge among its most consequential for the future of the region. The same political actors who reshaped late Ottoman politics were integral to the struggle for the post-Ottoman landscape. These individuals included provincial elites from nondominant ethnic groups who, rather than embracing ethnic nationalism, remained Ottomanist in their vision of the region's future until the final moment. Newer scholarship rejects the teleology of the nations that emerged from postwar fracturing, demonstrating that the map was not redrawn by the victors in an instant. It was forged, instead, through armed struggles against European imperial powers and among rival movements that lasted for years. One hundred years after the Ottoman Empire's collapse, historians are still excavating its long-ignored relevance for understanding the modern Middle East, which was buried under the weight of nationalist and Orientalist metanarratives that never questioned the inevitability of its demise.

Why did the Egyptian revolution happen? How did it happen? Was it planned? What did it achieve? Was it defeated? These are some of the questions that usually surface in January each year, and during grim anniversaries of the infamous massacres that Egyptians witnessed after the 2013 military coup against Egypt's first elected president.