Near the beginning of his classic work of historiography, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, Moroccan thinker Abdallah Laroui inserts a footnote about a study of the region by a Harvard-based American author who refers to North Africa as “no idea producing area,” a statement that Laroui thoroughly dismantles in a couple of sentences. In this short note at the start of a book written forty years ago, Laroui pinpoints the central problem in U.S.-based studies of the Arab region. The historically contested nature of knowledge production in the field cannot be ignored in any attempt to address the question of critical theory's influence on Arabic literature in the American academy.

In his recent article, “Secularizing Anatolia Tick by Tick: Clock Towers in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,” Mehmet Bengü Uluengin makes a significant contribution to our understanding of late Ottoman and early republican clock towers. Uluengin shows that Ottoman clock towers carried “complex and seemingly contradictory layering of meanings” (p. 31). These buildings were at times associated with Christianity and with European power but were also seen as modern extensions of the Islamic institution of the muvakkit (timekeeper) or as symbols of the Ottoman government and its modernizing project. The cultural meanings associated with clock towers were fluid, concludes Uluengin, and it was the context that determined the way clock towers were interpreted.

Few people can speak to the complex issue of Palestinian identity in Jordan with the degree of background of Adnan Abu-Odeh, a West Bank Palestinian who has made his mark in the Jordanian political establishment by serving in the Directorate of General Intelligence (mukhabarat), the royal diwan, the cabinet, the Senate, and Jordan's delegation to the United Nations, and as an adviser to King Hussein and his son King ⊂Abdullah II. Over the course of more than three decades of public service in Jordan, Abu-Odeh has been an inside observer and, at times, a direct participant in many of the major episodes in the Hashemite kingdom's recent history. He has also been a controversial and sometimes outspoken figure for both Palestinians and East Bank (Transjordanian) Jordanians.

In this important book, Laurie Brand asks whether the all-too-brief political openings in the Middle East and North Africa had a positive or a negative impact on women's rights and whether the many Islamist and women's rights groups influenced that impact. She begins with a thoughtful statement describing her background and philosophical orientation vis-à-vis her study (pp. xv–xvi). Many authors of scholarly books find this very difficult to do, but it is helpful for serious readers and should be an expected practice. She also takes care to define her terms. “Women's status” here means women's legal status and women's rights to organize. She prefers to use “conservative forces” for “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism,” though this varies in the text, and “conservative” for “traditional.” “Progress for women” means reproductive rights and access to divorce, though, as she notes, many women would ask for clean running water, good educational facilities, decent working conditions, and increased wages before reproductive rights and access to divorce. It is of course difficult to separate civil and political rights from social and economic rights; which comes first is like the chicken and the egg conundrum.

This article examines banditry, embezzlement, and other insider crimes along Egyptian railway lines during a period when British officials exerted centralized control over the Egyptian railway and financial austerity had a negative impact on the rail sector. By exploring the motives and tactics of railway crimes, I posit that criminals, by making claims on and use of the technology outside the purview of state regulations, expressed their heterogeneous desires to redistribute social wealth, repurpose the technological promise of modern railways, and confound intentions of colonial governance. Using new archival materials, this article utilizes a bottom-up approach to examine grassroots activism, everyday knowledge, informal networks, and the social mores and norms that criminals harnessed to discern infrastructural vulnerabilities and elude surveillance from the colonial state. Ultimately, I contend that criminal acts uncovered social crises otherwise hidden under the shadow of the exterior prosperity and stability of late 19th-century Egypt.

This book addresses an increasingly salient but still under-studied subject: the relationship between Arab states seeking to maintain and expand political hegemony over their populations and minority communities struggling to maintain their identities in the face of this centralizing and homogenizing thrust. Coming as it does at a time when the shifting balance between states and civil societies continues to dominate both the politics of the Arab world and the intellectual agenda of its students, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the region.

On 10 June 1738 Maria Qari wrote her Catholic Melkite bishop, Athnasius Dahhan, an emphatic letter rejecting the authority of the Melkite church to impose the Eastern rite Rule of Saint Basil upon her and her fellow ʿabidāt (devotees). She unequivocally states, “It is important that your Excellency knows once and for all that I will only adopt the Augustinian Rule with the Ordinances of Saint Francis de Sales. I will not become a nun under any other circumstances, for God has called me to be free from all that binds my spirit, and I will not accept any oversight [from the Melkite church] . . . Four Jesuit missionaries are in agreement with me on this point.” This is but one missive in a voluminous record of equally rancorous discourses that spanned the better part of two decades (1730–48) and entangled the ten Aleppan devotees, their Jesuit confessors and supporters, the Melkite Church, and the Vatican.

Extant studies of Iranian nationalism accentuate the self-aggrandizing side of Iranian modernity, mainly achieved through, and informing, a process of otherizing certain non-Persians/Iranians, particularly the Arabs. I argue that equally important to understanding Iranian modernity is its lesser recognized, shameful and self-demeaning face, as manifested through a simultaneous 19th-century discourse, which I call “self-deprecating modernity.” This was an often self-ridiculing and shame-inducing, sometimes satirical, discourse featuring an emotion-driven and self-Orientalizing framework that developed out of many mid-nineteenth-century Iranian modernists’ obsessions with Europe's gaze; with self-surveillance; and with the perceived humiliation of Iranians through the ridiculing laughter of Other (especially European) nations at Iran's and Iranians’ expense. To explore this discourse, I re-examine the works of three pre-constitutionalist thinkers and writers within the broader sociopolitical context of late Qajar Iran, surveying their perspectives on shame, embarrassment, and ridiculing laughter, and showing how they were significantly informed by, while also helping to form, self-deprecating modernity. Given the strong, self-colonizing presumptions of this discourse, I conclude the article with a stress on the importance of re-exploring collective self-critical practices in modern Iranian history, culture, and literature with an eye toward decolonizing self-criticism.

On 15 July 1935, a group of residents in the small port town of Aqaba sent a rough handwritten petition to the prime minister of Transjordan. Its clumsy script betrayed the humble origins of its signatories. Inscribing their destitution in virtually every clause, the petitioners wrote: Because we, the common people and notables of Aqaba and its bedouins (ahālī wa-wujūh al- al-Aqaba wa-urbānuha) are in a state of poverty, our town being very poor, and since our poverty and our wretched conditions are not hidden from Your Eminence, our desire is for the cancellation of the municipality of Aqaba. Our town does not merit a municipality because it is poor and small, and many of its people have migrated over the past two years to Maan for the sake of making a living, and only the very poor remain in it. And the municipal administration of Aqaba has cut off from us the bedouins and others we depend on. Last year, they estimated the municipal budget at £P 60 [Palestine pounds] and it was not collected justly. Therefore we ask the mercy of Your Eminence in cancelling the municipality.

This article argues that the Aden Protectorate constituted one of the westernmost parts of India in terms of its political–legal identity and its place in the cultural project of imperial India. Although the port of Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency until 1937, the tribes of the Aden Protectorate were treated as independent native states similar to the princely states of India. Using the sultanate of Lahj as a case study, the article shows the extent to which the colonial state used the Indian model to elaborate a history of the sultanate as an independent political entity, a status that was then institutionalized in historical texts, ethnographic knowledge, and state rituals. The article concludes with an analysis of the protectorate's participation in the 1903 Coronation Durbar in Delhi as a means of demonstrating its place in the British imagination of a socially and politically fragmented India that extended beyond geographical South Asia.

Perhaps inadvertently, IJMES rendered a disservice to its readers by allowing Michael M. Gunter to review The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, by Guenter Lewy, because not only the book but also the reviewer pose serious problems.

Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.

Duldul, a beloved she-mule of the Prophet Muhammad and ʿAli b. Abi Talib (d. 661), fourth caliph and Muhammad's son-in-law, was a venerated riding beast in early Islamic tradition. The article argues that Duldul reflected the transmission of political authority and became a tool of legitimation for hadith compilers and medieval Muslim writers to use, contest, and navigate an emergent Shiʿa-Sunni rift. Exploring the responsive relationship between hadith construction and the Shiʿa-Sunni polemic, the article first analyzes three literary genres—maghāzī, hadith, and sīra—to describe Duldul and her role in early Islamic history. Second, the article examines the writings of al-Jahiz (d. 868) and al-Damiri (d. 1405) to understand medieval Muslim attitudes toward Duldul and she-mules in general. By taking Duldul more seriously as a historical actor, we can gain deeper insight into the disputes over Muhammad's legacy in medieval Islam.

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.