“At the heart of this topic is a puzzle (lughz),” my long-term friend and interlocutor Ahmad often said. I long thought Ahmad's interest in questions of disease at the intersection of psychiatry and Islam was only intellectual until I learned about one of his cousins’ past ailments. A skillful narrator, Ahmad had colorful ways of depicting that puzzle. “Imagine,” he once told me, “a young pious woman, a college student. Suddenly, she stops praying and studying, is morose, even aggressive sometimes. She locks herself in her room when she does not wander the streets, disappearing for hours. The family is worried, and they wonder: what is the problem?” Switching the tone from evocative to analytic, Ahmad continued: “In Egypt, when it comes to symptoms like seizures, hallucinations, and sudden behavioral changes, people use one of two main diagnoses: jinn possession (mass al-jinn) or mental illness (maraḍ nafsī). The young woman is either possessed or insane.” Ahmad's appeal to the imagination worked, as I came to think of Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image that can alternatively be seen as a duck or a rabbit, with the duck's beak appearing as the rabbit's ears and vice versa.

“I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show my guests what you can do!”

Over the past decade, there have been increasing numbers of displaced scholars from the Middle East and Africa who have come under sustained pressures and threats from their governments; only a few of them have been able to relocate to European and North American academia through scholarships and grants.1 Even these temporary solutions for displaced scholars rarely result in sustainable institutional solidarity in the form of permanent teaching or professorial positions. The lack of institutional support, coupled with discriminatory and racialized immigration policies, pushes these few fortunate scholars to either accept exploitative conditions perpetuated by the neoliberal economy or leave academia altogether to support their families. These challenges, along with draconian economic sanctions and restrictions imposed by the US Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on citizens of countries such as Syria, Sudan, Iran, and Cuba are only a snapshot of what displaced scholars endure on a daily basis while trying to do research, care for their families, and compete with scholars with privileged citizenship status for shrinking opportunities in the academic job market.

Egypt was at the center of a wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the region between 2011 and 2013, the common denominator of which was demands for a radical democratic alternative to authoritarian regimes variously formulated around social justice and political rights. While the Middle East was a major theater of these events, with Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen sharing the headlines, the processes that informed these uprisings were also deeply global. The year 2011 was a revolutionary year, maybe the last in history, when actors differently positioned in the neoliberal social landscape mobilized in different ways, from the Occupy Movement to the London riots. The demise, or better, defeat, of these movements has reverberated profoundly around the globe, highlighting the postdemocratic nature of governance in contemporary states. One of the effects of the rise of new authoritarianism across Europe and the United States is a palpable transformation in the asymmetry between outside observer and the local observed. Researchers now face a reshaping, in some ways a leveling, of differences between “us” and “them” and the distinct temporality used to underpin this asymmetry. Nothing could illustrate this better than the fact that as I write, Egypt's president ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi is enjoying a warm welcome in the White House. The narrative is no longer framed through the worn-out trope of an Arab leader aspiring to modernize his country through pledging allegiance to the leader of the Free World in exchange for aid and armaments; now the man in the White House implicitly pledges to learn from the Arab dictator. Egypt is the pioneer; the United States is the relative latecomer to the Age of New Authoritarianism.

The dislocations associated with modernity have driven scholarly, literary, and philosophical inquiries in various directions since the 19th century: Marx's materialist critique, Ranke's historical empiricism, Baudelaire's flâneur, Simmel's studies of urban anomie and alienation, Durkheim and Weber's sociology, and so on into the 20th and 21st centuries, and now reflected in this issue of IJMES on queer studies. Although there are vast differences among them, they share a compulsion to explain what appeared as massive reconfigurations of time and space. The proliferation of subjective possibilities was pegged to an acceleration of the former and compression of the latter; accordingly, on our radar appear the bourgeois, middle class, and worker in the long 19th century and gay, lesbian, and transgender in the late 20th, two moments of rapid globalization and subject proliferation. We are to believe that in the fullness of time all will be free and all will be good. However, in the here and now some must be unfree and some bad. The modern distinction between free and unfree, good and bad, subjects relies heavily on uninterrogated assumptions about the spatial origins, temporality, and trajectory of modernity.

Several decades ago, Gayatri Spivak asked the pertinent question about whether the subaltern can speak.1 Posed in the distinct context of Western colonial empire, her interrogation remains relevant to this day: Can those confined to the lower rungs of an informally hierarchical, Western-dominated liberal international order be expected to speak, and be heard, in ways that respect their agency? The 2020 war around Nagorno-Karabakh raised this issue in stark relief. In media reports, think tank analyses, seminar and conference panels, and policy pronouncements, clear hierarchies appeared at play.

This article provides an ethnographic account of automated surveillance technologies' impact in the occupied West Bank, taking Blue Wolf—a biometric identification system deployed by the Israeli army—as a case study. Interviews with Palestinian residents of Hebron subjected to intensive surveillance, a senior Israeli general turned biometric start-up founder, and testimonies from veterans tasked with building up Blue Wolf's database provide a rare view into the uneven texture of life under algorithmic surveillance. Their narratives reveal how automated surveillance systems function as a form of state-sponsored terror. As a globalized information economy intersects with the eliminatory aims of Israeli settler colonialism in Hebron, new surveillance technologies erode Palestinian social life while allowing technocratic settlers to recast the violence of occupation as an opportunity for capital investment and growth. Attending to the texture of life under algorithmic surveillance in Hebron ultimately reorients theories of accumulation and dispossession in the digital age away from purely economistic framings. Instead, I foreground the violent political imperatives that drive innovations in surveillance, in Palestine and worldwide.

During the British Mandate period Zionist health organizations and professional groups made an extensive effort to educate the Jewish public in health and hygiene. This article analyzes the Hebrew popular-scientific discourse of hygiene. It looks at the inculcation of hygienic models of conduct as part of a project of modernization and Westernization. As the analysis demonstrates, Zionist identity was constructed as modern and Western in opposition to the Orient and Oriental ways of life. At the same time, “Occidental” and “Oriental” were unstable and sometimes ambivalent categories in the hygienic discourse. Not only the value of the categories sometimes differ (as Jews were depicted both as European settlers and as natives of the Orient), but also East European Jews appeared both as objects and as subjects of a “civilizing mission.” As a consequence, the construction of difference between European Jews and Orientals was not always grounded in different practices attributed to each of these groups but sometimes in the different value attached to the same practices when performed by members of different groups.

Uri Davis has written a valuable book in which he advances a very progressive project indeed. Davis is first and foremost committed to human rights. Whereas he acknowledges that liberalism, the ideological narrative of Western universalism, informs this discourse, Davis dismisses the critique of human rights as mere cultural imperialism from the West. Human rights, according to Davis, are spared what may otherwise be a justifiable critique of liberalism by virtue of their incorporation into the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, this declaration is universal law, and state membership in the United Nations necessarily implies respect for it.

This issue opens with an article by a pioneering scholar of Ottoman economic history, the late Donald Quataert. In the summer of 2010, Quataert wrote to inquire whether IJMES would be interested in a piece he had recently written on a corrupt Ottoman official in the coal mining district of Ereğli. Because the manuscript was too long for IJMES, Quataert revised it during a holiday in the “spectacular” Eastern Sierras. He passed away from cancer in February 2011 before learning that his article had been accepted for publication. His wife, Jean Quataert, a professor of history at Binghamton University and a coeditor of the Journal of Women's History, suggested that we work with one of her husband's students, David Gutman, to respond to reviewers’ suggestions and prepare the piece for publication. The editors of IJMES thank Jean Quataert for giving us permission to publish the piece and David Gutman for stepping into his mentor's shoes—no small task—and serving as a second author. We are honored to be able to publish Donald Quataert's final project, “Coal Mines, the Palace, and Struggles over Power, Capital, and Justice in the Late Ottoman Empire,” as testimony to a lifetime of innovative scholarship. A richly documented microhistorical account based on nineteen witness testimonies, the article experiments with narrative and shows state–society interactions on the ground, including the processes through which subaltern complaints were received and managed by the central Ottoman state as well as the ways these processes may have begun to fracture in the late Hamidian era.

In English the terms “political system” and “political regime” are used to distinguish different constructs. The first was initially developed by behavioralists such as David Easton and Gabriel Almond to replace the older, institutionalist term, the “state”; the second typically designates the arrangements for producing a government. In Arabic, though, the words “system” and “regime” both translate as niẓām. This piece argues that when millions of citizens across the Arab region came out in 2011 chanting al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām, those chants marked a critical juncture in a long process reflecting the end of not just the existing regimes, but also the states as we knew them. Whether defined in terms of governing institutions and capabilities, as Lisa Anderson, Ellen Lust, and Ariel Ahram do, or in terms of discourse, imagination, and symbolic power, as Ellis Goldberg and Charles Tripp do, the state was withering away long before the uprising. Concomitantly, the heightened levels of repression and shifts within official discourse by the changing ruling elite after the uprisings signal a perceived threat to the state itself, and not just to a particular regime. And while this piece focuses on Egypt, unlike some of the other contributions in this collection, I argue that the nation-state, as a conceptual and material construct, is being challenged.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was one of the most renowned Arab Muslim scholars of the last two decades. The main focal points of the scholarly work that established his brilliant reputation worldwide were a valiant hermeneutical approach to the Qurʾan, a radical critique of the highly politicized religious discourse in Egypt and other Arab countries, and a penetrating view of Islamic culture.

This paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17th-century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn, nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint at any taboo concerning male love for beardless boys, it does display a remarkable asymmetry between male and female same-sex desire; it also displays distinct views of legitimate and transgressive sexuality. Thus, this poem encourages a more historicizing view of the gendered and sexual dimensions of modern (Kurdish and other) nationalism, and a greater attention for the distinct characteristics of vernacular literatures within the premodern ‘Persianate cosmopolitan.’

The growth of private welfare in Syria since the 1990s and a parallel détente between the Baʿth regime and the Islamic trend have allowed an Islamic movement called Jamaʿat Zayd to gain an impressive hold on Damascus's charitable sector. Through a detailed, fieldwork-based analysis of this process, this article argues that the movement's success as a private welfare provider is the product rather than the cause of its large religious following. We also propose an empirically nuanced contribution to the debate on the current transformations of Arab authoritarian systems, questioning the regime's ability to effectively co-opt the Zayd movement. Whereas the development of private welfare is politically risk free when authoritarian leaders control the financial and symbolic resources needed to maintain it, it can also strengthen independent-minded groups when, as in Zayd's case, its funding stems from a large popular base that limits the possibilities of instrumentalization by the regime.

In 1970, I published in Mélanges de l'Institut Dominicain d'Etudes Orientales (MIDEO) a long article entitled ‘La civilisation musulmane dans l'æuvre du Professeur von Grunebaum’ which was part of a study in preparation for publication. This study although sympathetic was a very objective approach to the works of Gustave E. von Grunebaum. He appreciated it but urged me to make a personal critical evaluation of his work, without hesitating, if necessary, to contradict any of his opinions. As a close friend, I accepted willingly.I composed it under the form of 'some questions posited to M. Grunebaum'. He read my essay and found the questions provocative andinteresting enough to answer. But alas, death snatched him before the essay was published. As tribute to his memory and as a historical document I thought it would be interesting to publish it as is, without any recasting.