Much of the scholarship on the history of Iranian cinema considers film spectatorship in the first three decades of the 20th century as a leisure practice with origins in royalist and elitist entertainment forms. However, a close reading of archival material from this era reveals that cinema's significance extended well beyond its role as a pastime, as it became engaged in the governance of the self and disciplinary strategies of the state in Iran's experience of modernity in the early 20th century. In this article, I reperiodize the history of cinema in Iran by demonstrating the entanglement of cinema in popular nationalist discourses on education prior to cinema's institutionalization in the 1930s. Drawing on newspaper articles, film announcements, official documents, and poems, I show how, despite the absence of a centralized cinema institution in the 1910s and early 1920s, cosmopolitan citizens in dialogue with global trends promoted cinema as a means for the governance of selfhood and moral edification in the service of national progress. With the appropriation of cinema by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s, cinema was used as a technique of governmentality that aimed to conduct the conduct of individuals and shape an Iranian civic society.

This volume does not “distill more than four decades of research,” as its jacket blurb asserts, but brings together eleven articles on Farabi's “political philosophy” by Muhsin Mahdi published between 1963 and 1999. They are arranged in the book in three parts. The first, introductory part contains two general essays titled “The Political Orientation of Islamic Philosophy” and “Philosophy and Political Thought,” and a historical study on “The Foundation of Islamic Philosophy.” The second and third parts contain seven articles, which present detailed readings of eight selections from Mahdi's canon of Farabi's “political” writings: Enumeration of the Sciences (chap. 5), Book of Religion, Virtuous City (second half), Political Regime (second half), Attainment of Happiness, Philosophy of Plato, Philosophy of Aristotle, and the second part of the Book of Letters (some of Mahdi's renditions of the titles are misleading; see later). Another general essay on “Religion and the Cyclical View of History,” roaming from Plato to Nietzsche, concludes the collection.

Melani McAlister, currently assistant professor of American studies at George Washington University, attempts a multi-faceted and multi-layered coherence between U.S. political activities and agendas figuring the Middle East, and U.S. popular-culture appropriations of specific histories, religions, and symbologies of the region over a fifty-five–year span. McAlister sets herself a daunting task to interweave popular culture, politics, history, and criticism:

In 2005 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization accepted Lebanon's archaeological site of Nahr al-Kalb into its Memory of the World Programme, turning it from national heritage into a globally memorable text. I argue that it is not the content of the commemorative inscriptions but the mode of repeated commemoration that makes it possible to reinterpret potentially divisive markers of Lebanon's past into icons of national unity and a shared humanity. By focusing on the intersection of public monumentality, repetition, and the construction of community identity based on the logic of resemblance, I show that governmental elites at times of political transition need to make public interventions into the past to bolster their legitimacy, new commemorations are confined by rules and conventions of public memorializing, and the logic of resemblance inherent in commemorative processes can be used to convert a fragmented history into a memory of unity and strength

This article lays the groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty to recognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states as well as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions and modern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincial police forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority over territories where it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies of government. While acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie's emergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more with the Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and took on a uniquely Ottoman form.

This roundtable on women and crime was inspired by a discussion at a CUNY Dissections Seminar in April 2021, where Gülhan Balsoy presented her work in progress on Ottoman crime fiction in the early 20th century. The focus of her paper was a popular murder mystery series called The National Collection of Murders, which had been published in Istanbul in 1914. The protagonists of this fictional crime series were a mother and daughter known as the Dark Witch and the Bloody Fairy, who led an underground criminal gang living in a secret subterranean world beneath the city of Istanbul. While reading her paper the night before the seminar, I could not help but notice striking parallels between this fictional Ottoman murder mystery and the sensationalized media coverage of a 1921 Egyptian serial murder case, popularly known by the name of its alleged perpetrators, Raya and Sakina. In both the fictive Ottoman story and the Egyptian media coverage of a real crime, two sets of female relatives were presented as the respective leaders of a criminal gang that stole luxury goods from respectable families and turned their homes into human slaughterhouses. In both cases, the female gang leaders used “superstition” to deceive and trap their victims while continually outwitting the police, all against a backdrop of illicit sex.

This article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.

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Naguib Mahfouz's realistic treatment of his subject matter in Midaq Alley (Cairo, 1947) stands in sharp contrast to the symbolic mode of Tayeb Salih in Season of Migration to the North (Beirut, 1966). The style of Mahfouz here is simple, clear, and direct. His characters are common people who belong to the lower strata of life in Cairo and, more specifically, in the “Midaq Alley” of Cairo, this dark enclosed street which literally grinds down its inhabitants (as its Arabic name suggests), then carries on, indifferent to their plight.

Starting with Said's critique of Orientalism but going well beyond it, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of modernity have challenged not only one-dimensional visions of Western modernity—by “multiplying” or “alternating” it with different modernities—but also the binaries between the modern and the traditional/premodern/early modern, thus resulting in novel, more inclusive ways of thinking about past experiences. Yet, while scholars working on the Middle East have successfully struggled against the Orientalist perception of the Middle East as the tradition constructed in opposition to the Western modern, they often have difficulties in deconstructing the tradition within, that is, the premodern past. They have traced the alternative and multiple forms of modernities in Middle Eastern geography within the temporal borders of “modernity.” However, going beyond this temporality and constructing new concepts—beyond the notion of tradition—to understand the specificities of past experiences (which are still in relationship with the present) remains underdeveloped in the social history of the Middle East.

From the dawn of the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution until the consolidation of Hizbullah in the late 1980s, a network of Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian clerics played a crucial role in spreading the revolution to Lebanon and laying the groundwork for Hizbullah. Whereas the historiography of the post-1979 Iran–Lebanon relationship is overwhelmingly focused on Hizbullah, the present study, by drawing on oral history interviews with these clerics and archival materials, contends that the Iranian Revolution came to Lebanon primarily through these Shi‘i and Sunni clerics, who joined ranks and established the Association of Muslim ‘Ulama’ in Lebanon in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion. This study argues that these clerics modeled their struggle on the ‘ulama’-led and mosque-based example of the 1978–79 revolution, which this paper describes as the Khomeinist script, to transcend sect to seed a revolution in Lebanon and mass mobilize against the invasion. This article concludes that the ecumenical script was highly appealing to non-Shi‘i Islamists, a key factor in the success of exporting the revolution and the rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon.