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.

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

On November 21, 1914, Ahmed Cemal Pasha departed Istanbul's Haydarpaşa railway station for Damascus. A few weeks prior to his departure—after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary on October 29—Enver Pasha, the minister of war, invited Cemal Pasha to his mansion. At this meeting, Enver Pasha requested that Cemal Pasha, who was then minister of the navy, take up the post of governor-general of the Greater Syrian provinces and assume command of the Fourth Army. Cemal Pasha enthusiastically accepted Enver Pasha's offer to, in his words, “prepare for and carry out an attack on the (Suez) Canal, and also to maintain security and internal order in (Greater) Syria.”1 He secured his existing ministerial post in addition to gaining full authority as the commander of the Fourth Army and governor of the Greater Syrian provinces. Before his train departed from Haydarpaşa, Cemal Pasha addressed the crowd who had gathered there to see him, describing his mission as the “divine but extraordinarily difficult” duty of “saving Egypt from British invaders.”2

When I entered graduate school in September 2016, Turkey was mired in a series of successive crises. I had spent the first half of the year living in Istanbul, writing about the country's reception of Syrian refugees as a journalist and researcher. During that stretch, a series of suicide bombings and, in my last week in the country, an attempted coup, were formative for the way I made sense of future fieldwork in Turkey. I surmised that it would be wrought with unpredictability. My research interest in Syrian refugees’ access to Turkey's state services was itself marked by uncertainty. This uncertainty was tied to the nature of Syrians’ explicitly temporary legal status within Turkey and the broader domestic and geopolitical context that shaped the contours of Turkey's refugee policy. Given these layers of unpredictability both endogenous and exogenous to my research interest, I planned to design my research with uncertainty as an analytical focus.

The Ottoman state and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople during the mid-19th-century Tanzimat reform era relied on ethno-confessional and gendered differences, new administrative organization, and coercive institutions like the police to centralize and expand their power. Yet Armenian men and women used those same tools of power to seek justice in ways that created instances of disorder for their families, local community, the church, and the Ottoman state. Attending to the voices and experiences of Armenians through untapped petitions from Erzurum, Mush, and Van, this article highlights the ways in which provincial Armenians interacted with and navigated their diverse ethno-confessional milieus.

In the mid-16th century, the Ottoman government sought to expand its tax revenue from Egypt through a controversial initiative to levy taxes on endowments (waqf). The controversy produced a diverse range of responses from Ottoman scholar-bureaucrats, such as Ebussuud Efendi, who supported the initiative; Egyptian scholars, including Ibn Nujaym and al-Ghayti, who opposed it; and the Ottoman governor, who worked to resolve it. Despite the opposing positions of the diverse actors, shariʿa served as the common medium for the articulation and negotiation of their opinions and helped produce a compromise that became foundational for the Ottoman tax regime in Egypt. In this episode, shariʿa constituted an instrument of governance. Such a role for shariʿa differs from its conception as an autonomous field of scholarly interpretation, or the understanding of it as an inclusive normative system encompassing rules emerging from both the interpretative activities of scholars and the definitive edicts and orders of rulers. Shariʿa did not constitute the endpoint of rulemaking; rather, it provided the shared language of terms and concepts through which different actors participated in the process of formulating rules.

Although translation and commentary are often treated as distinct, separable activities in literary and intellectual history, the Persian tradition of Qur'an exegesis demonstrates that they are best understood in relation to each other. Introducing the concept of hyper-exegesis as a mode of interpretation that approximates translation, we examine the dialectical relationship between translation and commentary by focusing on how Persian exegetes have dealt with the so-called “disjointed letters” (ḥurūf muqaṭaʿāt). The disjointed letters inaugurate twenty-nine chapters (sūras) of the Qur'an. We show how six Persian translator-exegetes (the anonymous author of Tarjama-yi Tafsir-I Tabari, Isfarayini, Surabadi, Nasafi, Maybudi, and Razi) used commentary in response to their understanding of the Qur'an's inimitability. Persian translators’ confrontation with the disjointed letters are presented here as a case study of the ways in which translatability and commentary overlap and enrich each other. As a contribution to translation studies and literary theory, this research reveals how untranslatability is situated at the core of the translational enterprise, and how commentary functions as a mode of translating the ineffable.

This roundtable explores how recent social and political upheavals in Turkey have impacted ethnographic research in and about the region. We propose that an analysis of ethnographers’ experiences in contexts of disruption and uncertainty can offer important insights into both research methodologies and contemporary politics and society in Turkey. The past twenty years have been a time of transformation and, arguably, disruption in the Republic of Turkey. In 2003, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) rose to power under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As the following decade heralded a period of rapid economic growth and development, social and political changes also began to reshape institutions in consequential ways. In 2008, top military leaders were charged with participating in a conspiratorial deep state in what would come to be known as the Ergenekon trials. While these prosecutions were framed by the ruling party as critical to securing democratic governance in Turkey, they also marked a turning point in the AKP's efforts to secure and consolidate its hold on the state. After the AKP won its third general election in 2011, their efforts to consolidate power grew, and over the following decade Turkey would devolve from being recognized as a model Middle Eastern democracy to an illiberal democracy and finally an authoritarian regime. This political transformation was punctuated by key events, from the 2013 Gezi Park protests and the attempted coup of July 2016 to the resumption of armed conflict with the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê PKK) in 2015 and the government's crackdown on Academics for Peace.

Any fieldwork is inherently filled with tension arising from two fundamental yet conflicting obligations: first, the need to treat the field as an already constituted research object, and second, the requirement to continuously reframe, remake, or essentially reconstitute this object during the fieldwork. This double bind places the fieldworker in a blurred position, navigating between the certainty of the former and the uncertainty of the latter. My fieldwork on Istanbul's private security market in Turkey was no exception. While approaching the market as an already constituted research object, I also had to cartographically unfold it as I explored it. My research specifically examined how security, as a peculiar good and service, was translated into a market object in Turkey's private security industry. Despite its relatively recent emergence in 2004, the industry has experienced tremendous growth. By 2019, 1.6 million people had completed private security training, 1.1 million had obtained licenses, and around 320,000 were actively employed in the industry. This translates to nearly 3 in every 100 working-age individuals being trained, almost 2 in 100 licensed, and 1 in 200 working as private security guards.

What is perceived today as “living in an unknown moment” with global pandemics and ecological disasters has long become the “new normal” that structures everyday life at the margins of Europe and the Middle East, particularly in places with rising authoritarian regimes. As scholars working in and on Turkey, for instance, we have witnessed or experienced firsthand several moments of crisis over the recent years. We have seen the collapse of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane; PKK) in 2015 and the resulting surge in state violence in Turkey's Kurdistan, the 2016 coup attempt against the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) government by the Gülen movement, and the long-standing suppression, criminalization, and incarceration of dissent affecting, among others, students, politicians, journalists, and academics. These divergent yet interlinked moments of crisis have reshaped and often complicated, if not completely stopped, our research as ethnographers of Turkey. These moments of crisis have also pushed us to develop creative strategies and analytics to continue our fieldwork and provided opportunities to hone our research questions and methodologies in more nuanced ways.