Social media content creation is hugely popular with second-generation Arab immigrants to the UAE who lack a path to naturalized citizenship, particularly as a space to perform their belonging in the nation. This essay analyzes the work of two Arabophone content creators on Instagram and YouTube who use comedy to perform as quintessential “Dubai kids.” While they align with the state mission of presenting the UAE positively on social media, these creators produce ironic content that makes visible practices of belonging by second-generation youth who distance themselves from inherited politics of national and gender identity. The affective communities that form around these satirical content creators offer a model of belonging in which binaries of citizen and noncitizen can be elided, staging performances of immigrant identity uniquely local to the UAE.

Historians have long argued that abolitionism, as a distinct political project, never fully took root in the Ottoman Empire. While anti-slavery measures emerged from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, they are often seen as state-imposed responses to diplomatic pressure. From a state-focused perspective, abolition indeed appears to be the result of actions by the Ottoman state and international community, inevitably so, given its entanglement with the emergence and development of the Congress system in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna. Yet a focus on individuals, organizations, and institutions also suggests a subversive, practical abolitionism concerned with everyday injustices rather than lofty ideals. This paper examines such efforts, reframing abolitionism as a political issue rather than a moral one detached from broader transformations. By situating abolitionist thought within the late Ottoman Empire’s increasingly radical politics, it challenges the conventional state-centered narrative, highlighting the diverse actors who shaped anti-slavery discourse and action.

This article analyses the struggle for possession of the House of Baha’u’llah in Baghdad during the 1920s and 1930s. One of the Bahai religion’s most sacred sites, the House of Baha’u’llah was the subject of protracted legal and political-diplomatic disputes following efforts by anti-Bahai activists to appropriate it from its Bahai custodians in 1921. The ensuing case touched almost every facet of the Iraqi judicial system, galvanised the international Bahai community and captured the attention of the British colonial state, the Iraqi government and the League of Nations. This article explores the causes and implications of the dispute, which can be considered one of the first incidents of religious persecution in modern Iraq. Rather than explaining the incident with reference to the intolerant attitudes of the Shi`i majority, the article argues for the role of the institutions of colonial modernity – the Mandates system, the new minorities regime, the praxis and discourse of colonial expansion, and the internationalism of the interwar period – for the unravelling of the case itself and for affecting modern, secular articulations of anti-Bahai prejudice.

This article works to recover the life story of Qudsiyya Khurshid, a once well-known Mandate Palestinian intellectual and educator, who wrote essays for publication and for broadcasting on the Palestine Broadcasting Service, while working as a principal at girls’ schools in al-Bireh and Jerusalem. One of a number of educated women active in the Mandate public sphere, she disappeared from public consciousness after the Nakba. But in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where she had moved with her husband, a naturalized U.S. citizen, she became a prominent figure in civic work and as a community speaker on Palestinian and Middle Eastern life and culture. Recovering her full life story makes it possible to better appreciate the opportunities available for Palestinian women during the Mandate period and to similarly appreciate the efforts and impact of early Palestine activism among displaced Palestinians in the United States.

The present article is a study of Ottoman military recruitment attempts of Circassians in the northwestern Caucasus. It examines the process of realizing a Circassian highlander army and the administration of the Anapa fortress during the time of two different fortress commanders. Focusing on the deeds of these two pashas regarding Circassian recruitment and their social background, this study highlights the Ottoman-Circassian relations and the dynamics of loyalty and pragmatism. Specifically, the role of provincial networks in ruling the border fortresses and regional politics in the Eastern Black Sea have been underlined within the context of the Russian-Ottoman rivalry over the Caucasus. Rebutting the importance of the origins of Ottoman officers for Ottoman borderland politics, this study argues that the contribution of provincial notables to the Ottoman civilizing mission and the Circassian army project in the early nineteenth century has been indispensable to the realization of Ottoman establishment in the Caucasus.

The interwar period saw fitful attempts by British, American, French, and Russian interests to secure oil concessions for Iran’s northern provinces, in a region traditionally perceived as a Russian sphere of interest. Drawing on corporate as well as familiar state archives, this article argues that the contest over concessions in this region served political more than narrowly economic agendas. Although this contest was convoluted, repetitive, and ultimately inconclusive, it sheds light on the emergence of a world oil cartel, as well as the relations between oil-producing and oil-consuming countries before World War II. This article challenges familiar state-centered narratives of oil diplomacy and critiques the tendency to view the history of Iranian oil as one of all-out plunder by Britain and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It outlines the political as well as intellectual obstacles—obstacles not only to achieving a more equitable allocation of Pahlavi Iran’s oil wealth prior to Mossadegh’s 1951 nationalization, but to conceptualizing what such an equitable allocation might have looked like.

In 1901, Cemaleddin Dağıstani, a newly enrolled student at a madrasa in Bursa, sent a letter to his family in the district of Quba (now in Azerbaijan) in the Russian Empire. He excitedly shared what he had witnessed during his journey to the Ottoman Empire. Upon crossing the Russo–Ottoman border from Batum (now Batumi, Georgia) to Rize, he was met by Ottoman officials who registered him as a muhajir (refugee or immigrant). Alongside other muhajirs from Russia, including Circassians, Dagestanis, Tatars, and Muslim Georgians, he boarded a state ferry to Istanbul. In seven days, he arrived at the Ottoman capital. He recalled meeting Muslim refugees from Bulgaria, Greece, and Habsburg-occupied Bosnia, and Muslim subjects of the British, French, and German colonial empires. The lion’s share of muhajirs, however, like Cemaleddin, were former Russian subjects. In his letter, Cemaleddin marveled that at times of need Muslims from all over the world sought and found refuge in the Ottoman domains.1

On May 15, 1972, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Algeria’s President Houari Boumedienne arrived in the workers’ town of El Hadjar, near Annaba, to celebrate what appeared to be postcolonial Algeria’s most important economic achievement. In a festive atmosphere, Castro cut the ribbon inaugurating a powerful blast furnace constructed by the Soviet Union and a rolling mill made by the Italian firm Innocenti in the steel plant of El Hadjar.1 Promised by the French colonial state, but built step by step after Algeria’s independence by the government of the Algerian Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale; FLN), the El Hadjar steel plant was the heavy industry the country hoped would spur its industrialization, much like the heavy industry that once constituted the cornerstone of industrialization in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a major source of inspiration for Algeria; it also was a key provider of technology, training, and further technical assistance. Reporting on El Hadjar’s opening ceremony, the French newspaper, Le Monde, did not fail to observe that, “The Algerian government entrusted the USSR to expand the plant, increasing its production capacity [from 400,000] to nearly 1.5 million tons [per year] in 1977.”2

This article examines the Wadi Salib protest that erupted in Haifa in the summer of 1959 against the background of the history of the children in the neighborhood during the 1950s. One of the main causes of the protest, which was led by Jewish migrants from Morocco, was the educational and social condition of the children in Wadi Salib. During the Mandate period, Wadi Salib and the surrounding areas had already emerged as a focus of poverty and deprivation. Among other aspects, the article examines the changes that occurred in the character of the neighborhood after 1948 and the essence of Wadi Salib, with its street steps, as a liminal space between downtown Haifa and the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood. The liminal character of Wadi Salib was manifested in its status as an impoverished migrant area, in the participation of children in the protest of the summer of 1959, and in the educational, social, and health problems that faced the children. This character was also manifested in the manner in which the children of Wadi Salib challenged the physical and symbolic boundaries that enclosed the neighborhood.

The September 2015 military intervention launched in Syria by Vladimir Putin at the invitation of Bashar al-Asad marked Russia’s tangible return to the Middle East and initiated a 180-degree turn in the course of the ongoing war. Four years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, its repression, and its escalation into war, Moscow’s military involvement became a testing ground for Russian martial strategies, including “nonmilitary” measures and communication strategies. By exploring both textual and visual content posted on social media by Russian war reporters deployed in Syria between September 2015 and January 2020, in this essay I seek to highlight the ties between the embedded narratives around the on-site military intervention for Russian-speaking audiences, and the longstanding Russian Orientalist fascination with the Middle East.

The period of struggle over hydrocarbon sovereignty in the Arab world –the 1950s-1970s– saw a spate of periodicals in Arabic about oil. These included periodicals produced by the public relations departments of Euro-American oil companies, as well as monthlies, weeklies and quarterlies produced by Arab journalists, experts, and former oil revolutionaries in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut and Kuwait. This essay argues that the trajectory of these latter publications –both their context and content– traces the massive political transformations that saw a shift of power in the region, alongside a radical transformation in the representation of oil from a public good into a private property.

After an absence of more than fifteen years, Russian and Soviet themes began to reappear in contemporary Arabic fiction around 2005, as Russia started to regain prominence in Arab politics and Arabic writers began rediscovering some of the transnational entanglements that the Cold War’s unipolar ending had largely occluded. Contemporary Arabic fiction writers have put Russian and Soviet material to many uses; this essay focuses on four: satirizing Soviet internationalism through depictions of dormitory racism; mocking the gender assumptions behind Arab nationalism and internationalism; humanizing jihadi fighters; and speaking beauty to power. The sheer diversity of these uses (and of others not covered here) shows that “How has Russian literature influenced Arabic literature?” is the wrong question. Future research should ask, rather, what local hungers the Russian/Soviet legacy has fed, what artistic and rhetorical resources it has offered, and how Arab writers have reimagined it.

On October 5, 2023, Ubisoft Entertainment SA (Ubisoft) released Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the thirteenth installment in its video-game series launched in 2007. Since its inception, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has engaged hundreds of millions of players around the world; the most recent estimates indicate that Mirage players number in the millions.1 Set in 9th-century Baghdad, the game centers on Basim Ibn Ishaq, a character introduced in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020). The authors of this article served as consultants and collaborators for the game, under the auspices of the Digital Lab for Islamic Culture and Collections (DLIVCC), based at the University of Edinburgh. As such, we were among the external historians and institutions who helped create and contribute to the game’s educational feature.2 This article offers reflections on our collective experiences working on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, reviews historical representation of Islamicate cultures in video games, discusses the remit of the DLIVCC consultancy, and identifies some structural challenges to diversifying and decolonizing video games and game-development processes.3 Lastly, we propose steps for scholars and institutions wishing to broaden the impact of their research through decolonization work across the academic, video games, and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) sectors.

In 1926, an official delegation of prominent Muslim scholars from the Soviet Union visited Mecca. The delegation came to the holy city just a few months after the Soviet Union had become the first country to recognize the rule of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ʿAbd al-Rahman al Saʿud (1875–1936; Ibn Saʿud) over the Hijaz. The delegation’s members attended an international Muslim congress, met with Saudi officials, and performed the hajj. Before departing they issued a statement supporting Saudi sovereignty, noting that Ibn Saʿud had “purified the [Islamic] holy lands” from the rule of the Hashemite dynasty (r. 1916–24), the Saudis’ predecessors. The Saudi state warmly welcomed this Soviet support, publishing the delegation’s statement in Umm al-Qura (est. 1924), their official weekly.1

From the early years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, observers predicted that their de facto annexation might occur. Fifty-seven years later, it has happened. Although governed differently than other zones within the Israeli state, neither territory can be separated from Israel. Yet, the territories’ official status is that they are not part of the state. We offer four reinforcing analyses—legal, historical, discursive, and political—of this sustained discrepancy between what is and what is officially said to be. By analyzing Israel’s juridical techniques for regularizing the incorporation of territories occupied beginning in 1948, we show that de facto annexation has been Israel’s predominant form of territorial expansion. This helps account for the failure to implement de jure annexation, the intensity of conflict over attempts to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, and debates over the future of postwar Gaza.

Using the concept of the carceral state, this article articulates how Israel’s control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has shifted to a nondemocratic one-state paradigm. While, initially, Israel operated a separate military carceral system for these areas, between 2000 and 2006 it dismantled the military system, transferred most Palestinian prisoners into Israel, and rebranded its civilian prison service as the National Prison Authority, making it the sole agency responsible for the incarceration of Palestinians. This reorganization consolidated a single carceral system inside Israeli territory—the one carceral state— which serves as crucial evidence of the de facto one-state paradigm and forms a centerpiece of this new regime in Israel/Palestine. By analyzing a broad range of archival and administrative documents and 168 Supreme Court decisions on the management of prisons and Palestinian prisoners, this study reveals how the massive “exclusionary inclusion” of the Palestinian prisoner population in Israeli state law and its administrative mechanisms changes the entire landscape of the Israeli settler-colonial citizenship regime. Palestinian prisoners become “carceral citizens” of the “one state” and are subject to a parallel, alternate legality, in which they expand their repertoire of resistance against the wider racialized and repressive regime across Palestine/Israel.

In January 1935, Palestinian Islamic thinkers, in conversation with counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia, concluded that those who sold or facilitated the sale of land to the Mandate Jewish community must be excommunicated. This article explores the emergence of such religious excommunication (takfīr) in Mandate Palestine between 1929 and 1935 based on a wide range of periodicals and pamphlets from this period. It argues that, far from a story of an underlying “Islamic radicalism” which reemerged in a time of pressure, this is a case in which internal and external political and economic pressures necessitated a drastic solution which could distinguish Muslims committed to the Palestinian nationalist project from those who were not. In doing so, the article contributes to scholarship on both Modern Islam and Mandate Palestine.

The roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. However, this shared history has fallen through the cracks of academic structures that approach the two regions separately. This roundtable, part of a growing scholarly effort to heal the area studies divide, expands and reflects on the recently published book Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, which we co-edited with historian Eileen Kane.1

The Aswan High Dam was a cornerstone of two overlapping political projects. For Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dam symbolized a bright future in which the decolonized Egyptian people could finally claim their destinies and triumph over the twin forces of imperialism and nature. The Soviet-assisted megaproject acquired such symbolic importance that Nasser’s security apparatus carefully policed its representations in Egyptian society, culture, and intellectual life. For the USSR, by contrast, the dam symbolized Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s break with the Stalinist past, initiated in his famous February 1956 “secret speech” that criticized Stalin’s draconian repressions, isolationism in international affairs, and neglect of “the East.” Even as it led to economic, scientific technical, and cultural agreements with Afro-Asian states including Egypt, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization agenda loosened controls over political speech at home, unleashing powerful new political ideas, forces, and artistic trends. This brief essay will explore the overlap between the two projects, asking where they met and diverged and what this means for studies of political, cultural, and environmental history.