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.

What is ethnography in times of war? How does war shape the conditions and possibilities of ethnographic research? How do the exigencies of daily life in a war zone ultimately prescribe and restrict what kinds of research can be done? In the following essay, I reflect on my experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Turkey in unexpected wartime conditions. During the two years that I spent in the field, a series of local and national crises disrupted a fragile peace that had lasted for the previous few years. Confronted with disaster after disaster, I was continually compelled to reevaluate my project—interrogating my research questions, changing my research methods, and assessing whether I would be able to continue my research at all. The war defined my time in the field and dictated the possibilities and limitations of the work that I was able to do. While I had planned to examine earlier histories of violence, ultimately the contemporaneous war and its effects on daily life, the politics of memory, and the landscape became a central focus of my fieldwork.

When researchers think of access disruptions, they tend to think of factors exogenous to a field site, those emerging from nationwide events or global crises. Especially in semiauthoritarian contexts, such as Turkey, where ongoing historical contestations (over human rights, minority rights, and freedom of expression) as well as current political polarizations have created a volatile institutional and social environment, ethnographers are more likely to find their fieldwork disrupted. In this essay, I draw attention to a different kind of disruption, one that arises from the endogenous character of the local field site. In particular, I discuss the impact of low interpersonal trust on fieldwork. While gaining access and establishing trust are universal challenges in ethnographic research, the issue is particularly a formidable one in Turkey.

The global confrontation between the Axis and Allied powers during World War II accelerated decolonization in the Middle East. Axis propaganda supporting certain nation-state aspirations pushed the British to support nationalist Lebanese and Syrian leaders’ claims to independence from the French. After declaring independence, the leaders of the new Lebanese and Syrian governments sought to further secure their national interests by asking the Soviet Union and United States for help, establishing diplomatic relations with both countries in 1944. This calculated move proved effective. Josef Stalin, at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, opposed the continuously privileged status France enjoyed in the region and, in 1946, Soviet representatives advocated in the UN Security Council for the removal of French and British troops. US representatives also supported Syrians’ right to determine their government, but in more moderate and cautious ways.

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.

Aside from the obvious and central role of women in Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) uprising that began in the fall of 2022, two other (f)actors have played a crucial role in defining the movement's demands and propelling it forward, namely, students and music. University students have a long tradition of serving as righteous agitators of uprisings in Iran, both before and after the 1979 revolution, as does music in inspiring and soundtracking them. But in this arguably greatest ideological and political threat to the Islamic Republic since its founding, something unprecedented happened: the fusion of student activism and song in the form of a recognizable genre, unattached to a specific political ideology although fully supportive of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising and its demands for liberation and freedom for all.

Appraising the roots of the Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) movement requires a different framework of power: internal colonialism. Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova argues that internal colonialism results when the direct domination of foreigners over natives disappears, and the domination and exploitation of natives by natives emerges.1 This process, I contend, has occurred in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the forty-year rule of Iranian clerical elites has subjugated a dissenting populace, especially women. The repressive gender practices of the theocracy in Iran have over the course of the past year prompted a unique internal anticolonial protest.

The death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, on September 16, 2022 following her arrest by Iran's now-suspended Gasht-i Irshad (guidance patrol or morality police) for apparent lax conformity to the Islamic dress code ignited protests across Iran. The protests, known as Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Azadi) quickly spread to Iranian diaspora communities across North America, Europe, and Australia. Initially, diasporic Iranians organized their protests to support and amplify their compatriots’ calls for justice. As the protests continued in Iran and the demands for change grew louder, some members of the Iranian diaspora shifted their focus from the Islamic Republic to the public shaming of Iranians living outside Iran for their purported support of the Iranian regime. Some of the tactics employed by those engaged in public humiliations of suspected regime supporters recalled Gasht-i Irshad's methods of trapping and accosting individuals for perceived infractions. These public confrontations were aimed at isolating, shaming, and silencing perceived allies of the Islamic Republic and, by extension, denouncing the regime for its abrogation of women's and human rights. I refer to this phenomenon among diasporic Iranians as gasht-i intiqām, roving avengers, which reflects a frustration with the absence of justice in Iran and targets purported proxies for the regime. There have been many instances and types of denunciations aimed at silencing and ostracizing individuals, academics, and institutions. As Daniel Block points out in his analysis, “The attacks overwhelmingly target women, most notably in North America and Europe. The victims include gender equality activists, journalists, foreign policy analysts and a historian, each of whom has been accused of colluding with the authoritarian Islamist regime in Tehran.” Block further points out that many of the attacks are anonymous or originate from fake social media accounts. The common denominator he finds among those who target individuals is opposition to “Western-Iranian diplomacy or reporting information that adds subtlety to the debate over how the United States and its allies should handle the Islamic Republic.”1 Often those deemed regime collaborators are Iranian American individuals, journalists, or institutions that supported the 2015 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the nuclear deal.

To make sense of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF), some have asked straightforward questions: Why now? What are the reasons for it? Who is behind the uprising? The Islamic Republic of Iran, its supporters, and its allies have responded to the last question by labeling protestors as spies or provocateurs influenced and supported by foreign governments or activists. By raising the possibility of outside interference to bring about regime change through the participation of willing or even unsuspecting Iranians, the Islamic Republic defends its extreme responses to the WLF uprising and dismisses the international community's condemnations of human rights abuses.

This paper forwards the concept of homohistoricism as a historicism that narrativizes the nation's past as the site of illicit or authentic relations/affections that have the power to pervert or rescue the public sphere in the present-now. In the case of contemporary Turkey, I identify republican, Islamist, and queer homohistoricisms as divergent political projects with interconnected rationales. I analyze two sets of primary materials on queer contention from Istanbul's Gezi Park uprising: Protest records (fliers, brochures, zines, pictures, banners, posters) from Kislak Center's “Gezi Park Protests 2013” collection and the meeting minutes from 657 neighborhood forums produced and archived by the protestors. I argue that queer homohistoricism in Turkey as a contentious repertoire of invoking nostalgic visions of Ottoman cosmopolitanism and urban civility may succeed in authenticating a certain kind of queer politics, but would do so at the expense of perpetuating just as authentic mechanisms of oppression.

I had completed two months of exploratory dissertation research in Tehran in the winter of 2015 when I was called in for questioning by two men who declined to provide me with their names or that of the office they called from. We met in an unmarked building adjacent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in downtown Tehran. They were middle-aged and sat on opposite sides of a table with a framed picture of Ayatollah Khomeini. When they offered me tea, I declined, remembering my cousins’ hurried advice an hour earlier. “God forbid someone puts something in your drink and they take you away to a different location,” he had said.

In Iraq, like elsewhere in the region, cinemagoing became a popular form of leisure in the 1920s and 1930s. The emergence of permanent indoor and outdoor cinemas during this period gave rise to new consumption practices, ways of inhabiting the city, opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs, and the creation of a leisure and entertainment economy that was both modern, international, and Iraqi. In the early 1930s, three Jewish brothers, Ezra, Meʾir, and Hayyawi Sawdaʾi, began transforming their family's wealth from one based in regional trading to a modern cinema business. During the period of British colonial rule, Iraq was forcefully integrated into a global, Western dominated market economy and the brothers tried their hands at several import and local businesses before eventually finding their niche in entertainment. They rented movie theaters, built cinemas, established themselves as prime importers of foreign movies, and left a deep imprint on the Iraqi film industry.

“Woman, Life, Freedom” (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) is the main motto of the 2022 Iranian uprising that started in September. This revolutionary movement began after Mahsa Amini's murder while in custody of the Islamic Republic's “morality police” due to not wearing hijab “properly.” Iranian women have resisted the sexist policies of the Islamic Republic since its inception. They are protesting in the streets again, endangering their lives to call for structural political change. They have been deservedly recognized as heroes of 2022 in a Time Magazine article by Azadeh Moaveni, journalist, writer, and associate professor of journalism at New York University.1 Moaveni's approach departs from the Western imperialist and Orientalist image of Iranian and Muslim women as docile individuals, clad in black chadors, and isolated from public spaces. Yet her analysis results in a new misrepresentation of Iranian women: a counterimage that looks anti-imperialist yet projects another one-dimensional reductionist representation that also risks serving the Islamic Republic and fulfilling its need for international legitimacy.2

The idea for this roundtable emerged from a special session held at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) in Denver in December 2022. As nationwide protests swept over Iran, many MESA members voiced support for organizing a public conversation that addressed various aspects of the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) uprising. We thank MESA president, Eve Troutt Powell, for supporting this last-minute addition to the program. We are also very grateful to IJMES editor, Joel Gordon, for publishing these essays and enabling ongoing conversations about the WLF movement.

By now, it is well known that the murder of the Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, last fall sparked nationwide protests in Iran. Aside from Jina, many other young protestors were killed, imprisoned, or permanently disabled, as security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran began blinding demonstrators by firing rubber bullets at their eyes.1 These ghastly scenes were accompanied by other disturbing and violent acts that included the raiding of universities, sexual abuse of students, targeting of minority populations, and shockingly the execution of young men for their involvement in these fracases.2 The Woman, Life, Freedom (Persian: Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) uprising, which erupted in response to gender discrimination in the Islamic Republic, promptly embraced other social causes. What began as gender protests amplified people's strident cries against political repression in Iran. Despite raising awareness of a range of sociopolitical problems in Iran, the gender focus of this movement remains its singular achievement. This uprising,whose slogan (Kurdish: Jin, Jiyan, Azadi ) gained inspiration from the struggles of Kurdish women fighters, has put gender issues center stage and restored women's presence as primary agents of change in Iranian society.

The death of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 sparked a movement that immediately captivated the Iranian diaspora around the world. The morality police had detained Amini in Tehran for allegedly improper hijab. Protests began in Iranian Kurdistan, where Amini was from, and spread across the country to regions and sectors of society that have historically been less involved in political protests than major urban centers like Tehran. What began as a street protest became a full-throated rejection of the status quo. Merchants, teachers, and students organized coordinated labor strikes, while protesters and security services clashed in the streets. Additional economic sanctions were implemented against Iran's government by the United States and Europe; the United Nations Human Rights Commission initiated an independent investigation of the government's response to the protests; Iran was expelled from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women; and the European Parliament cut diplomatic ties with Tehran. The United States has nearly abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) even as it was in the final stages of renegotiation, while calls by activists and the European Parliament to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group are ongoing.1 We also saw significant global solidarity protests in numerous major cities in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

By tracing Zionist and German Templer efforts to buy arable private property in Palestine between 1897 and 1922, I show the ways in which the changing balance of Ottoman and Levantine forces over land and labor—as well as political and economic institutions and social structures—facilitated settler-colonialism in northern Palestine. In this article, I examine official records of the Ottoman state, Jewish organizations, and Levantine, Jewish, and Templer real estate papers. I argue that changing capitalist practices in northern Palestine, driven especially by interactions of Beirut-based companies with the changing global capitalist market, facilitated settler-colonialism in the region. Specifically, Ottoman state-sponsored violence during World War I increased peasant dispossessions in the fertile region of northern Palestine, already in progress since at least the mid-19th century, making settler colonies possible.

Following the murder of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini on September 16, 2022, her parents decided—despite the threats and intimidation by security forces—to hold a public funeral. Protests were ongoing outside Kasra Hospital in Tehran as word spread across the capital of Jîna's murder.1 The family transferred her body to their hometown of Saqez the next day. Hundreds of people traveled to the Ayçî cemetery within hours of the announcement of the public funeral on social media. There, they helped bury Jîna among Kurdish chants and songs. Kurdish women threw their scarves in the air and chanted Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom), among other slogans. In addition to the initial print reports about Jîna's murder by journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi—both of whom remain imprisoned for their work— social media participated and propelled the protests. Photos, videos, and other types of testimony circulated online. The funeral, solidarity demonstrations in Kurdish cities, towns, and villages, and the observation of mass strikes in the following days captured the attention of Iranians all over the country.