Identifying ethnonational mixed towns as an analytical and comparative category, we show how in Palestine and Israel such towns underwent six major historical transformations and how their history under Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule displays an emergent and bifurcated sociospatial configuration. On one level, they personify the political conflict over space and identity as it evolved from millet-based confessional communities to modernist nation-based collectives shaped by milestones of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. On another level, they form political and cultural arenas that defy the binary logic of ethnonationalism and urban colonialism. Avoiding the restrictive Manichaean conceptualizations of the colonial, the divided, and the dual city, we show how such towns embody segregation and exclusion while actively resisting them. Scrutinizing demographic diversification, cultural expansion, intercommunal relations, and the secularizing, modernizing effect urbanity has had in the region, our analysis, which emphasizes relationality, reconfigures the sociospatial history of Jewish–Arab mixed towns.

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A greater understanding of the politics of nationalism and identity must consider the importance of locality. This research, conducted among Muslims and non-Muslim minorities in Istanbul, Turkey, and Tel Aviv, Israel, relies on place narratives of Istanbul during the mid-20th century, when Istanbul was transforming into a predominantly Muslim, “Turkish” city. Place narratives reveal the multiplicity of interpretations of the national past and are thus a powerful resource for examining the cultural politics of identity in the national present. This research contributes to studies of national identity, which have traditionally focused on the top-down role of the state in producing the nation, by examining the processes through which ordinary people make meaning of the state-authored nation. I conclude that place-based relationships can transcend national/minority frameworks for identity, as shared ties to local place create feelings of common belonging among diverse residents

Through an analysis of Foreign Office (FO) memoranda dealing with the “recovery” of Assyrian artifacts, I argue that archaeology served important diplomatic and propagandistic functions in the eastern Ottoman Empire in the years leading up to the Crimean War. Dovetailing excavation with imperial issues of defending national honor, securing commercial markets, deploying troops, and even spying, these documents represent an underground genealogy for Austen Henry Layard, the key British agent in the FO's secret plot to transport archaeological trophies to London. This evidence implicitly challenges the romantic narrative of discovery and the paternalistic ideology of Western stewardship so firmly embedded in narrative histories of British Assyriology. Comparing the Victorian experience with a contemporary instance of archaeological propaganda—the playing cards issued by the U.S. Department of Defense to troops stationed in Iraq as part of a 2007 training program in archaeological stewardship—this essay contends that archaeology continues to rationalize Western imperialism in Mesopotamia.

This article examines Americans' uses of the Ottoman-Turkish past to justify different approaches to “Third World” development. Such invocations exposed tensions within American liberalism and projected them onto Middle Eastern history. One interpretation criticized Tanzimat land reform to emphasize agrarian democracy as the impetus for the development process. Another, reflecting postwar liberals' predilection for elite authority, relegated democracy to the end of that process by embracing Kemalism as its model. The article concludes by arguing that Ottoman historians influenced the modernization paradigm as much as it did them. H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen transmitted Ottoman reform discourses to social scientists through Islamic Society and the West, which the authors based on reform-era writings at a time when archival research was just beginning to transform Ottoman studies. Cold War intellectuals and bureaucrats appropriated their Ottoman predecessors' temporal and spatial perspectives in the effort to manage Third World change

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This article inquires into Israel's understandings of its conflict with Iran by relocating analysis from the realm of political–strategic issues, with which previous scholarship on Israel and Iran has been preoccupied, to the realm of culture. The article draws on works that read metropolitan and colonial cultures together, or contrapuntally. By studying one history (Iranian) as at once the condition and the effect of the other history (Israeli), I show that Israelis fashioned and comprehended the post 1979 Iranian polity on the basis of what they believed to be the (dis)ordering of their society at home. In this way, Israeli perceptions of Iranians as alien and threatening have turned into a defensive protection of the home front. Anti-Iran phobias in the Israeli public sphere reveal not only justified strategic concerns, but also fears of “Oriental” (Mizrahi) and ultrareligious, Iran-like “demons” operating within the Israeli polity. The Israeli sense of danger emanating from Iran is related to the very process of demarcating and safeguarding the Jewish state's Western character

The Arab cultural-literary “awakening” of the late 19th century, known as the nahḍa, represented the first phase of mass printing in the Middle East, a historic development of major implications. Underlying new trends in social, political, and cultural thought, it entailed the large-scale production of printed texts, introduction of new diffusion channels, and emergence of broad reading audiences. The present study explores one facet of these dynamic changes: the advent of private publishing first centered in Egypt and Lebanon. Through the individual prism of Khalil Sarkis—a Beirut printer, publisher, bookseller, and author (1842–1915)—the article examines early book- and journal-publishing initiatives by printers, bookshop owners, and others, as well as their motivations and dilemmas. The emerging scene illustrates a vivid and rapid cultural shift, arguably a kind of “printing revolution” akin to that which had occurred in early modern Europe.

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This piece raises the historical and contemporary importance of a little-known campaign of resistance to the ascendancy of the Turkish National Movement (a movement that would later spawn the Republic of Turkey) during the Turkish War of Independence. Unlike other acts of resistance carried out by Ottoman Christians and Kurds, the rebellion profiled here was largely led and populated by members of the north Caucasian or Circassian diaspora of northwestern Anatolia. As a population that became economically and socially disjointed through settlement along the southern littoral of the Marmara Sea, a significant component of this exile community repeatedly rejected forces led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). This article approaches the Circassian rebels' provincial origins and motivations and offers new insights into localist, as opposed to nationalist, forces that have both shaped and resisted the formation of the Republic of Turkey.

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This paper studies the intersections between military occupation and tourism in contemporary Israel. Focusing on two key moments of Israeli military engagement—the 1967 war and subsequent Israeli military occupation and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—the paper considers the ways that mainstream Israeli newspapers represented the conquest and/or incursion to Israeli publics through stories about Israeli tourism, consumption, and pleasure in the occupied territories in question. Drawing on postcolonial scholarship on colonial travel, I argue that these tourism stories can be read as “anticonquest narratives” that obscure the violence of the occupation by recasting it as a leisure opportunity. Both cases have been largely overlooked within the scholarly writing on Israel, and both expand our scholarly accounts of Israeli militarism by considering the quotidian, cultural avenues by which military projects have been enabled and sustained.

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Muslim women have often cultivated ritual activities that fall outside the framework of normative Islam as defined by elite male scholars, activities that are frequently characterized as “popular” Islam. Although it proves problematic to define “popular Islam” as a rigorous analytic category, it is important to recognize that different groups of Muslims (including the uneducated, the poor, rural populations, and women) have had differential ability to assert their religious practices as “correct” Islam. The idea of popular Islam has played an important role within Islamic tradition as scholars strove to stigmatize practices such as the mawlid (celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday) as customs of the unlettered masses. In contemporary Sanaa, Yemen, professional female mawlid chanters take different approaches to affirming the religious value of the mawlid celebration, one of which casts it as “folk Islam” in the context of a newly valorized national heritage.

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