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.

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.

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.

When the Egyptian singer ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz passed away in 1977, a group of fans began meeting at his tomb to celebrate his memory and music. Since then, their gathering has become an annual multi-day event attracting thousands of the singer's devotees from across Egypt and the Arab world. This article explores the unique fan culture around ʿAbd al-Halim, tracing its emergence after his death and expansion into various ritual activities organized by fans. As I show, central to the affective power of Halim fandom is the sense that the singer is close and tangible. I examine how fan practices foster this feeling, but also argue that it is rooted in the music ʿAbd al-Halim made during his lifetime. Investigating Halim fandom, this article offers a new ground-level perspective of how ordinary people in the region interact with music, popular culture, and each other.

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 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.

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.

This article explores the turn to human rights of Tunisian Maoist activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many of these Tunisians later became human rights activists. I argue against prevailing views that ideological changes toward human rights in the late 1970s were the result of paradigmatic ideological shifts or the demise of socialist, anti-imperialist thinking, or an outcome of international human rights norm diffusion. Doubt or loss of faith in some or all parts of Marxism-Leninism led to a diversity of ideological transformations that were complex and hybrid. Drawing on interviews with former Tunisian Maoists, as well as on their writings, the article outlines the political and ideological environment in which they operated. It describes their solidarity work for political prisoners and explores their encounter with Amnesty International as well as the Tunisian League for Human Rights in its first years of existence, showcasing how multiple approaches to human rights existed among the activists.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.