This issue of IJMES opens with a special section on the Arab uprisings of 2011. For the first feature of the section, titled “Reflections: Middle East Studies at the Barricades,” we asked scholars from different disciplines to provide brief reflections on how the events might or should change scholarship on the region, or the questions that scholars ask. The contributors responded with a range of suggestions for future scholarship and a variety of critiques of past scholarship. We will not attempt to summarize these critiques here. Instead, we would like to play devil's (or scholar's) advocate, by pointing to a few ways in which past scholarship on the Middle East has produced insights for understanding the unfolding events.

The first three articles in this issue, grouped under the subtitle “Insurgency, State Formation, Counterinsurgency,” all deal with historical aspects of nationalism and state-building in the 20th century and resonate with contemporary politics in the Arab world. Starting with Egypt, Omnia El Shakry looks at how student demonstrations in 1935 and 1936 helped usher in the “figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics.” This discourse placed youth at the vanguard of nationalist struggle and social change in Egypt “but only insofar as they could enact a non-antagonistic conception of politics grounded in national unity.” It also foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology in the 1940s, in which adolescence was “reconfigured as a psychological stage of social adjustment, sexual repression, and existential anomie.” Given the emphasis on the role of youth in the 2011 uprisings in Arab states, the article has potential theoretical implications for analyses of current events and discourse.

As this IJMES special issue on “Relocating Arab Nationalism” is going to press, democracy movements in the Arab world have toppled the old regimes in Tunisia and Egypt; uprisings in Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya are shaking the foundations of their respective governments; and protests in Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, and Oman have sent rulers scrambling to respond with some combination of reform and repression that they hope will ensure their survival. The events have had reverberations in Iran, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere; but they have clearly, at least so far, reverberated most strongly from one Arab country to another. This is reflected, among many other ways, in the protesters' self-conscious borrowing and repetition of chants and slogans, such as tūnis huwwa al-ḥall (Tunisia is the solution) and the ubiquitous al-shaʿb yurīd isqāt al-niẓām (the people want the fall of the regime). In showing how Arabist symbols, discourses, and identifications can be mobilized for purposes that are not only cultural but also deeply political, even when they do not involve any project to create a Pan-Arab nation-state, the protests sweeping the Arab world have made the recurring themes of this special issue more timely than we had imagined.

The first three articles in this issue, grouped under the heading “Politics and Cultures of Capitalism,” address various ways that Middle Eastern actors dealt with European capitalist expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They all focus on cultural and political aspects of economic change and maintain a global perspective while constructing an intensely local analysis. Gad Gilbar and Jens Hanssen trace specific institutions and networks in Qajar Iran and the late Ottoman Empire, respectively, that operated within what Hanssen calls the “interstices” of state bureaucracy, local business concerns, and European expansion. The interstitial nature of the arguments made by both authors is underlined by the impressive range of sources they draw on: Persian, British, Russian, German, and French in the case of Gilbar and Turkish, Arabic, German, British, and French in the case of Hanssen. The third article, by Nancy Reynolds, takes us from late Qajar and Ottoman societies to Egypt during the first half of the 20th century and from general commerce to the marketing and consumption of particular commodities.

We did not see them growing up. We did not think these jaded middle-class boys and girls would one day be resilient and hold their ground. We did not realize that they would be brave, supremely articulate, and driven by aspirations beyond our dreams. The whole thing started with the desperate act of self-immolation by a young Tunisian man. His death sparked a wave of rage against poverty, social exclusion, and corruption. Almost overnight, young men and women created spaces in squares, streets, and alleys where we could imagine new Arab countries. Enraged yet nonviolent, they used technology and the vocabulary of democracy to connect and mobilize ordinary Arab citizens of all walks of life and capture the attention of the world. In Egypt, Tahrir Square became the epicenter of the people's demands for bread, dignity, and social justice. Without leaders or a timetable, but with unconditional demands for immediate change, online activists provided us with physical and social grounds to imagine a new country. We all brought something to the square: blood, medicines, bandages, food, water, blankets, generators, diapers, mobile-phone chargers, garbage bags, wipes, and our own personal notes to the regime (and the world) written in bold letters. Mine just said: “Leave.”

“Relocating Arab Nationalism” locates various representations of nationalism in the Arab world in new and hitherto neglected contexts. The project was first conceived in a conversation among some of the contributing authors about the validity of nationalism as a research topic in a seemingly postnationalist period in the Middle East. This conversation turned into a panel at the 2007 MESA conference in Montreal as an attempt to contribute to a further shift of perspective in the study of Arab nationalism away from the realm of theory and politics toward that of cultural history. The articles in this volume therefore trace the contours of multiple imaginary Pan-Arab spaces between the Atlantic Ocean and the Tigris river, inquiring into the movements of people, terms, and ideas between physical locations and in time. The space is imagined but experienced; the people who moved in it were sometimes excited about its promises and sometimes disappointed about its corruption and containment. Such experiences are the focal points of the articles. They ask whether and in what ways a virtual Pan-Arab community transcending the borders of nation–states ever existed. They also present the multitude of national narratives that were at work—and more often than not in conflict—inside the boundaries of nation–states. The authors do not see Arab nationalism as first and foremost a political agenda of unification and cooperation but rather focus on the roots, establishment, and evolution of imaginative, symbolic, or “lived” ties between people(s) who claimed to belong to an Arab national community, or tried to claim space for dissident minorities through counterhegemonic narratives. Case studies from Algerian, Moroccan, Syro-Palestinian, and Iraqi contexts from the interwar to the postindependence periods investigate the ways these ties of community were established beyond the rhetoric of textbooks and political speeches.

A public discourse of “youth crisis” emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, “adolescence” had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly consolidated disciplinary space of psychology and was reconfigured as a psychological stage of social adjustment, sexual repression, and existential anomie. Adolescence—perceived as both a collective temporality and a depoliticized individual interiority—became a volatile stage linked to a psychoanalytic notion of sexuality as libidinal raw energy, displacing other collective temporalities and geographies. New discursive formations, for example, of a psychology centered on unconscious sexual impulses and a cavernous interiority, and new social types, such as the “juvenile delinquent,” coalesced around the figure of adolescence in postwar Egypt.

European merchants and investors doing business in the Middle East during the long 19th century expected that commercial disputes in mixed cases would be conducted according to procedures and laws familiar to and accepted by them. In the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, mixed courts based on the French commercial code were established during that century. The Qajars, however, offered the foreign commercial community a different judicial institution: the local kārguzār (agent) and his majlis (court). By the beginning of the 20th century, thirty-six kārguzār offices operated in Iranian towns and harbors. Nevertheless, foreign (mainly British) merchants and their consuls complained bitterly that it was not an effective institution and that it clearly favored the local tujjār (big merchants). They claimed that these defects meant huge financial losses to them. The Qajars viewed this institution and its functioning differently. It served their policy of discouraging foreign penetration, and it contributed to the competitiveness of the Iranian tujjār in their struggle for commercial superiority.

The foundations of both Arab and Turkish nationalism lay in the late Ottoman mass education and conscription project and in the region-wide struggle against colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s. The anticolonial insurgencies of the 1920s and 1930s have passed into history as the formative expressions of new nations: the Turkish War of Independence, the Iraqi revolt of 1920, the Syrian Battle of Maysalun, the Great Syrian Revolt, and the Palestinian uprisings of 1920, 1929, and 1936. But all insurgents of the 1920s had been Ottoman subjects, and many and probably most had been among the nearly three million men mobilized into the Ottoman army between 1914 and 1918. The Ottoman State, like all 19th-century European powers, had made mass education and conscription a centerpiece of policy in the decades before the Great War.

This article examines the rise and fall of the Malhamé family at the court of Abdülhamit II. The point of departure is the flight and arrest of six Malhamé brothers and the accompanying outbursts of popular anger at them during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The analysis locates the historical conditions that made the Malhamé phenomenon possible in the interstices between Levantine society, late Ottoman bureaucracy, and European diplomacy and capitalist expansion. In order to bring into conversation the hitherto unconnected literatures on the Levant and the Ottoman state, the Malhamé story is framed in the analytical concept of transimperialism. This concept shares affinities with wider transnational studies. But it is also grounded in the specific political, economic, and social processes of the Levant—both within the Ottoman Empire and among it and its British, French, German, and Italian imperial rivals at the height of the “Eastern Question.”

In response to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt of 1936, a coterie of five prominent entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the Mandatory Jewish community formulated a capitalist binationalist resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This paper examines the genesis of and debate over the little-known Concord they proposed and compares it with better-known liberal and socialist binationalist plans. “The Five,” as they came to be known, were the only binationalists seeking to base political parity on economic integration. The occasion of their blueprint allows further exploration of the preconditions for an effective binationalist program, among them the structure of labor markets, political preferences of minorities and majorities in regard to sovereignty, and levels of mutual trust. Ultimately, binationalist resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were precluded by the Labor Settlement Movement's separatist state-building strategy.

Peaceful protests and demonstrations have swept through the Arab world, toppling rulers and advancing programs of radical change. Some enthusiasts for these movements have already proclaimed them a revolution. They predict a new Middle Eastern political and economic order. A new generation of young people—men and women, mainly in their twenties and thirties, using their skills in cyberspace communication and fueled by many frustrations—assembled vast numbers in peaceful protests that have thus far claimed many triumphs. They forced the departures of the long-standing dictators of Egypt and Tunisia and have demanded that the monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain reign rather than rule.

The specific ways that cloth—“foreign silks,” “durable Egyptian cottons,” and “artificial silks”—emerged as a potent and visible symbol through which to contest the relations of colonialism and establish national community in Egypt varied with the changing realities of Egypt's political economy. The country's early importation of textiles despite its cultivation of raw cotton, the growth of its state-protected local mechanized industry working long- and medium-staple cotton for a largely lower-class market, and that industry's diversification into artificial silk technologies all helped structure a shift from “foreign silks” to “the nylon woman” as tropes in popular and political discourse defining the limits of the national community and the behaviors suitable for it. Although artificial fibers considerably lowered the cost of hosiery and other goods, thereby expanding consumption, the use of synthetics like nylon rather than cotton subverted the goal of national economic unity between agriculture and industry.

Colonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territory and infrastructural development carried out between 1907 and 1934, dramatically transformed the social and political context in which collective identity was imagined in Moroccan society. Prior scholarship has highlighted the struggle between colonial administrators and urban Arabophone nationalist elites over Arab and Berber ethnic classifications used by French officials to make Moroccan society legible in the wake of conquest. This study turns to the understudied question of how rural, tribal communities responded to state- and nation-building processes, drawing on a unique collection of Tamazight (Berber) poetry gathered in the Atlas Mountains to illuminate the multiple levels on which their sense of group identity was negotiated. While studies of identity in the interwar Arab world have concentrated on how Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, and local nationalisms functioned in the Arab East, this article changes the angle of analysis, beginning instead at the margins of the Arab West to explore interactions between the consolidation of nation-sized political units and multivocal efforts to reframe the religious and ethnic parameters of communal solidarity during the colonial period.

The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for their own purposes (Žižek's impassioned, albeit simplistic, “freedom is universal”), others listened closely to the voices on the ground in Tahrir and elsewhere. Now, if ever, is the time to critically reevaluate some of our theoretical models, our tenacious binaries (chiefly among them secularism versus Islamism) and our catch-all monolithic frameworks, such as “the military dictatorship,” “authoritarianism,” and even “neoliberalism.”

This article explores the relationship between the administration of President John F. Kennedy and the Arab Baʿth Socialist Party's first regime in Iraq from February to November 1963. It demonstrates that Kennedy administration officials had adopted a paradigm of modernization through which they believed recently decolonized countries could achieve high-consumption economies with democratic governments. Because this process appeared threatened by communist-supported insurgencies, the administration developed a doctrine of counterinsurgency, which entailed support for the repressive capacities of developing states. Administration officials regarded the Iraqi Baʿth Party as an agent of Iraq's modernization and of anticommunist counterinsurgency. They consequently cultivated supportive relationships with Baʿthist officials, police commanders, and members of the party's militia, despite the regime's wide-scale human rights violations. The American relationship with militia members began before the coup that brought the Baʿthists to power, and Baʿthist police commanders involved in the coup were trained in the United States.

In his memoir Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk argues that Istanbul is the site of intense hüzün (melancholy) caused by the loss of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, like other inhabitants of the city, that is, Istanbullus, his life is imbued with this inescapable melancholy. Taking issue with the apparent anachronism of Pamuk's historical argument, I show how he constructs and naturalizes this association between Istanbul, melancholy, and loss of empire by creating a literary genealogy for his claim. Using the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope (a schema that recognizes and explains the patterns of fusion of time, space, and emotion as thematic constellation or narrative pattern), I argue that what Pamuk identifies in and derives from the writings of his predecessors is the chronotope of Istanbul. I show how Pamuk constructs the hybrid literary canon and tradition (that references Balzac and Joyce as much as it does Beyatlı and Tanpınar) in which he locates himself in the process of deriving this chronotope.

This article analyzes the exercise of state authority in Kurdish areas in the early Turkish Republic and discusses the state's ineffectiveness in dominating these areas. It argues that the mere existence of a highly ambitious social-engineering project, increased state presence in the region, and military power does not mean high levels of state capacity. Based on primary documents, this article discusses the problems of autonomy, coherence, and implementation that the Turkish state encountered in its nation-building project. It shows how the state's ideological rigidities and its shortage of resources and dedicated personnel undermined its capacity to control and shape the Kurdish areas. While the state attempted to regulate citizens’ private lives in Kurdish areas, the local society also tried to mold state employees in accordance with its own interests. A blurred boundary between the state and society was one of the unintended consequences of increased state presence in everyday life.

The three-week uprising in Egypt that ended with the removal of Husni Mubarak on February 11 happened to coincide with the section of my spring course syllabus on the Egyptian novel from Najib Mahfuz to Ahmed Alaidy. As was the case for many of my colleagues and their students, the rapid and awe-inspiring events unfolding daily before us pushed purely academic concerns to the margins of class discussion. This tidal wave of revolutionary politics erupting into the classroom forced me to the realization that my larger syllabus was not simply some neutral or systematic survey of half a century's worth of Arabic literature. I began to think about the largely invisible dystopic intellectual and historical paradigms through which modern Arabic literature is often framed, at least in the United States. The nahḍa/naksa narrative, which compelled many of us to read Arab cultural history of the 20th century as a story of brief “awakening” followed by irredeemable decline and corruption, is clearly no longer tenable in the wake of February 11. This same narrative underpinned the highly self-conscious postmodernism that began to emerge in Egypt in the 1990s and that reached its apogee a couple of decades later at the end of the 2000s, a postmodernism that was celebrated (though by no means universally) as the true beginning of literary modernity and the emancipation of the subject from the dead weight of a past ideological age.

In Algeria as in many other cases, experiences of exile and diaspora played a major role in the creation of nationalist politics in the 20th century; exile has also been a recurring literary figure in expressions of Algerian cultural politics since independence. This article examines a range of literary sources to consider the politics of language and culture in Algeria since the 1940s. It shows how identification with Arabism has enabled Algerians to articulate claims to community, solidarity, and sovereignty, first in a conception of national “salvation” against the colonial state and then as both a state-sponsored project of political legitimacy and an indication of the limits of that project. A sense of these limits can be gained by a brief consideration of the complexity of the country's sociolinguistic landscape and the often unorthodox creativity of its literary self-expression since independence.