This article reconsiders Turkey's 1928 alphabet reform by shifting the focus from the state to the social experiences of alphabet change. Rather than assuming an obedient and indifferent public silently following the decrees of an authoritarian and repressive regime, it explores the actual processes, institutions, and lived experiences of the alphabet reform by drawing on a variety of sources, including unpublished archival evidence and personal narratives collected through oral interviews. It draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of learning to read and write (the new letters) as well as to the persistence of the Ottoman script; it also examines the variety of ways that state authorities dealt with this persistence. The analysis of this particular reformist measure has implications for understanding social change and the emergence of a nationalist culture in the early republican period as well as state–society relations and the nature of the Kemalist state.

The speed, spread, and democratic thrust of Arab revolutionary uprisings conjure up the revolutionary waves of 1848 and 1989 in Europe. Spearheaded by educated youth, the Arab uprisings have been brought to fruition by the masses of ordinary people (men, women, Muslims, and non-Muslims) who have mobilized at an astonishing scale against authoritarian regimes in pursuit of social justice, democratic governance, and dignity. If this broad observation is valid, then these social earthquakes are likely to unsettle some of the most enduring perspectives on the region. To begin with, they should undermine “Middle East exceptionalism,” with its culturalist focus informed by assumptions of “stagnant culture,” “fatalist Muslims,” and “unchangeable polity.” In political science, students of “regime stability” and the “authoritarian resiliency” of Arab states may have to reevaluate their conceptual premises. The analytical relevance of the concept of “rentier state” as the political basis of authoritarian stability might likewise need serious reformulation. The blatant cash handouts by some Arab Gulf states to “buy opposition” during the wave of protests in February and March 2011 do not seem to have worked.

Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the twin goals of centralizing state power and inscribing a uniform national identity on all citizens resulted in the proliferation of disciplinary practices that required changes in habits and everyday life as well as in the locus of faith, allegiance, and obedience. Nowhere were the repercussions felt as deeply as in the Kurdish regions, where the urge to create a new citizen sparked considerable resistance. This article suggests that alongside Kurdish nationalist movements, kinship networks and morality constituted an alternative reservoir of resistance to the new disciplinary practices that followed state building. By subverting state practices to make citizens legible, kinship networks, I argue, undermined the state's attempts to establish bureaucratic authority and create an exclusive identity.

After his premature death in exile in Beirut in 1937, the body of former Iraqi prime minister Yasin al-Hashimi became a matter of contention between the Syrian and Iraqi governments, as did his legacy as an avid Pan-Arabist. When the coffin with the deceased stopped in Damascus on its promised transfer to Baghdad, the Syrian National Bloc government used the opportunity to stage a solemn republican funeral to bolster its Arab nationalist credentials. Syrian conflicts with the Iraqi government that had removed al-Hashimi in a military coup in the previous year ultimately made Yasin's return impossible, however, and he was buried in Damascus, next to Saladin's mausoleum at the Umayyad Mosque. Unfortunately for the National Bloc, the funeral coincided with the first clashes over the Alexandretta crisis. The resulting street protests destroyed all public confidence that the bloc had gained during the funeral, underlining the volatile nature of nationalist politics at the time.

This article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.

When writing biographies of historical figures, narrative convention requires that concision and clarity be wrested from sources that are multiple and often confusing. In this article, I argue that multiple accounts of a person's life may be more than an accident arising from the way that information was compiled. Rather, such multiplicity renders exemplary figures adaptable to a wide variety of circumstances, making them even more useful as a focus of devotion and emulation. Examining multiple accounts of early Maliki scholar Sahnun b. Saʿ id (d. 854), including those of his travels in search of knowledge and of his suffering under the miḥna (trial) in Kairouan, I find that close attention to apparently contradictory evidence may not get us any closer to understanding the man himself, but it does offer us much information about the ways in which he was considered an exemplary individual.

This paper analyzes Iraqi national narratives in the years from 1958 to 1961 to consider how innovative definitions of Arab nationalisms were affected by worldwide processes of decolonization. It demonstrates how Pan-Arabism was transformed in Qasimite Iraq because of its hybridization with Iraqi patriotism and, concurrently, how various elements of Arabist discourses were integrated into local and patriotic perceptions of Iraqi nationalism. Examining cultural idioms shared by Iraqi intellectuals belonging to different political groups, especially the communists and the Baʿthists, destabilizes a typology that assumes each ideological camp subscribed to a rigidly defined set of well-known historical narratives. The Pan-Arabists in this period often cultivated the notion that Arab nationalism did not entail an ethnic origin but rather the ability to adopt the Arabic language, as well as Arab history and culture, as a marker of one's national and cultural identity. The attempts to adapt Pan-Arab discourses to the specificities of the Iraqi milieu and to build coalitions with as many of the nation's groups as possible meant that the sectarian, anti-Shiʿi, and anti-Kurdish notions that colored Baʿthist discourses in later years were not as prominent in this period.

The year 2011 will forever be known as the year of mass protests for regime change and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Opinions on causes and outcomes have focused on the role of young people, the demands of “the Arab street,” and the possible transition to a liberal, Islamist, or coalition type of governance. Middle East specialists have long been aware of the problems of authoritarian regimes, widening inequalities, high rates of youth unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure and public services, and rising prices attenuated only by subsidies. But something has been missing from recent discussions and analyses. Let us pose it in the form of a number of (socialist-feminist) questions. We have seen that “the Arab street” is not exclusively masculine, but what kind of democratic governance can women's rights groups expect? To what extent will Tunisian women shape the democratic transition and the building of new institutions? In Egypt, will an outcome be—to use a phrase coined by East European feminists in the early 1990s—a “male democracy”? How can a democratic transition benefit working women and the poor?

The question that the five literary scholars participating in this roundtable have set out to answer is the following: “How has ‘theory’ affected the field of Arabic literature in the Unites States and vice versa?” By theory, we understand both the entire range of poststructuralist critical practice that emerged through continental philosophy in the 1960s and the canonical disciplinary object that came to dominate departments of literature in the United States in the 1980s. Most of us were beginning our graduate careers around this latter decade, in departments of Middle East studies or English and comparative literature, and experienced firsthand that moment of encounter referred to in the following essays. A couple of decades later, and irrespective of our institutional locations, all of us, as a matter of course, continue to work at the intersection between national traditions and the world of theory, as do our colleagues in the field and our graduate students. At the same time, there was a feeling amongst us of being at a crossroads of sorts—a certain sense of malaise, or perhaps urgency, that manifested itself in a recurring set of questions about the field here and now: questions about history and reading, about translation and audiences, and about institutional and cultural politics, that all somehow emerged from the era of sanctions and war during which we came of age and that now haunt the time of revolution in which we live. If the present roundtable raises more questions than it answers, we hope that it will at least initiate a broader discussion about the practice and purpose of the discipline of Arabic literature in the American humanities today.

Scholars of the Middle East based in social science disciplines—especially my own, political science—are likely to feel a bit more welcome by their colleagues as a result of recent events in the Middle East. Not only will we be informative conversationalists in the hallways for a while because of our regional expertise, but also, far more profoundly, the sorts of things that political scientists study, from voting patterns to regime change, are suddenly interesting subjects in the region. This is not to say that Middle East elections were not studied in the past or that research on political change was not undertaken—far from it. But the questions posed, the terms used, and tools employed were often different from those more prevalent in the discipline. Political scientists focusing on the Middle East are therefore likely to find this a gratifying time, ripe with opportunities for comparative and cross-regional analysis. And those nonregional specialists whose interests lie in a wide variety of topics from voting behavior to revolutions may work harder to incorporate Middle Eastern cases into their own work.

In this roundtable, we have asked a group of specialists anchored in different but overlapping scholarly communities to reflect on the academic study of Islamist movements, and they present their thoughts on its evolution as well as their suggestions for its future course. The contributions are worth reading in their entirety and quite short, so there is no point in summarizing them here. But it is worth observing that the contributions highlight and begin to explore three areas in which various modes of inquiry and communities of specialists can overlap, interact with, and even cross-fertilize each other.

The expansion of U.S. power across the Middle East has led to a convergence between what had previously been distinct historical fields. As U.S. foreign relations scholars turn their attention toward the Middle East and as Middle East historians address the implications of American imperialism, both groups have produced new research on the Cold War era. Since 2001, Rashid Khalidi, Juan R. I. Cole, and Ussama Makdisi have reexamined American foreign policy during the Cold War to understand the antecedents of current events. With the evolution of U.S. diplomatic history into a more cosmopolitan international history, its practitioners have consulted sources in regional languages. Recent scholarship has incorporated the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into global narratives based on the themes of superpower rivalry, decolonization, and the struggle for development. While these global narratives help to counter regional exceptionalism, historians of the Cold War would also do well to read more Middle East historiography. The growing significance of American power for the MENA region calls for greater collaboration between the two fields on common interests that they have developed, at least so far, mostly in isolation.

Watching the uprisings unfold in the Middle East, as well as the opposition to them, leads me to appreciate the insights of social movement theory, which suggests that heterogeneous forces can unite in coalitions around super targets when political opportunities suddenly and serendipitously emerge. In this historic moment of change and resistance, will we see the unfolding institutional transformation of the state as it responds to a more participatory ethos, or will former regime stalwarts reconstitute themselves? Elected officials and new governance strategies will still confront serious distributional and economic challenges as states remain enmeshed in neoliberal policies. Political scientists are already studying constitutional change and debates about electoral design, party construction, and other institutional changes to democratize the polity, but we should also look to different transition models that seek to redress deep structural inequalities following decades of repression and rent seeking. Should principles of political or economic affirmative action be incorporated into new institutional designs of transitology?

Over the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East have produced an impressive body of scholarship that seeks to understand diverse groups and practices that are together called political Islam. Much of our work has drawn little attention outside of academia despite the obsession with Islam shared by policymakers and the general public. The many careful studies produced by academics and some journalists—typically based on extensive field research and use of primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—have to contend with bestselling books that trade in fears about the irrational, West-hating Muslim fanatic. Unfortunately, serious scholarship on political Islam cannot ignore this terrain of stereotypes and fearmongering, as it dominates mainstream debates about Islam and the Middle East. But in responding to these discourses, we often allow them to dictate our analytic starting point, resulting in less theoretical innovation and empirical insight than might emerge if we moved beyond the focus on Islamist groups and whether most are moderate or radical. Indeed, we might do well to abandon altogether the idea that “political Islam” represents a tangible object of study.

By every indicator—methodology, citations, paper titles—students of Arabic literature have been courting “theory” for decades. From the 1970s on, scholars have approached classical and modern Arabic literature with theoretical models that draw explicitly on structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, semiotics, performance studies, and so on. That said, until recently the mainstream of modern Arabic studies continued to use methods inherited from Orientalist scholars working on classical texts.

The new Cold War history has begun to reshape the ways that international historians approach the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the post-1945 era. Rather than treating the region as exceptional, a number of scholars have sought to focus on the historical continuities and transnational connections between the Middle East and other areas of the Third World. This approach is based on the notion that the MENA region was enmeshed in the transnational webs of communication and exchange that characterized the post-1945 global system. Indeed, the region sat not only at the crossroads between Africa and the Eurasian landmass but also at the convergence of key global historical movements of the second half of the 20th century. Without denying cultural, social, and political elements that are indeed unique to the region, this scholarship has drawn attention to the continuities, connections, and parallels between the Middle Eastern experience and the wider world.

Near the beginning of his classic work of historiography, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, Moroccan thinker Abdallah Laroui inserts a footnote about a study of the region by a Harvard-based American author who refers to North Africa as “no idea producing area,” a statement that Laroui thoroughly dismantles in a couple of sentences. In this short note at the start of a book written forty years ago, Laroui pinpoints the central problem in U.S.-based studies of the Arab region. The historically contested nature of knowledge production in the field cannot be ignored in any attempt to address the question of critical theory's influence on Arabic literature in the American academy.

The first wave of academic writings on Islamists emerged in the Arab world after the war of June 1967 and the subsequent resurfacing of religious ideologies and religiously inspired social and political movements. Examples in this first wave include works by the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm, the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, and the Moroccan historian ʿAbdullah al-ʿArawi. These writings advanced three insights. First, the rise of “religious movements,” “religious currents,” and “religious ideologies”—the term islāmī or Islamist was yet to be coined—was seen by some writers as a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the secular state and the secular idea of Pan-Arabism. Second, other writers accused Arab ruling establishments in modernizing countries—the reference was primarily to post-1967 Egypt—of using religious currents and ideologies to enhance the state's popularity and legitimacy in times of crisis. Third, Wahhabism and petrodollars were held responsible by some for the resurfacing of religious currents and their increased appeal in the contest with secular ideas. Most of the writings of the first wave were Egypt centered and were clearly inspired by an antireligious sentiment that saw religious movements and currents as representing an existential threat to secular modernization and progress.

Religious actors and religious language are not absent from the Arab revolutions, but a striking feature of these movements is that they depart from Islamist identity politics, which tended to portray the problems of the Arab world as the result of Muslims’ betrayal of their religious identity. Slogans referencing Islam are remarkably few, even in contexts like Egypt where Islamist movements are an important organized political force. Similar to many Islamist activists, the youth who initiated these movements are exasperated by growing economic inequalities. Unlike the former, however, they do not feel the need to frame this issue in religious terms, but rather mobilize universal notions such as democracy, freedom, justice, and equality. This is the case even in societies with sharp religious divides such as Bahrain, where the overwhelmingly Shiʿi demonstrators oppose a Sunni-dominated regime. Regardless of whether the uprisings will succeed in achieving a genuine regime change, new political movements are likely to emerge that focus on political freedom and the reduction of social inequalities rather than projects maintaining Islam as a solution. The question remains whether this trend simply went unnoticed by the majority of the scholarly community working on the Middle East or whether it is something that emerged in the dynamics of the uprisings themselves. Either way, the phenomenon must now be analyzed. Does it mean a decline of the Islamist ideology? Will it permit an empowerment of existing liberal political movements? Of trade unionism? What does it reveal about the integration of the Middle East within global political trends?

One of the more prominent themes to emerge from this roundtable is the desire to integrate the history of the modern Middle East with broader trends in international history, particularly with regard to the recent emphasis on “decentralizing” and “globalizing” the Cold War narrative. My own research interests are consistent with this approach, as one of the central concerns of my current project is to show how Algeria's revolutionary nationalists defied the regional categories imposed on them from the outside by pursuing overlapping diplomatic initiatives under the rubrics of Maghribi unity, African unity, Arab unity, Afro-Asianism, and Third Worldism. After independence in 1962, the Algerian foreign ministry's main geographical divisions differed significantly from those used by the U.S. State Department—and most history departments’ hiring committees—by dividing the world into “the West,” “the Socialist Countries,” “the Arab World,” “Africa,” and “Latin America/Asia.” These categories were the product of both practical considerations and ideological/identity politics on the part of Algeria's new leaders, and to my mind suggest that the “Middle East” may itself be a particularly arbitrary and misleading geographical framework, even in comparison to other parts of the developing world where European imperialism exerted a heavy cartographical influence.