In Beirut between 1920 and 1940, the fine-art nude was a necessary genre. Exhibitions of these pictures put audiences on display as much as nudes. Thus, these events enable probing the role of art at intercultural junctures and understanding the experience of self-modernizing subjects outside metropolitan locales. Al-ḥadātha and al-muʿāṣira are analyzed as complementary but noninterchangeable aspects of the modernizing project, to argue that viewing art and appreciating nudes were necessary components of an urban, modern identity for Mandate-era Beirutis. The concept of dislocation is introduced to explore why artists such as Moustapha Farroukh employed academic art formulae to intervene in representational conventions and, in doing so, dislocated common ways of seeing and relating to “Easterners.” Nude paintings evince the importance of intellectuals’ physical and aesthetic experiences in the production of modernity. Moreover, they complicate the common idea that “authenticity” opposed “modernity” in Arab and colonial settings.

Scholars have long struggled with various and even conflicting historical narratives and definitions of Salafism (al-salafiyya), but a closer look at the history of the concept itself—rather than of the ideas for which it stands—goes a long way toward explaining the perennial confusion that has typified this religious orientation. This article examines the production of knowledge about Salafism as a conceptual construct and a typological category. It argues that although Salafi epithets have existed since the medieval period, they did not start referring to a religious concept known as salafiyya until the 1920s. By the same token, the widely accepted idea that salafiyya referred to an Islamic modernist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a historical fiction that originates with Louis Massignon. The history of Cairo's Salafiyya Press and Bookstore, however, sheds important light on the process by which the construction of Salafism took place.

This article delivers an empirical analysis of the effects of Danish Muslims' transnational activities during the Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005–6 on subsequent Muslim claims making in Denmark. The article argues that the envisioned “boomerang effect” of the transnational activities—the attempt to put pressure on Danish authorities by contacting political and religious authorities in the Middle East—backfired on Danish Muslims. The transnational move was successfully “securitized” by elements of the media and the political elite, inviting soft forms of repression against the Muslim actors, especially those involved in the “imam delegations” that traveled to Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria in December 2005. These actors were forced into a more defensive mode of claims making soon after their return to Denmark through processes of name calling and stigmatization. Building on this case study, the article concludes by suggesting some theoretical modifications/specifications to the boomerang model of transnational activism.

In this article, the first fruit of an ongoing research on the sociocultural history of midwifery in medieval Muslim societies, I trace the attitudes toward midwives as revealed in Arabic biographical, medical, and legal texts. These texts, the product of male scholars, mirror an ambivalent attitude toward midwives: a mixture of repressed admiration, open repulsion, and fear. Thus, midwives are almost totally absent from Islamic scriptures, and Muslim writers make them play only a minor role in biographical and hagiographic literature, where the midwives of the Prophet's family are consciously or unconsciously “blocked” from becoming mythological figures. Women, sometimes hesitatingly identified as midwives, nevertheless played a role through their very presence at the moment of the Prophet's birth. In a storylike manner, they set an example for the implication of the legal rules concerning the midwife's exceptional status as a witness in court, rules that were formulated and consolidated in the formative period of Islamic law side by side with the traditions on the Prophet Muhammad's birth.

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, one of the most popular reading grids of Middle East politics has been the increased impact of the Shiʿi issue on the national political agendas of Arab states. This article focuses on the place of one of the less studied Shiʿi groups, the Shiʿa of Oman, who represent around three percent of the national population, in the nation-building project initiated by Sultan Qaboos since 1970 to maintain political stability and legitimize his power. I argue that the special relationship the Shiʿa have maintained with the ruling elite in Oman and the prominent role some of them are enjoying in the Omani economy help explain their weak insertion into transnational Shiʿi networks in the Gulf and the fact that they have never questioned the validity of the Omani nation under Qaboos as a political framework. But the socioeconomic changes caused by the end of the rent-based welfare-state model has led recently to an increase in mutual prejudices and social grievances. The Shiʿa, because of their high socioeconomic visibility, are likely to find themselves at the center of other groups’ complaints.

Since at least the 1930s, Palestine has had a continuous role as a laboratory of counterinsurgency. During the British Mandate, Palestine saw a consolidation of the techniques of imperial policing and the development of a complex military-legal apparatus of control, from “security fences” and watchtowers to mass incarceration and collective punishment to emergency laws and administrative detention. Palestine has continued to be the setting for counterinsurgency military exercises, with Israel incorporating the British Mandate laws in its legal corpus and British military practice in its doctrines. Based on extensive primary research, this essay traces the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice and the legal apparatuses that uphold it and argues that both in the incorporation of British transmission of doctrine, law, and practice from Palestine, and in the Israeli military's deployment of new and transportable techniques of control, Palestine has been gradually transformed into a central node of military knowledge/power within a global matrix of counterinsurgency.

This article examines an Arabist-Salafi press network in the interwar period that operated between Algeria, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and Cairo and involved members of two sectarian communities, Sunnis and Ibadis. This Arabist-Salafi press network created a public sphere of intellectual engagement in which Salafism and nationalism were interwoven, producing a nationalist discourse transgressing post World War I borders of identity and linking the three layers of nationalism—the territorial, the Pan-Arab, and the Pan-Islamic—together. These layers not only intersected but also legitimized one another. Thus, this article not only expands the geographic horizons of Arab nationalism but also contributes to the scholarship examining the correlation between Islam and national identity in the interwar period.

This essay argues that with the rise of the autocratic Pahlavi dynasty (1921–79), the state started to cast a long shadow over the historiography of modern Iran. Drawing on dynastic nationalism, modernization policies, and repression, the Pahlavi shahs and their bureaucratic elites produced an image of an all-powerful state completely detached from society. Scholars often reflexively replicated this top-down perspective. The resulting methodological statism, a metanarrative of state action as the inevitable ultimate reference point of all things Iranian, has reified our understanding of the modern Iranian state and, more generally, limited our vision of “the history of Pahlavi Iran.” Fixated on autocratic policymaking, we have ignored routine citizen–government interactions; equally, we lack microhistories of the complex facets of everyday life. By illuminating the politics and history of methodological statism, this essay hopes to prepare the ground for the assimilation of such alternative perspectives into the historiography of modern Iran.

The postwar period of 1945 to 1963 witnessed dramatic political and economic transformations in Syria. To date, however, the cultural manifestations of these transformations remain largely unexamined. This article seeks to begin the process of redressing that historiographic imbalance and recovering the meaning of these transformations for those who experienced them through a close reading of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition of 1954. This event constituted the stage upon which the recently independent, and still fragile, Syrian state conducted an exercise in autoethnography, the attempt to define and represent itself to its citizenry and to the outside world, as well as the screen upon which Syrians' collective longings were focused and projected. Thus, I treat this body of discourse as a unique opportunity to apprehend an emergent elite's anxieties about foreigners' perceptions of their country, as expressed in this stratum's homiletic discourse about street begging and other forms of urban disorder that threatened to disrupt the exposition's staging.

This article examines the assimilation of sexology and sexual reform in the Yishuv of the 1930s. Prominent German sexologists visited Palestine, texts they authored were translated to Hebrew and Yiddish, and members of the Yishuv community traveled to central Europe to learn sexual-reform ideas. In 1931 and 1932, three consultation centers were opened in Tel Aviv, accompanied by Q&A columns in the general and medical press. In these centers and columns, men and women consulted medical doctors on contraception, impotence, abortions, and the everyday of heterosexual life. This short-lived experience was inspired by similar European experiences, especially in Weimar Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The 1930s discourse on sexuality was sometimes compatible with mainstream Zionist ideology and sometimes at odds with it. It came to an end during the last years of the decade, following the Arab Revolt, the Holocaust, and the demographic struggle over Palestine.

The last century of the Ottoman Empire saw an intense move to build clock towers in Anatolia. Among the reasons for this move were the central government's desire to advertise its sovereignty in the provinces, its desire to secularize the same periphery, and that clock towers were a means for Christians to erect church towers. Compounding this already complex layering of meanings, these towers were often erected under the pretext that they would help announce the daily times of prayer. After the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, this move continued in a new guise: clock towers were attached to modern-style buildings that advertised the republican project. Using documents from the Archives of the Prime Ministry and other primary sources, this paper attempts to trace the proliferation of clock towers in Anatolia and how the meanings attached to these edifices changed through time.

This article examines the origins of the walled and fragmented Palestinian landscape by situating it within a context of recurrent encounters between dominant groups with territorial ambitions and less powerful subalterns focusing on the interplay of power and territorial space. The argument is that the Palestinian landscape is part of a long-standing narrative in which groups coveting territory transform the economy, demography, and culture of territorial space through the time-honored practice of enclosure. Enclosure is the exercise of force upon space by groups with territorial ambitions resulting in the remaking of landscapes. Mobilizing the institutional power of property law and the material power of the built environment, these groups reorder land ownership, use, and circulation on the landscape in an effort to consolidate systems of control over subalterns and reorganize socioeconomic life and demography in a place. This article argues that the project of state building launched by Zionists in Israel or Palestine is fundamentally an exercise of power on space similar to the making of enclosure landscapes from the past, notably, the enclosure landscape of early modern England. By exploring the contours of this pattern, this article seeks to uncover a more general meaning in the landscape of Palestine today.

At the time of its first modern census in 1993, Oman had one of the world's highest fertility rates (6.9 children per woman) and over half of the population was under the age of fifteen and yet to enter its peak childbearing years. In response, Oman introduced a Birth Spacing Program in 1994, encouraging couples to space births by at least three years and making a wide range of modern contraceptives available throughout the sultanate. Although the program was ostensibly designed to promote reproductive and child health, it clearly had a demographic agenda. By 2006, the fertility rate had dropped to 3.2 children per woman and the contraceptive prevalence rate had increased sharply. However, these changes cannot be attributed solely to the Birth Spacing Program and must be seen in the broader context of delayed marriage and extraordinary gains in social well-being, health, and female education.

This article investigates links between religious and political transnationalisms through analyzing responses to the 2006 Lebanon war from the diaspora. I examine the role of a shaykh in bringing Lebanese Shiʿa in Senegal “back to Islam” as well as (spiritually if not physically) back to Lebanon. I explore his efforts to institute formal religious education through a Friday sermon, encourage public expressions of piety, and introduce new religious rituals in commemorations of ʿAshuraʾ and Ramadan. This ethnographic study adds a diaspora component to debates about Lebanese nationalism and suggests that the ideology of the umma does not hold for a marginalized Muslim minority community in a Muslim majority country, which instead defines itself along reformulated ethnic, religious, and national boundaries. The paper contributes to newly emerging scholarship on transnational Shiʿi linkages by demonstrating how the African example adds another dimension to our understanding of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East.