In 1493, a Czech nobleman named Jan Hasištejnský z Lobkovic embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. As nearly all Central European pilgrims did, he traveled south through the Tyrol to Venice and joined a large, multinational group there before setting out across the Mediterranean. He remained nearly a month in Venice, meeting prominent political figures, visiting churches and cloisters, and admiring the realism of the painting and sculpture of the Venetian quattrocento. Among all the other marvels of Venice that he describes in his 1505 travelogue is the memory of his day trip to the island of Murano. “In this little town,” he writes, “there are, I think, close to seventy artisans or more, and all are glass makers.” He describes some of the fine works that he saw there, and eagerly adds, “and there is always a great quantity of these various things completed, so that whoever arrives wants to buy something of it.” In this moment, the fifteenth-century tourist is not that far removed from his counterpart in the twenty-first century.

This essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.

On the dramaturgical map of western Asia, the huge section long held by Czarist and Soviet Russia deserves attentive scrutiny. Theatrical life has been especially rich in the multi-ethnic Transcaucasus and, to a lesser degree, in the Tatar homelands and Central Asia, at least since medieval times. In certain respects the area leads the entire Middle East in this field. Theater in the region is abundant as well as versatile in form. It has given to both players and audiences literary religious performances, a secular neoclassical drama, folk comedy, modern European-style stage works, and ideologically-committed theater, as well as numerous plays translated or adapted from West and East. But how far the modern dramas may be identified either as local Asian or international Western remains a serious question for every specialist.

Rai music has traveled far and undergone remarkable transmutations since the early days of its development in Wahran (Oran) during the first decades of the twentieth century. Originally performed at weddings and in bars, mostly by women singers known as cheikhat, the instrumentation was simple (a reed flute known as a qasba, a single-stringed viol or rbab, and a hand drum known as the gellal) and the vocals, raucous and sometimes bawdy. The lyrics consisted of formulaic couplets, and mostly dealt with relations between men and women. The early recordings of rai's greatest female vocalist, Cheikha Rimitti are the essential foundation of any collection of rai music.

Some years ago, a colleague from another institution told me how much she was looking forward to screening Nasser 56 in her introductory Middle East history course. Students had just finished reading about the Nasser era, and the screening of Muhamad Fadel's stylish biopic starring the charismatic film star Ahmed Zaki would serve as an enjoyable way to round out the unit. I was surprised, not at my colleague's use of the film in her class, but at her timing. Released in 1996, Nasser 56 is very much the product of the Mubarak era. It offers rich opportunities to discuss the particular challenges Egypt faced in the 1990s and how this nostalgic look back at a triumphant moment in Gamal Abdel Nasser's (Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's) presidency was marshalled to animate an economically and politically fraught period. Its celebration of ʿAbd al-Nasir as an effective and caring patriarch to the nation could be interpreted as an endorsement of Egypt's authoritarian political system. However, the film is less useful as an explication of ʿAbd al-Nasir as a political figure, or of 1950s Egypt.

Teaching modern Middle East history at the University of Melbourne raises problems of culture. Students are not generally acquainted with the Middle East and North Africa—even those whose families originate there—news coverage is patchy, and Australia is far away. Not all students are even arts students let alone history majors: our degree structure requires interdisciplinary study. The University is liberal about how to assess students, only requiring that during a twelve-week semester subject a student must write 4000 words. Within broad bounds, how teachers do this is up to them, although the Arts Faculty has a culture of avoiding unseen examinations. History major students are very accustomed to the “traditional” researched essay format, but it does not provide much variety of intellectual training; it is unfamiliar to non-Arts students; in classes that regularly number over 100 students, it is tiring and boring to assess; and large numbers of essays are freely available online. So I have introduced an assessment task to replace the standard researched essay. The purpose here is to describe an alternative approach to assessment and learning by using a simulation: in that sense the actual topic of the simulation is secondary. It concerns refugees, which is of course, a matter of vital current concern, but it is the reasoning behind the task that I hope is instructive.

Every year, I teach a broad survey course on the Modern Middle East (between 120 and 200 students), along with seminars on a wide range of topics. Regardless of the content of these courses, I have three big goals. I want them to come away understanding that the history of the region is more complex and fascinating than they learned in high school and from the pundits, and the simplistic assumptions and solutions they offer answer no questions. Second, I want to persuade them that things change over time, and we can't understand anything without knowing its context—and the context of the Middle East is global. But most imperative: I want to convince students to be critical in analyzing sources of information. Informed citizenship requires students to be able to think critically, and that is what historians do offer. We analyze multiple sources in myriad ways.

Every summer, cultural festivals take place all over Morocco, and streets in towns and cities become animated scenes for the articulation of Moroccan contemporary culture. So animated, heterogeneous and pluralistic has this festival scene become that the semiofficial newspaper for the Islamist PJD party has called these street festivals “vectors of decadence” and performing-artist union officials have declared that they feel threatened by the “foreign invasion” of internationally-based diaspora groups. Recently, in a critique of these attitudes, the magazine Telquel reported that they are “sick of the wet-rags of the festival season” that deny “millions of happy festival-goers the occasional…free oasis in the grand cultural desert of Morocco.” Describing the street as an oasis of culture vis-à-vis the desert landscape of Moroccan cultural institutions is not a new trope. In this paper I explore how Moroccan artists have engaged with the potential, promise and problems of art in the street when gallery spaces and museums fail to integrate modern art into a wider Moroccan cultural landscape.

“But You Might Discover Secrets that we don’t know we have,” he said with unmistakable irony. He knew that my project, concerning museums of a century ago, would most likely not uncover any deep dark secrets, much less any that would fall within the realm of any legal statute of limitations. And yet he also knew that there are few statutes of limits when it comes to the patrimony of cultural property, a patrimony which, as Turkish museum administrator, is his to protect in the name of the state and in the name of its citizens—and even to protect from those citizens, of which I am one. Yet in the supposition that I would most likely not uncover any secrets, and in full consciousness of the irony of his statement, he would still not allow me, an ‘outsider,’ free access to documents, in this case uncatalogued and as yet unseen, and which nonetheless I had designated as mine through their proximity to my project. The limits of my access were as arbitrary, by some standards, as the limits of my project: as many documents from century-old registers as I could list on two sides of a blank page. “Can I write extra small?” I asked, and we laughed in complicity, even though this time it was I who was fully conscious of the irony that the limits on these documents were not good news for my project, yet that his assertion of control provided one of the most important insights around my research: the nature of possession and the economy of a ‘free’ flow of information.

In September 2002, an article I had authored, “Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis,” was published in the September 2002 issue of the journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA). On February 6, 2003 a UK news report revealed that entire sections of a British government dossier entitled “Iraq-Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation” were copied from three published sources, with the bulk of the plagiarized material coming from the article I had written. I was a twenty-nine year old doctoral student when the media frenzy that surrounded this incident erupted, six weeks prior to the 2003 Iraq War. I, as an Iraqi-American, had to watch as both sides opposite my hyphen waged a war against each other that I had an indirect role in justifying.

This article examines changes in Tunisian political and societal life that allowed the country's second attempt at political opening (beginning in 2011) to introduce deeper, more long-lasting changes in its political system as compared to the first attempt (beginning in 1987).1 The article argues that three such changes in particular—the increased role of regime moderates; the development of a network of civil society groups and political activists; and the use of inclusion, negotiation, and consensus—allowed the second attempt to unfold differently. The article also briefly discusses developments in the international context between the two attempts. The article contributes to existing studies of regime change and political transition as well as to historical considerations of Tunisian political developments more broadly.