In the summer of 2002, more Americans – 1.3 million – heard the music of Central Asia in just a few days than in the entire previous history of the United States. Some 370,000 of them picked up the extensive, well-documented guidebook to the 36th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which broke all attendance records. As they traipsed through the humid haze of the Washington Mall, staggering into the sun baked tents to see crafts and hear music, this crowd was in a good mood. Kids asked to see the Bactrian camels, who, like their handlers, were Texans. People crowded the sprawling crafts exhibits to watch artisans, then jammed the sales pavilions to scoop up gifts and albums, also at unprecedented levels. The surging spectators jammed the tents for most of the shows on the two days I was there. The reception was rousing. The organizers had brought not just “classic” performers, but contemporary musicians, like the Kazakh rock band Roksonaki. The small stock of their CDs sold out on the first day, and their performances regularly received standing ovations.

West African Islamic cultural heritage is recurrently overlooked or marginalized in scholarly, museological, and popular imaginaries, despite contemporary burgeoning Western attentiveness to Islam. Historically, Orientalists and/or Islamicists exclude West Africa, and anthropologists study West African Islam due to its alleged lack of written Arabic and Ajami texts (Loimeier 2013; Saul 2006), despite textual and material evidence to the contrary. Existing literature on the material expressions of West African Islam, largely edited volumes and museum catalogues, direct attention to Islamic West Africa, rather than Islam in West Africa, in other words, predominantly West African Muslim societies, and not those for whom Muslims comprise a minority (Adahl 1995; Insoll 2003; Roberts and Nooter Roberts 2003; for exceptions cf. Bravmann 1974, 1983, 2000). Analytically, the “Islamization of Africa” and “Africanization of Islam,” standard nomenclature customarily employed to describe the simultaneous processes at play in West African Islam (Loimier 2013), note the reciprocal relationship between Islam and pre-existing West African religious traditions shaped by local contexts, circumstances, subjectivities, and exigencies (Fisher 1973; Trimingham 1980). Accordingly, West African Islam's material manifestations labeled “inauthentic,” “syncretic,” “vernacular,” and “popular” are considered, inter alia, antithetical to “classical” Islam. Notwithstanding, so-called classical Islam represents the embodiment of a locally synthesized form that, over time and with repetition, has come to be conceptualized as “classical.” Yet, Islam has incorporated and translated an assortment of pre-existing ideals to adjust in ways viewed as neither regression, apostasy, plurality nor heterodoxy. And, West Africa proves no exception. Indubitably, West African Islamic cultural heritage is the heritage of the “‘Othered’ religion par excellence” (Preston-Blier 1993:148).

The last fifteen years have witnessed rapid growth in the number of students studying Arabic and of programs concerned with the teaching of the language. This is directly attributable to the awakened interest in the United States in the Middle East in general, and the Arab world in particular, as a result of the entry of the U.S. in World War II and its emergence as a global power with strategic, economical, and political interests in the area. This is not to say that the teaching of Arabic is a new phenomenon in the U.S. As an indespensible tool of Orientalistic scholarship, Arabic was taught for many years in a few institutions which offered programs in Oriental and Semitic Studies.

“Water,” wrote the mayor’s council late in the nineteenth century, “is the only thing holding Algiers back from expanding its glory as the queen of African cities.” Paris uses 240 liters of water per person per day, it reported; New York, Philadelphia and Chicago 400 liters. Algiers could only muster a meager 60 liters per day per person, far below the levels necessary to feed a population, fill wells, and scrub a city of its toxins. For over half a century, the council reported, Algiers had thirsted after the clean water necessary to make it a great city. If the French were to make Algiers truly modern, they would need to solve this vexing problem of water.

Thus the council summed up one of the ongoing challenges in continuing settler colonialism in Algeria. Environmental projects—battling epidemic disease, drought, locust invasions, and providing/establishing hydraulic control—became important factors in the rise and expansion of the colonial state. In the midst of a crippling environmental disaster, water—access to fresh water for drinking, controlling agricultural infrastructure, and ensuring cities were “hygienic”—became a site of contention in the creation of the modern state. In this paper I will briefly examine how the physical control of water resources, along with discourses about modernity and modern governance, contributed to the expansion of the colonial state by the end of the 1860s.

The SSRC’S Joint Near and Middle East Committee has organized a series of workshops on the state in its Middle Eastern context. The format consists of discussions of papers written by members of the committee, as well as of articles and chapters of books presented as background material by a small number of invited guests. A report on the first workshop, held at Buyukada, Istanbul, in September 1989 appeared in the MESA Bulletin 24 (1990), pages 179 to 183. A third workshop was held at St. Antony’s College, Oxford in December 1990.

On February 7, 2018, Anoush Baghdassarian (Claremont McKenna College ‘17) conducted a presentation of her undergraduate research on Syrian refugees in Armenia called “Coming ‘Home’: Documenting 100 years of Displacement of Syrian-Armenians.” This interview was lightly edited for clarity.

The 1990s marked an important moment in Egyptian television, when the country turned its attention increasingly (although never monolithically) toward historical drama as a means of recreating and reinterpreting modern Egyptian history. Mahfouz Abd al-Rahman and Osama Anwar Okasha, in particular, scripted long multi-year series aired during Ramadan, the peak season for television viewing, that covered decades of the late ninteenth century and pre-Nasserist history, in many ways re-writing public history, and making historical drama—and history—fashionable. I focus here on the former and his first mega-hit Bawabat al-Halawani (Halawani Gate). Biographical dramas, initially of artists, but later politicians, kings, and religious leaders would follow. As the Egyptian industry atrophied in the following decade these dramatists passed the mantle on to the Syrians, later the Turks, who broke the Egyptian monopoly and brought their own stories to the fore. But a rebirth may be in view.

According to its Mission Statement, MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) is tasked with monitoring violations of academic freedom in the MENA region as well as in North America. Violations of academic freedom are often understood as comprising governmental attempts to prevent scholars from conducting scholarly research, publishing their findings, delivering academic lectures, and traveling to international scholarly meetings. However, CAF often addresses cases in which professors and academic researchers irrespective of discipline are harassed, persecuted, dismissed or detained for their peaceful professional or personal activities, particularly if they encourage respect for human rights. In some instances, the committee has also protested state violence that has deliberately targeted educational institutions’ buildings or campuses.

A consideration of the contemporary musical soundscape in Syria provides unique insights into how Syrians of multiple classes and generations discriminate between critical points in their own past, who they perceive they are today, and how they might think about their future. This review, based on fieldwork in Syria conducted between 1997 and 2001, suggests that people in Syria can use music to negotiate the following complex issues: 1) the struggle between an identity rooted in the modern nation-state of Syria and one rooted in the more traditional concept of ‘Bilad al-Sham’ (roughly ‘the lands governed from Damascus,’ a region that included all of modern Lebanon, as well as portions of Turkey, Palestine, and Jordan); 2) the struggle between a Syrian identity and an Arab identity; and 3) the maintenance of a strongly Arab and necessarily anti-Western canon.

This report summarizes the results of a survey of Kansas high school teachers of World History conducted in the Spring of 1972. Though the data were gathered in the state of Kansas, the textbooks used in the World History course are “national” in the sense that (1) the authors are not local or even regional and (2) the books are widely used in various parts of the country.

Historians confront numerous difficulties while doing research on Central Asia, particularly concerning the contemporary period. Historical developments in the relations between Iran and Central Asia, especially following the rise of the Soviet Union, have led to the creation of high walls separating Iran from those countries, and have made research and information exchange impossible. Historical sources for this period are scarce and inaccessible, and researchers cannot easily access the little that exists in the form of manuscripts kept in the archives of Iranian libraries. Moreover, the writers of the Qajar period have dealt with only a very small sample of the events that took place in that part of the world, and then mostly with those occurring along the Iranian borders. Thus, they reveal little about developments inside Transoxiana.