The legacy of the 2013 Gezi Park protests has been controversial and its impact on Turkish politics difficult to assess. At the same time, there has been little reflection on contemporary Islamic feminist thinking in English sources. This essay argues that one important political and intellectual legacy of the Gezi movement has been the development of certain intersectional discourses in Islamic feminism in Turkey, whereby the shared experience of marginalization felt by pious Muslims, women, ethnic and religious minorities, and the LGBTIQ community has begun to broaden and complicate the scope of Islamic feminist discussions of liberation and social justice. By delineating and linking some important connecting threads of Islamic feminist theological thought in Turkey of the past 30 years, this essay will attempt to summarize key developments in the history of Islamic feminism in contemporary Turkey, demonstrating how they have led to new strands of intersectional feminist thinking in the post-Gezi era of Turkish politics.

In the past, the majlis or dıwanıyah a sitting room used for socializing in many Gulf homes, was often a place of music-making. In recent years, however, the ‘ud, duff, and tabl have been supplanted by satellite TV, Wi-Fi Internet connections, and video game consoles. Other long-established music-making contexts in the Gulf have also disappeared, particularly songs associated with maritime occupations that were such an intrinsic part of life in the recent past. Some of these songs were performed as accompaniments to tasks on ships, such as pulling up the anchor or setting the sail, whereas others were songs of supplication, asking God for protection from the perils of the seas (Al-Taee 2005). Traditional music in the region has also suffered from the breakdown of original patronage systems, as wealthy merchants now seek to invest in skyscrapers and artificially created islands rather than support musical ensembles. With the disappearance of these traditional music-making contexts and support networks, mass media has increasingly become the primary mode of experiencing music, both old and new, in the region.

I Begin this talk by telling you a story, that of a Spaniard who was living in the Moroccan city of Tangiers. One day he came to see the president of the local Council of Ulemas and said to him: “I feel attracted to your religion. I would have embraced it already but for one thing which disturbs me.”

“What is it?” asked the ‘Alim.

“I am a musician by profession,” answered the Spaniard, “and Islam forbids music.”

“Who told you that?” retorted the ‘Alim angrily. The would-be convert didn’t reply, which he would have done nowadays, as I hear it in the news; he simply pulled out of his pocket a sheet of paper and gave it to the man of religion who read it and understood everything. It was an ad for a book recently published by a local professor. The ‘Alim began to explain patiently that the book was five centuries old and that it was about a theological controversy known as the Sama’ Dispute over the way the Koran should be read in public. What was forbidden, at least in the eyes of some clerics, was to sing the words of the Holy message because the listener would be more interested in the music than in the meaning. But it was soon clear for the ‘Alim that he was speaking for nothing. His visitor had read in the article exactly what he was hoping to find, an Islam more rigorous, stern, severe than his own religion. Otherwise his conversion would be pointless. The kind of Islam the ‘Alim was offering him, simple, moderate, conciliatory, Jesuitical in a word, wasn’t the real thing.

One of the striking features of the literary culture of the modern Maghreb is the profusion of works that undertake to identify the essential features of the region – exercises in definition that almost always emphasize plurality. Philosophers, social scientists, and literary writers have highlighted the Maghreb's multilingualism – the coexistence of different forms of Arabic, Tamazight, French, and Spanish – the varied and hybrid cultural legacies of conquest and colonialism, and the effects of the region's geographical proximity to other parts of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It would be hard to find a more ubiquitous theme of francophone Maghrebi literature than cultural diversity, and the subject is by no means absent from Arabic-language literature. This preoccupation with plurality can be seen as a response to a history of colonization and decolonization with particular ideological features. In their efforts to build “l'Algérie française,” the French colonial authorities suppressed Arabic as a language of culture and government. In response, anticolonial nationalists called for the replacement of French with Arabic. “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my nation” – the catchphrase of Abdelhamid Ben Badis's Jam'iyat al-'Ulama [Association of Muslim Ulema], an Islamic reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s – later became a slogan of the nationalist movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN) [National Liberation Front]. Since the 1980s, a similar call to restore Arabic and eliminate French has been issued by the Islamist opposition to the corrupt and undemocratic FLN government and at times by officials in that same government seeking to restore their legitimacy. In emphasizing linguistic and cultural diversity, writers and scholars have tried to tender an alternative to these recurrent efforts to delimit the region's identity.

The aim of this project is to discuss how Islamic universities in the West facilitate and condition the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities. The central question of the study is: How is the formation of modern forms of subjectivities tied together with the reinterpretation of Islamic traditions? The paper provides analysis of the curricula, and institution background, values and aims of two universities—Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, the first Muslim liberal arts college in the U.S.; and Cambridge Muslim College, the first to offer a Diploma in Muslim community leadership in Britain. Alongside the textually founded analysis, interviews conducted with leadership, faculty and students, and participatory observation inform the discussion. Analysis demonstrates that both institutions see themselves as mediators between Islamic traditions and modern Muslims in the West, and as having a responsibility to engage in the development of both Muslim minorities and the wider societies within which they operate.

The terms “Islamic” and ‘Arab” are not ideal instruments for classifying modern or contemporary art, for they are meta-categories that can variously encompass Muslims and non-Muslims, and Arabs and non-Arabs. Nonetheless, as historians of modern art in Islamic regions, we seem to have inherited a longstanding commitment to Islamic art as an epistemologically unique practice that produced limitless abstract patterns and other “non-Western” visual expression. It is time to move beyond such overburdened lineages. In this paper, I aim to historicize the formulations of a specific Arabo-Islamic aesthetic that emerged in the 1970s. I do so by a study of a single event and its metacultural claims: the World of Islam Festival held in London in 1976. The Festival projected optimistic countercultural options for art and civilization that remain instructive today, while the complexity of its organizing structures demonstrates the limitations of the West/rest paradigm in interpreting its artistic products.

It is a good omen that an essay on the current study of Arabic philosophy is appropriate. In the first place, it is a sign that the field is flourishing. Indeed, there are now so many who pursue this kind of inquiry, and those hail from such far-flung locales, that hardly any single scholar is acquainted with all of his fellows or even with all of their research. Names of new scholars, announcements of long forgotten manuscripts, and novel interpretations of well-known works spring forth at each learned conference as well as in each issue of scholarly journals. What is more, it is a sign of the extent to which the field of Arabic studies in general has now become populous and diversified. No longer can an individual scholar aspire to keep up with all of the research being pursued in all of the various sub-disciplines of the field. Finally, it is a sign that even in the midst of such burgeoning activity and specialization there is an abiding interest in the field as a whole. It is the latter, above all, that warrants this general account of what is happening with respect to the study of Arabic philosophy.

“Social media,” Saudi artist Abdullah al-Shehri (known as Shaweesh) observes, is the “best tool we have available to showcase and express our art,” because it allows millions of Saudis to share and comment on a given work of art simultaneously. Building on this insight, this essay argues that Saudi artists, who have among the largest followings on the country's social media, have used the online public sphere to build a new social movement. They have adopted a role akin to Antonio Gramsci's concept of organic intellectuals – namely, men and women who are not part of the traditional intellectual elite, but who, through the language of culture, articulate feelings and experiences the masses cannot easily express. To paraphrase Ezra Pound, Saudi artists are the “antennae” of the kingdom's society, whose work is not “mere self-expression,” but, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, the “distant early warning system that can always be relied upon to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” As a leading Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem observed in June 2019, “people need to listen to the artist.”

This essay presents a reflection on a selection of collections of Islamic art in Europe and the Middle East, focusing on new installations that emerged in the last decade. While various approaches have been discussed in the context of new installations, chronological narratives still prevail. Perhaps, these are indeed the best way to introduce audiences unfamiliar with the material to its complex historical and cultural contexts. The overarching goal of many of these displays may be to create positive public engagement with Islamic art in a global context where Islam is often associated with war and destruction.

As researchers in Central Asian Studies, we discuss the different perspectives our methodological approaches provide to understanding the content and context of Islam, security, and the state in the region. We acknowledge the role of bias in creating narratives that dominate regional and international discourse and question mono-causal explanations of Islamic practice and the roots of radicalism. As such, we offer insights into the challenges and best practices of doing research on Islam and security and posit Central Asian Studies as a case for the value of multi-disciplinary research.

In many areas of Middle East studies, revolutions—from the 8th century Abbasid to the 20th century Egyptian cases—have been treated as multidimensional phenomena, filled with actors impelled by varying, often conflicting interests and motives. Scholarship has come to perceive these revolutions as products of commingled political, intellectual, social and economic forces, and each event as the unique creation of a particular blend of the various elements. The nature of this mix, in turn, has been seen to determine the subsequent post-revolutionary behavior of the various groups in society. Yet when we focus on the case of the so-called Young Turk “Revolution” of 1908, we find that most studies have been strikingly unilinear in their analyses. The limited approach has colored our view, both of the Revolution and of subsequent events. My purpose here is to examine the historiography of the Young Turk Revolution and then to offer some possible alternative interpretations.

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.