This article uses ethnography of a studio recording project underway at a Qur'anic school in Salé, Morocco, to offer new insight on sound, media, and religious authority in Islamic contexts. The aim of the project is to record the entire Qur'an incorporating all of its seven canonical, variant readings (qirā’āt), which are enjoying a small renaissance in Morocco. Several of the school's faculty, known as shaykhs, engaged as expert listeners and overseers of the process. I show how a historical model of such expert listenership, which I call “aural authority,” is transformed by the technologies of the studio and then dispersed across a collective of productive agents that includes the reciter and the sound engineer. I argue that these transformations, along with erasure of the shaykh's role from the medium of circulation—the recording—presents significant challenges to the broader qirā’āt tradition and raises questions about its future.

This article analyzes the sensationalized media coverage of a serial murder case during the Egyptian revolution of the early interwar era. Despite conflicting evidence, the media blamed the murders on two sisters from southern Egypt named Raya and Sakina. Through a close reading of Egyptian editorials and news reports, I argue that middle-class nationalists constructed Raya and Sakina as barbaric women who threatened to pull the nation back in time in order to legitimize their claim to power. Borrowing from Ann Stoler's analysis of the relationship between race and sexuality and Maria Lugones's concept of the modern/colonial gender system, this article maintains that race was as central to nationalist conceptions of female barbarism as gender, sexuality, and class. The enduring depiction of Raya and Sakina as the quintessential barbaric Egyptian women symbolizes the way in which the modern woman was constructed at the intersection of race and sexuality.

Extant studies of Iranian nationalism accentuate the self-aggrandizing side of Iranian modernity, mainly achieved through, and informing, a process of otherizing certain non-Persians/Iranians, particularly the Arabs. I argue that equally important to understanding Iranian modernity is its lesser recognized, shameful and self-demeaning face, as manifested through a simultaneous 19th-century discourse, which I call “self-deprecating modernity.” This was an often self-ridiculing and shame-inducing, sometimes satirical, discourse featuring an emotion-driven and self-Orientalizing framework that developed out of many mid-nineteenth-century Iranian modernists’ obsessions with Europe's gaze; with self-surveillance; and with the perceived humiliation of Iranians through the ridiculing laughter of Other (especially European) nations at Iran's and Iranians’ expense. To explore this discourse, I re-examine the works of three pre-constitutionalist thinkers and writers within the broader sociopolitical context of late Qajar Iran, surveying their perspectives on shame, embarrassment, and ridiculing laughter, and showing how they were significantly informed by, while also helping to form, self-deprecating modernity. Given the strong, self-colonizing presumptions of this discourse, I conclude the article with a stress on the importance of re-exploring collective self-critical practices in modern Iranian history, culture, and literature with an eye toward decolonizing self-criticism.

When the State of Greater Lebanon was established in 1920, the Jewish Community Council of Beirut was officially recognized as the central administrative body within Lebanon, and although smaller communities such as Sidon and Tripoli also had their own councils they were consequently made subject to the authority of Beirut. In this context of political overhaul, I argue that some Jewish actors made use “from below” of political opportunities provided by sectarianism “from above”—or national sectarianism—to garner control over all Jewish political structures in Lebanon. But by examining in particular activities in and around the Israelite Community Council in Sidon (al-Majlis al-Milli al-Isra'ili bi-Sayda), I show how and why these attempts to practice new forms of sectarianism were met with resistance, despite connections that tied Lebanon's Jews together administratively in one community.

This paper aims to clarify the scope and limitations of the ideals of Pan-Maghrib nationalism as developed by the Association of North African Muslim Students in France (AEMNAF) in the 1930s. The AEMNAF members’ inclination toward sciences and technology and their emphasis on conserving their mother culture made them consider Arabism and Islam their most important identity markers. Moreover, the AEMNAF created a sense of solidarity among Maghribi students in France and extended its social influence by cooperating with French and Mashriqi opinion leaders in Europe. However, the AEMNAF's narrow definition of Muslim-ness and its elitist nature led to the exclusion of Maghribis with French citizenship from the organization. The dualistic view of technology and culture in Maghribi nationalist thought also contributed to prioritizing Francophones over Arabophones, Muslims over non-Muslims, men over women, and students in the sciences over those in humanities.

What shape does Salafism take in Tunisia after the ban of the Salafi-Jihadi group Ansar al-Shari‘a and the wave of securitization carried out by national authorities? This article argues that a constraining legal context put Salafism's doctrinal rigidity in tension with its survival and ultimately prompted a residual current of Salafi actors to accommodate their stance toward Malikism, the prevalent school (madhhab) in the country. This adaptation is at odds with contemporary Salafism, which traditionally dismisses all four law schools (lā madhabiyya), rejects their blind imitation (taqlῑd), and claims the superiority of the Qur'an, hadith, and consensus of the salaf (pious predecessors) over jurisprudence (fiqh). To account for this puzzle, this article scrutinizes the historical development of Salafism and the evolution of its stance toward Malikism across three generational waves. It notably shows how religious securitization associated with the promotion of a “moderate” Islam pushed Salafi actors to redefine their ideology to preserve their preaching and teaching activities. We call Salafi-Malikism the outcome of this adaptive strategy. Drawing on the Tunisian case, we argue that, despite its purist claims, Salafism is not an immutable religious current, but can take different trajectories to survive in constraining environments.

This roundtable is the product of a conference on tribalism in the Modern Middle East held at the University of Maryland in College Park in early May 2019. In two days of scholarly exchange, the participants addressed questions on the reality of tribal life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and its impact on politics and society. Most of the specialists who participated in the conference are also contributors in this forum. To keep the discussion concise, the case studies focus on the Arab East – Syria, Jordan, and Iraq – as well as Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Building on the findings and reflections shared in College Park, the contributors responded to the following prompt as a point of departure for their essays:

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Despite entrenched views about tribes and tribalism as premodern phenomena, this form of social organization and identity is relevant today no less than in the past; in some cases, it is even more relevant. Even without exact statistics, one can safely assert that a large proportion of the Middle East's inhabitants belong to a tribe and adhere to tribal social norms and cultural values. Whereas tribe and tribalism in English have somewhat negative connotations—they refer to divisiveness, rivalries, sectarianism, and favoritism—in the Middle East the term tribe is used as a matter of fact, a part of reality. It has equivalents in the local languages (‘ashīra, qabīla, ṭā’ifa) and a long history, from the days before the emergence of Islam in the 7th century. It is a term used by local people, usually in a positive rather than a pejorative way; people are proud of their tribes and see them as building blocks of their societies.

Oymak. Al. Boy. Cemaat. Taife. Aşiret. These are the terms Ottoman officials used in imperial orders (mühimme) to describe diverse human communities linked by their mobility and externality to village administration in Ottoman Anatolia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1924, Turkish historian Ahmet Refik compiled Ottoman imperial orders concerning such communities into a volume he titled Anadolu'da Türk Aşiretleri, 966–1200 (Turkish Tribes in Anatolia, 1560–1786). His use of the term aşiret (tribe) in the title is striking, because this term was only used in 9% of the orders in his volume (23 out of 244 total). However, by the late nineteenth century and in Refik's early Republican context, aşiret had become the standard term for these rural, extra-village, mobile human communities, which he understood as similar enough to include in his painstaking effort of compilation.

The “eshiret” (‘eşîret in the romanized Kurmanji Kurdish alphabet) is a highly variable and situated concept and social and political entity in Kurdistan, the homeland of ethnic Kurdish people. This essay is based on regular ethnographic fieldwork I have been conducting in part of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. My first research stint was in the mid-1990s, and I was there most recently in 2016. During the early period of my research, I had a great deal of contact with people in nonurban settings for whom an eshiret may be an important social category and contributor to individual identity.

The continued use of the term “tribe” to describe groups with segmentary organization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has long been recognized as problematic, albeit without viable alternative English translations of the local terms: qabīla, ‘ashīra, sha‘b, ‘ilt, and others. Yet the equally problematic but enduring uncritical acceptance of genealogical classification of MENA's tribes leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the basic principles of tribal organization as well as the multiple roles of kinship in the region. This propensity is not only misleading but is loaded with social evolutionary assumptions about presumed “stages of development” that hinder scholarship on tribes and have a negative impact on international policy toward countries like Yemen with significant self-identified tribal populations. Key to this essay is the wide diversity and flexibility in the terminology applied to tribal segments and in the sizes of segments.

There is a short answer to the question that has been posed to the participants in this roundtable. Tribes have a great deal of currency in modern Yemen because they provide an effective means to govern and protect local society. Tribalism is a deep pool of widely accepted customary practices in Yemen that people draw upon to provide security, manage agricultural resources (Yemen's tribespeople are mostly settled agriculturalists), and resolve local disputes.

International media outlets have covered the news of Syrian tribes since the beginning of the protest movement that erupted in the country in 2011. This started with the “Friday of Tribes,” when Syrian tribes participating in protests against the Syrian regime in the Syrian city of Dar‘a began chanting “faz‘a” (chanting for support), which meant that they were seeking solidarity from other tribes for defense against the regime's aggression. As the Syrian uprising turned into a civil war that involved many players, some media outlets focused on the scenes of tribal leaders pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or of others being summoned to Geneva, Switzerland, to hold talks with Western powers about the possibility of mobilizing against ISIS militants. One could only wonder exactly why tribal loyalties continued to play such a significant role in the everyday events of the Syrian civil war when many civil society advocates had argued that tribal affiliation in Syria had diminished.

Literature on tribes in Iraq is scant and often falls prey to simplistic binary approaches to state-society relations. Scholars of legal pluralism provide tools to conceptualize interrelations between adjacent normative fields. Several legal specialists have talked about “a thin form of cooperation” between tribal “private orders” and the Iraqi state. By the same token, many scholars presuppose that the capacity of the tribes and the state to mediate and settle feuds covary in opposite directions and are correlated with the strength of state institutions (tribes step in to fill a vacuum during times of state weakness). However, careful examination of Iraqi penal legislation and its implementation in tribal areas invalidates this stereotypical paradigm. Already in her seminal 1973 article, Sally Moore drew the attention of scholars of legal pluralism to the idea that legal orders should be approached as partially discrete, overlapping social fields. The various arenas intersect and create meaning for each other.

In the oral traditions of Jordan's Balga tribes, one event occurs many times: local shaykhs are invited to a feast by the Turks, and at this feast the shaykhs are attacked, arrested, or killed. Sometimes it is the Ottomans who are betrayed by their bedouin hosts. Either way, they should have seen it coming—that is usually the narrator's conclusion—but the lure of hospitality was strong. Something about these encounters was worth the risk of ending up in manacles, or dead.