Mansur Bushnaf's al-ʿIlka (Chewing Gum; 2008) is the author's sole novel, born of his twelve-year imprisonment in a Libyan jail, and his reflection on the nation's subjection to international marginalization and dictatorial rule under Gaddafi. The novel is centered on a 19th-century nude which confounds all who encounter it, and which lies neglected in a corner of Tripoli's Red Palace Museum. Through this statue, and the novel's broader poetics of stasis and “chewing,” I explore how turāth in Bushnaf's work, and wider Libyan fiction, is depicted through its abject vulnerability and exposure to historical vicissitudes, reflecting the parallel exclusion of human lives from rights and agency. In al-ʿIlka, I examine how this is formulated into a defamiliarizing perspective on the postmodern, and on historical trauma and erasure, in which the possibility of narrative is a driving concern, rooted in existential reflection, as well as the real precarity of those who tell stories in Libya.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Djibouti's Markazi camp for refugees from Yemen between 2016 and 2018, this article examines the complex motivating factors that drove a subset of Yemenis to seek refuge in the Horn of Africa. Although the primary reason for their flight to the Horn of Africa was the ongoing war, a secondary but not inconsequential driver of many of these Yemeni refugees’ current displacement was their family histories of transnational migrations and interethnic marriages. This article argues that, for this group, it was their “mixed” (muwallad) Arab and African parentage and resulting alienation in Yemen that made their flight imaginable—and, in their view, imperative. Although “mixed motive migration” is not unusual, this example underscores how spatial and social (im)mobilities in Yemen and the Horn of Africa region have been co-constituted across generations. More importantly, it has critical implications for the recently adopted Global Compact on Refugees, which promotes (among other solutions) the “local integration” of refugees in their proximate host societies.

I propose that careful reading of films and film coverage provides a new research avenue for scholars interested in the social and cultural history of the 1950s and the 1960s in Lebanon. Looking specifically at the manner in which George Nasser's 1957 film Ila Ayn? (Where To?) embraces and modifies the generic conventions of neorealist melodrama to articulate anxieties over the effects of emigration on Lebanon, this article explores the manner in which contemporaneous cultural critics used the film to, in turn, express their dismay at migration from Lebanon. Reading the film closely for the affects it contains and for those it produced in its readers, I argue that this technique, attendant to both sides of this dynamic, affords us new insights into the manner in which cinema produced during Lebanon's golden period interacted with and complicated the dominant cultural narratives of that era.

This paper investigates the contemporary phenomenon of smuggling sperm from within Israeli jails, which I treat as a biopolitical act of resistance. Palestinian prisoners who have been sentenced to life-imprisonment have recently resorted to delivering their sperm to their distant wives in the West Bank and Gaza where it is then used for artificial insemination. On the level of theory, my analysis of this practice benefits from Jacques Derrida's commentary in The Post Card on imaginative postal delivery of sperm to distant lovers. I use Derrida's heteronormative implication to examine how Palestinian prisoners defy the Israeli carceral system via the revolutionary act of sperm smuggling. The article then argues that smuggling sperm challenges the conventional gender codes in Palestinian society that see women in passive roles. Drawing on Derrida's metaphorical connection between masturbation and writing, I problematize the perception of speech/orality as primary in traditional Palestinian culture. Women, who mostly act as smugglers, become social agents whose written stories of bionational resistance emerge as a dominant mode of representation.

This article explores the coloniality of gender, sexuality, and desire, and the links between nationalist and commercial imperatives, in the making of Egypt's first sound film, or talkie, in 1932. Through an analysis of the politics, economy, and memory of Yusuf Wahbi's film Awlad al-Dhawat (Sons of the Aristocrats), it shows how the interplay between new sound technologies, the global film trade, and nationalist and racialized narratives of gender and resistance shaped the contours of ideal femininity and masculinity during the interwar period in Egypt. The article also shows how the film's representations formed at the intersection between the filmmakers’ attempts to challenge colonial stereotyping and their efforts to capture an ever-expanding global film market. Often neglected in cinema scholarship, early filmmaking in Egypt, I argue, is critical to understanding wider processes of nation formation and gendered characterizations.

For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and foremost, or whether one must prioritize understanding the meaning of its complex language. What is the best way to encounter God's Word? To explore this question, a women's Qurʾan lesson in a slum of Old Cairo illustrates modern Muslim anxieties over the place of discursive meaning in encounters with the Qurʾan. This article elaborates the concept of affirmation as an analytic to grasp how the women relate to the truth of revelation. Affirmation is a performative and discursive hermeneutic practice that deploys Qurʾanic citation, situates Qurʾanic concepts in daily life, and sutures the efficacy of Qurʾan education with correct language and with right action. Their lessons are indicative of reformist trends in Qurʾan education that open onto questions of meaning and understanding in relation to human interactions with divine speech.

In this article we examine accounts of self-identifying Iranian gay men. We draw on a range of evidentiary sources—interpretive, historical, online, and empirical—to generate critical and nuanced insights into the politics of recognition and representation that inform narrative accounts of the lived experiences of self-identified gay Iranian men, and the constitution of same-sex desire for these men under specific conditions of Iranian modernity. In response to critiques of existing gay internationalist and liberationist accounts of the Iranian gay male subject as a persecuted victim of the Islamic Republic of Iran's barbarism, we address interpretive questions of sexuality governance in transnational contexts. Specifically, we attend to human rights frameworks in weighing social justice and political claims made by and on behalf of sexual and gender minorities in such Global South contexts. In this sense, our article represents a critical engagement with the relevant literature on sexuality governance and the politics of same-sex desire for Iranian gay men that is informed by empirical analysis.

This article draws on a year of ethnography conducted among cis heterosexual couples in contemporary urban Lebanon in order to argue that, in the absence of a serious project of national reconciliation, intersectarian love, despite its short lifespan, constitutes restorative instances in post–civil war Lebanon. Intersectarian hetero desire emerges as a counter-discourse that threatens the masculinist foundations of the Lebanese state. By tracing the timeline of love in the life of Lebanese citizens, this article places personal narratives of “impossible” intersectarian love stories in conversation with queer temporality scholarship in order to recognize the political, albeit limited, potential of romantic love. Here, societal expectations of married life are replaced by an ephemeral unity that operates in contra to hegemonic interpretations of “man and wife.”

The Islamic reformist movement in Algeria is often seen as a precursor to the independence movement, in which religion was supposedly integrated into nationalist identity politics. Focusing on the Muslim scout movements between the 1930s and 1950s, this article challenges this view by arguing that Islam continued to play a role beyond that of an identitarian marker. Influenced by Christian youth movements, the Muslim scouts developed ideas of a “muscular Islam” that remained central even after the movement split in two—one association close to the major nationalist party and another linked to the reformists.

In this article, I argue that audiocassette technology decentralized state-controlled Egyptian media long before the advent of al-Jazeera and the Internet. By enabling any citizen to become a cultural producer, as opposed to a mere consumer, the mass medium and its users sparked significant anxiety in the mid-to-late 20th century, when contentious cassette recordings led many local critics to assert that “vulgar” tapes were poisoning public taste, undermining high culture, and endangering Egyptian society. This article breaks down these arguments and shows that audiotapes actually broadcast a vast variety of voices. Thus, underlying many criticisms of cassette content, I contend, was not simply a concern for aesthetic sensibilities but a desire to dictate who created Egyptian culture during a time of tremendous change. By unpacking these discussions, this article harnesses Egypt as a case study to enhance prevailing investigations of sound, popular culture, and mass media in Middle East studies.

The zūrkhānah is the traditional gymnasium of Iranian cities. Athletes exercised in a homosocial milieu that occasionally allowed for same-sex relations. Beginning in the 20th century, modern heteronormativity made such relations problematic, while gender desegregation allowed women to enter them. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, gender segregation was again imposed, while heteronormativity was maintained. In recent years, women have endeavored to make the zūrkhānah more inclusive. This article analyzes the contradictions and paradoxes of gender relations in the zūrkhānah by using classical poetry, modern novels, anthropological accounts, autobiographies, travelogues, and press reports.

This article examines the social makeup of the early Qajar administration or chancery (dīvān). Using a wide range of Persian sources, the article focuses on those individuals who held offices in the dīvān and traces their family, social, and geographic backgrounds, highlights their marital ties, and reveals their sources of economic and social prestige. In doing so, the article draws attention to patterns of continuity and change between Safavid, Afsharid, Zand, and Qajar rule, and to the familial and informal nature of political power during the early Qajar period (1785–1834). Ultimately the article suggests that an analysis of the social makeup of the dīvān, and of what political office-holders actually do, offers a more fruitful pathway for understanding the formation of Qajar Iran than a focus on institutions and political structures.

This article develops a concept of social brokerage to explain leftist–Sadrist cooperation during Iraq's 2015 protest movement. Conventional understanding holds that Iraq's secular-leftist civil trend and Shiʿi Islamist factions have been mutually isolated, and at times fierce antagonists, in Iraq's post-2003 politics. This view has been challenged by an emergent political alliance between a faction of the civil trend and the Shiʿi Islamist Sadrist movement. By comparing this alliance with the failure of another Shiʿi Islamist group, ʿAsaʾib Ahl al-Haq, to involve itself with and exploit the protest movement, this article isolates the conditions which determined the dynamics of leftist–Islamist interactions. Shifting the focus away from elite politics and structural-instrumental explanations favored by rational choice models, this article reveals a longer backstory of social and ideological interactions between less senior actors that transgressed leftist–Islamist social boundaries. From this context, potential brokers emerged, capable of skilfully mediating leftist–Sadrist interactions.

Two Arabic-speaking Jewish guards worked in the European Jewish agricultural colony of Petah Tikva soon after its founding, northeast of Jaffa, in 1878: Daud abu Yusuf from Baghdad and Yaʿqub bin Maymun Zirmati, a Maghribi Jew from Jaffa. The two men, who worked as traders among Bedouin but were recruited for a short time by the colony, offer a rare glimpse of contacts between Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews in rural Jewish colonies established in the last quarter of the 19th century, colonies that are often regarded as detached from their local and Ottoman landscape. The article first argues that Zionist sources constructed these two men as bridges to the East in their roles as teachers of Arabic and perceived sources of legitimization for the European Jewish settlement project. It then reads beyond the sparse details offered in Ashkenazi Zionist sources to resituate these men in their broad imperial and regional context and argue that, contrary to the local Zionist accounts, the colony was in fact likely to have been marginal to these men's commercial and personal lives.

This article traces a conflict that erupted in the late 19th century between the Armenians and the Süryani. This conflict, I argue, precipitated nothing less than the creation of the Süryani community itself. The dispute began over the key to a closet in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but it quickly evolved. Soon, the Armenians and the Süryani were clashing over holy places all around Jerusalem. The dispute centered on an Ottoman administrative arrangement which had been institutionalized nearly 400 years earlier: yamaklık. The Ottoman investigators, however, were unfamiliar with this archaic arrangement and had to be reeducated as to its terms and its history. The Süryani and the Armenians offered divergent accounts. Where the Armenians furnished hard documentation, however, the Süryani could produce only claims to tradition and local practice. In this article I argue that, through this protracted conflict, the Süryani came to understand the importance of the documentary record in a post-Tanzimat Ottoman world. They thus turned to an alternative strategy that would conform to this documentary sensibility and render their community visible to the state: a series of petitions with thousands of Süryani signatures from around the Ottoman Empire.

In humanitarian studies, it is typically the white western doctor who stands apart as the cultural prototype or universal figure through which global aid is delivered to vulnerable groups. This article, by contrast, examines the experiences of members of a prominent Syrian-American global medical aid organization. The members of this organization provide life-saving emergency care to millions of Syrians affected by the ongoing civil war, both inside Syria and in surrounding refugee camps. Drawing on over four years (2014–18) of intermittent interviews and observations with these doctors, I suggest that they are positioned precariously within a global “hierarchy of humanitarians” that deems their lives less worthy of mobility and protection than others. In critically analyzing the unequal politics of humanitarianism that exists around the Syrian war, this research complicates our understandings of the givers of global aid, as well as the medical humanitarian encounter itself in times of war.

This article probes the legal expropriation of dynastic property in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Focused on the period from Abdülhamid II's deposal in 1909 to the decade immediately following the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, it takes parliamentary debates as entry points for exploring how this legislative process redefined the sovereign's relationship with property. Although this process was initially limited only to Yıldız Palace, the debates that surrounded it heuristically helped to shape a new understanding of public ownership of property that was put to use in other contexts in the years to come, most notably during and after World War I and the Armenian genocide, before establishing itself as the foundation of a new ownership regime with the republican appropriation and reuse of property two decades later.

Can a nation mobilizing for an extended armed conflict also construct and implement a national educational curriculum? This article explores the complex and crucial case of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as it sought to develop a national curriculum while in exile in Lebanon during the 1970s, prior to the inception of the Palestinian National Authority. Based on previously unexamined primary sources from PLO archives, I show how the PLO accomplished a high level of curriculum maturity despite considerable contextual and institutional challenges. The PLO mainstream embraced this curriculum as a political instrument of anticolonial and postdiasporic education suitable for regenerating a sense of community, fostering nation building, and increasing the PLO's political legitimacy. However, as can be expected in a colonial or diasporic setting, the process of educational transition remained uneven, fragile, and dependent on the PLO leadership's ability to navigate conflicts and negotiate arrangements with colonial power, host states, and international organizations.

The Palestine Group was a loosely connected collection of young anti-Shah activists some of whom were arrested and tried publically in 1970 for the crime of acting against the Pahlavi monarchy and Iran's national security. Their plight became global, receiving support from anticolonial figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre. But while they played an important role in inspiring the revolutionary generation, in the historiography of the 1979 revolution and that of the global south, their story has been mostly forgotten. This article argues for remembering the Palestine Group by focusing on two facets of their prerevolutionary activism: the importance of a connection to the anti-imperial/colonial struggles that spread from “Asia to Africa”; and the centrality of maḥfilī politics (friendship circles) in addition to tashkīlātī (organizational) politics, which the historiography has traditionally emphasized. It demonstrates that as resistance shifted from maḥfil to tashkīlāt, it also shifted from a global struggle where Iran was one node out of many, to a nationalized struggle.

The cholera and plague pandemics of the 19th and early 20h centuries shaped Ottoman state-building and expansionist efforts in Iraq and the Gulf in significant ways. For Ottoman officials, these pandemics brought attention to the possible role of Qajar and British subjects in spreading cholera and plague, as well as the relationship between Iraq's ecology and recurring outbreaks. These developments paved the way for the expansion of Ottoman health institutions, such as quarantines, and the emergence of new conceptions of public health in the region. Specifically, quarantines proved instrumental not only to the delineation of the Ottoman–Qajar border, but also to defining an emerging Ottoman role in shaping Gulf affairs. Moreover, the Ottomans’ use of quarantines and simultaneous efforts to develop sanitary policies informed by local ecological realities signal a localized and ad hoc approach to disease prevention that has been overlooked. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that environmental factors operating on global and regional scales were just as important as geopolitical factors in shaping Ottoman rule in Iraq and the Gulf during the late Ottoman period.