CSSAAME - Recent Issues (Duke Univ.)

Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates: Rethinking Violence, Secularism, and Islam in Germany

Fereshta Ludin’s struggle to be appointed as a public school teacher while wearing a hijab received massive media attention in Germany, while the xenophobically motivated murder of Marwa el-Sherbini, who was eventually dubbed the "hijab martyr" internationally, elicited muted response. Yet interpreting the reactions to these two cases together reveals much about the existence of racism and Islamophobia in contemporary Germany. In this article I juxtapose the public discussions of these two cases to consider the potential for a critique of headscarf discourse. I suggest that interrogation of headscarf discourse is only possible by turning the very notion of critique against itself in order to interrogate the conditions of secularism.

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The Role of Symbolic Capital in Protest: State-Society Relations and the Destruction of the Halabja Martyrs Monument in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

This essay examines state-society relations in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq through a case study of the March 2006 protest in Halabja, during which protesters destroyed a memorial built to honor the victims of the 1988 chemical bombing of the city. The article suggests that contradictions between word and deed fueled local perceptions that the Kurdistan Regional Government was exploiting Halabja’s symbolic and material legacy. The essay’s main argument is that these contradictions, along with Halabja’s symbolic capital, gave student protesters leverage for renegotiating the terms of the relationship between authorities and local people. They mobilized the politics of shame to pressure officials, transformed the monument site and the commemoration into a theater for conveying their challenge, and acquired influential allies capable of substantiating and institutionalizing their demands.

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Seductive Piety: Faith and Fashion through Lipovetsky and Heidegger

Martin Heidegger broadened the meaning of art to a truth-disclosing event akin to seemingly disparate events such as the founding of a political state, Jesus’s sacrifice for all humankind, and the questioning of a philosopher. Art makes us pay attention to it by presenting the familiar in a new and unfamiliar context and unsettles our presuppositions and reconceptualizes our way of thinking. I begin by explicating the Heideggerian interpretation of the nature of art by looking at the key concepts that make a work of art work. Then I argue that by themselves, the concept of veiling and the concept of fashion are very familiar concepts to Indonesians, but that the practice of combining these two ideas brings something unfamiliar to that society. This new practice reveals a way of Being that combines religious piety with our current, late-modern, consumer society. The combination of fashion and veiling for piety discloses, in the Heideggerian sense, a new "world" that undermines secular and fundamentalist narratives about the religious agent while still remaining an authentic Indonesian art piece.

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Gender, Performance, and the Politics of Space: Germany and the Veil in Popular Culture

Since the 1990s, the headscarf has played a powerful role in negotiating questions of national and cultural belonging, gender identity, and definitions of urban space in Germany. This essay examines examples of veiling depicted in popular culture and theorizes the relationship between the headscarf and gendered and racialized spaces and the headscarf’s potential as a symbol of defiance in Germany. The two examples, the television comedy Turkish for Beginners and the performances of Berlin hip-hop artist Sahira Awad, illustrate how young Muslimas (female Muslims) inhabit a precarious space as mediators between cultures. In spite of being rather prescriptive, the mediator role also opens up spaces for critical intervention in the German media landscape.

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Introduction: Veiled Constellations: The Veil, Critical Theory, Politics, and Contemporary Society

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From Traditional Mahallehs to Modern Neighborhoods: The Case of Narmak, Tehran

Most cities in developing countries experience unprecedented changes in their physical and social structures during the process of modernization. This article investigates daily life in a modern neighborhood of Tehran, Narmak, designed in 1951 based on Western ideas, through the application of qualitative research methods to examine the transformation of this neighborhood from a Gemeinschaft community to a more urban community. This article uses the public spaces of the neighborhood as a tool to monitor daily life and the changes that have emerged in the neighborhood. It considers the social interactions in the public spaces of the neighborhood as a synthesis between the new norms stemming from the modern culture and the traditional cultural and religious norms reflected in gender, family, and neighborhood relations. The findings reveal that despite Narmak’s modern design and planning, a synthesis between traditional and modern culture can be observed in this neighborhood. Five decades after its design, the original low-density residential neighborhood has been transformed into a mixed-use, medium-density neighborhood with new migrants consisting of half of its population. Observations suggest differences both with the old mahallehs (neighborhoods), such as the blur of the previously more clear-cut public-private boundaries and the use of public spaces by youths and women, and with qualities inherited from traditional mahallehs, such as a sense of community, the exclusion of strangers, cul-de-sacs, and so forth.

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World Metaphor, Metametaphor: Veils in Literature, Literature as Veil

For the past decades, public discourse on veils in Western societies has mainly focused on the Islamic veil. In the Western history of thought, however, veils have frequently been used as symbols in epistemological contexts, too, both in literary and in theoretical primary texts. Astonishingly, an overwhelming majority of secondary sources concerned with veils as epistemological symbols in Western culture continue to talk about "the veil" — as if there were only one. Indeed, veils have usually been used in similar epistemological contexts, albeit expressing completely different worldviews depending on the degree of transparency or opacity, the material structure, and — most important — the veils’ position in relation to the subject. Consequently, "the veil" as such does not exist; there is rather a plurality of different types of veils, for example, the veil of Isis, the metaphysical veil, the discursive veil, the veil of perception, the psychological veil, or the veil between subjects, all of which contribute to an all-encompassing veil in the sense of a "world metaphor." Different literary texts from the corresponding periods in literary history use veils as epistemological metaphors, too, and thereby reflect the conception of reality dominant in the respective epoch.

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Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh: Three Lives in a Lifetime

Taqizdeh’s extraordinary career involves three distinct but interrelated phases. In the first he is an influential young intellectual of the constitutional revolution and becomes a leading spokesperson of the Democrat party. This is the "first Taqizadeh" who in 1910 goes into voluntary exile in Europe and does not return until 1923, having in the meantime led the Berlin National Committee of Iranian intellectuals against the Anglo-Russian intervention in their country. The second phase of Taqizadeh’s life — beginning with his membership of the fifth Majlis in 1923 and ending with his dismissal as the Iranian minister counselor in Paris in 1934 — shows him as a mature politician, no longer idealistic but still hoping to contribute to Iran’s sociopolitical development under Reza Shah Pahlavi’s new regime. It is in this phase that he signs the Anglo-Iranian oil agreement of 1933 against his own will and eventually ends up as an exile, this time as a professor at the University of London. In the third phase, Taqizadeh returns to Iran in 1947, having been Iranian ambassador to London for five years, and becomes a Majlis deputy and then chairman of the Senate. He is now far too advanced for Iranian politics and, although still a public figure until the early 1980s, keeps to the margins of political life. He then confides to Iraj Afshar his deep regret that he had vehemently opposed any compromise with Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar when the latter had willy-nilly tried to reach a settlement with the constitutionalists.

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The Specter and Reality of Corruption in State and Civil Society: Privatizing and Auditing Poor Relief in Turkey

Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted at the headquarters of the non-governmental association Deniz Feneri [Lighthouse] Aid and Solidarity Association (DF) in Istanbul and its local branch in Izmir, Turkey, this article aims to add to the literature on accountability and corruption by critically examining technologies of accountability and transparency foregrounded by DF to counter possible corruption allegations against the association. Through an ethnographic study of various governance processes, the study aims to reach a comprehension of both corruption and accountability experienced and discussed as social practice. The research points to the fact that the overarching concern over corruption and accountability should be seen not as a reaction to the neoliberal agenda of deregulation and privatization favored by the government but as the neoliberal agenda reasserting itself through "good governance" and "audit culture" in an effort to ensure the public’s and donors’ trust in the effectiveness of neoliberal accountability as the poor are continuously categorized and made visible.

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Four Daughters of Tokoldosh: Kyrgyz Actresses Define Soviet Modernity

This article analyzes the lives of four stage personalities whose lives, career paths, and achievements connect us to the cultural makeup of Soviet Kyrgyzstan during the second half of the twentieth century. The stories of Sabira Kumushalieva, Saira Kiyizbaeva, Baken Kydykeeva, and Darkul Kuiukova take us back to an era when Kyrgyz women first took charge of their lives in a public forum. These "four daughters of Tököldösh" established the modern conventions of Kyrgyz stage and film. They helped construct idealized models for Kyrgyz women and fashioned a new Kyrgyz identity that redefined the meaning of "Sovietness."

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State as Socionatural Effect: Variable and Emergent Geographies of the State in Southeastern Turkey

This article draws on recent interventions related to everyday states, state-natures, and political ecologies of the state, as well as Timothy Mitchell’s concept of "state as effect," to detail and analyze ongoing changes in southeastern Turkey associated with the large-scale Southeastern Anatolia Project (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi, or GAP). Using interviews and survey data, the essay details changing narrations and understandings of the Turkish state among villagers of Turkey’s southeast, revealing the importance of social and historical processes, as well as differentiated biophysical conditions and changing access to water resources for these imaginaries. The case study explains both ways that state-society relations evolve as well as ways that the state is expressed as distinct from society, in part in relation to the varied and important changes associated with the ongoing damming and diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Apart from contributions to understandings of the state and state-society dynamics in the long-contested southeastern Anatolia border region, the work also advances state theory. Specifically, the article builds on arguments related to the importance of political ecology and socionatural approaches, detailing key analytics related to these approaches that provide important insights for state theory—spatiotemporalities, inequality and differentiated access to resources, scalar dynamics, and materialities of nature. Harris argues that these analytics have considerable potential to advance state theory and state-nature approaches, particularly to draw out ways that the state emerges as seemingly distinct from society—the "state effect." Scale, Harris argues, may be particularly useful toward this end and to expose other key processes of importance for states and stateness as they relate to development and nature.

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Literary Paradigms in the Conception of South Asian Muslim Identity: Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Hasan Askari

Literature has always played a synthesizing role in the history of Islam. The same can be said for the Urdu language and literature. Urdu was produced as a result of the mingling of Arabo-Persian-Turkish language with the indigenous languages and cultures primarily of north India. However, the Urdu language became politicized in British India first by the colonizers and then by the nationalists who insisted on giving it a specific Muslim identity distinct from Hindi. More complicated was the position of Urdu within the unity of Indian literature. After the creation of Pakistan, the dilemma for Urdu writers was how to construct a Pakistani literature that would be different from Indian Urdu. Farooqi’s essay asks the following questions: How would cultural identities be reflected in the new literature? Would Urdu in Pakistan shed the Indic part of its identity and become simply a language of Islam? Muhammad Hasan Askari, Urdu’s premier literary critic, maintained that there was a difference between Islamic and Muslim culture: Muslim culture was Islam plus local culture.

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Discursive Constructions of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon: From the Israel-Hezbollah War to the Struggle over Nahr al-Bared

Focusing on th e particularly volatile period between the Israel-Hezbollah war (July–August 2006) and the prolonged struggle over Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (March–October 2007), this article outlines and historicizes the complex and altering landscape of discursive constructions of the Palestinian refugee presence in Lebanon. Examining some of the more prominent discursive strands that emerge in relation to Palestinian refugee presence in Lebanon, the article argues that although the recent problematization of Hezbollah initially dwarfed the Palestinian "problem," Palestinian presence in Lebanon was quickly reproblematized in the context of the protracted struggle over Nahr al-Bared and the increasing instability in and around Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. Yet while past discursive strands have reemerged, a discursive shift is also apparent, tending in the direction of the establishment of a more conciliatory relationship between Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese state and the latter’s interest in a partial regularization of Palestinian refugee presence.

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Performing Veiled Women as Marketable Commodities: Representations of Muslim Minority Women in Germany

Why do narratives of Muslim women find a large audience in the European cultural market? In particular, stories that portray Muslim women as victims of patriarchal traditions buttress the notion of liberal freedom that excludes these women pitied for their lack of agency. This essay explores a recent German theater performance (Black Virgins, 2006) that poses itself against such victimization stories. The analysis of the performance shows, however, that the subjectivity of Muslim minority women is framed by their ability to unveil in speech and talk freely about sexuality.

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Alternative Narratives of the Veil in Contemporary Art

The Muslim veil is a heavily charged site in mainstream Western culture and media. However, its continued use as a visual shorthand for the oppressed Muslim woman, and by extension for the misogyny and violence of Islam, stands in sharp contrast to the numerous depictions of the veil present in contemporary artistic practice. This article analyzes mainstream representations of the veil and their various subtexts, before charting three alternative narratives of the veil found in contemporary art produced by artists of Muslim descent who now exhibit, and often live, in Europe and North America. The specific works examined and the new narratives of the veil they bring forward reorient the gaze. By displacing the veil, a site of cross-cultural mistranslation, they remap the world and uncover the possible spaces of transnational literacy and communication.

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A Door Ajar: National Borders and the Character of Islam in Pakistan

The modern nation-state has a national space and national borders. Yet borders are not always for defense. In Pakistan, since 2001, and from as far back as the 1980s, the premise (or implied threat) of unsecured borders on the North-West Frontier has become an unadmitted aspect of state policy which can be partly explained by a distinctive factor: the commitment of the post–General Zia state (or part of it) to a militant version of Islam. Pakistan owes its being to Islam. In August, 1947, the eastern border of the new state was opened to the flow of Muslim refugees from India. Even in those early days, the "homeland for the Muslims of India" was conceived (ideally) in two guises: either as a container for the Muslims that lived or migrated there, or as a project for making Pakistanis. The Indian Islam of large sections of the existing population was not of a kind to be respected by all architects of the new project. Before the 1980s, the state took a defensive (though sometimes accommodating) attitude toward the demands of a radical minority that society in Pakistan be brought into accord with Islamic norms. But state-sponsored processes of Islamization have since come to be deeply entwined with the cross-border conduct of policy and war in Afghanistan. Drawing particular attention to the Munir Report (1954), an inquiry into civil disturbances soon after the foundation of the country, this paper considers the events of more recent times in terms of the interdependence of two kinds of question: that of the nation-state and its borders, and that of the character of Islam in a particular country.

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The Mythology of the Veil in Europe: A Brief History of a Debate

The Islamic headscarf became an issue of controversy in Western European countries beginning in the late 1980s. This controversy increasingly began to include diverse issues such as the integration of Muslim immigrants into their host countries, the politicization of Islam, the ghettoization of Muslim populations, and the congruity of Islam with modernity. This article provides a history of this debate, with a focus on its emergence, with the aim to address the different contexts and issues raised in France, Britain, and Germany. It adopts a semiological approach in understanding the social dimensions through which an object, a form of clothing, can bear contested meanings and rouse debates that evoke unresolved problems related to immigration, secularism, and the reception of Islam in the West. The first section provides a historical narrative of the emergence of the headscarf debate in Western Europe and compares the different discursive contexts in France, Britain, and Germany. The second section proposes a mythological reading of the veil by using the notion of myth as employed by Roland Barthes. The third section argues that the myth of the veil demonstrates the conflicts between religion and society that were thought to have been resolved. Furthermore, the myth of the veil, as it emerged in European countries, functions both to present the Muslim presence in Europe as a new and sudden occurrence without a history and to distance the religious and colonial history of Europe in its search for its identity.

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Poetry, Power, Protest: Reimagining Muslim Nationhood in Northern Pakistan

This article examines the role of poetry in illuminating and challenging the meaning of citizenship in the border region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which is located in the north of Pakistan and is internationally considered as forming part of Pakistani Kashmir. Ali discusses how poetic performances constitute a critical public arena for protesting political dispossession and for nurturing a postsectarian, religious harmony in the region. The article also complicates our understanding of the state, as several of the poets in Gilgit work for the local government. From this overlapping position as local inhabitants and state officials, they seek to create spaces of poetic reflection that can help reshape the state as well as society in Gilgit-Baltistan.

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The Colonial State and Its Multiple Relations: A Case Study of Egypt

This article examines the nature of the colonial state as it existed in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century. It delves into issues surrounding the multiple societal relations that the colonial state had to maintain to ensure its continued existence. It also considers the very nature of the colonial relationship as exemplified by the attitudes and actions of British colonial administrators in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Contributors

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Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image

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Nationalism and the Imagination

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The Persistence of Philanthropy

One of the most profound Ottoman legacies to contemporary Turkey is the central role of private philanthropy as a vehicle for shaping culture and society. Two principal legacies of Ottoman philanthropy exist in Turkey today. The first is cultural, apparent in the thriving practice of elite philanthropy; the second is physical, readily discovered in the urban fabric of most Turkish cities, notably Istanbul. This article examines these legacies in order to analyze the nature of state building and society formation in modern Turkey from a new perspective. Both continuities and changes are apparent from imperial to republican times: in the identity of the donors, the sources and locus of wealth, the importance of foundations, the motivations for giving, the choice of projects, the physical impact of donations, and the identity of the beneficiaries. The dynamic contemporary culture of private charitable giving in Turkey results from a unique interaction of inherited Ottoman ideology and practices, themselves the result of combined Muslim, Turco-Mongol, Byzantine, and Arab influences; the observed example of modern Western philanthropy, notably that of the United States; and the specific experiences of the republican Turkish state and society since 1923. The economic elite have replaced the sultans and pashas as premier benefactors, with personal or corporate donations even rivaling government sources of assistance. The motivations for contemporary philanthropy echo the Muslim consciousness of Ottoman donors, while philanthropy functions more to legitimize wealth than to ensure political legitimacy. Nonetheless, philanthropy remains the means to contribute to a wider community, whether it is the community of Turkish citizens; of Muslims or another confessional group; or of a town, a neighborhood, or a profession. As in Ottoman times, the beneficiaries are not limited to the materially poor and needy. Rather, private elite philanthropy contributes to many segments of society and in this reflects the manifold motivations for giving.

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Introduction: The Ottoman Legacy for Contemporary Turkish Culture, Institutions, and Values

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The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State

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Najib 'Azuri's Le reveil de la nation arabe: A Reception History

Scholars have situated Najib ‘Azuri’s famous book Le reveil de la nation arabe (1905) primarily within the context of two major historiographical debates: the origins of Arab nationalism and the beginnings of an Arab-Jewish conflict in twentieth-century Palestine. Both these interpretations have not only largely failed to take ‘Azuri’s social and political context into account but have also relied on highly selective readings of the text itself. In tracing the reception of ‘Azuri’s work, this article seeks to shed light on the trajectory of Western scholarship about the Middle East over the past fifty years. It also attempts to take a closer look at the text of Le reveil and suggest some of the ways the book could be used not as a source for the perennial foci of the Middle East’s recent political history but as a snapshot of the concerns of a mobile, Western-facing, Levantine Arab Christian intellectual elite during the final decades of Ottoman rule.

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The Circuitous Origins of the Gender Perspective in Human Rights Advocacy: A Challenge for Transnational Feminisms

This article pieces together a complex genealogy of the multiple contexts that helped reshape women’s international organizing and create a global women’s human rights movement following the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women, 1975–85. It maps a multilayered history consisting of many different strands of women’s activities around the globe that increasingly converged in the 1970s, although in unanticipated ways. Through its broad focus on women in distinct social, political, and intellectual arenas, it links the UN human rights system and its oversight committees and commissions with the first two UN Development Decades of the 1960s and 1970s. And it interconnects these global structures, discourses, and activities with old and new patterns of women’s postwar organizing and with the emerging challenges to canons of knowledge and research methodologies from feminist theory and epistemology. Starting in the mid-1970s, four distinct yet overlapping endeavors converged: the work for international human rights, colonial and postcolonial expectations of economic development and well-being, women’s rights and liberation movements, and women’s studies in their global translations. This critical history, however, has all but been lost in the fraught contemporary debates about human rights as a vehicle for radical gender and social change.

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Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid

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Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture

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Crossing Musical Worlds: Ottoman Jewry, Music Making, and the Rise of the Nation

Based on a larger project investigating music making as an integral part of Ottoman and Turkish social history, this article seeks to understand surviving musical resonances across ethnoreligious communities in Turkey today. It specifically explores Jewish religious music and its interconnections with a wider Ottoman-Turkish musical culture that has sustained historical traces in Turkish synagogues today. Focusing primarily on a Jewish musical form with close links to Ottoman court music, the Maftirim repertoire, the study investigates the changing urban landscape of intercommunal music making as the Ottoman Empire ended and the Turkish nation was built. Through composer biographies and ethnographic methodologies of oral history within an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, the analysis seeks to articulate the places and people circulating in a late Ottoman music world and sharing patterns of patronage, aesthetic understandings, professional specialization, and master-pupil relations. The social ethos of this art world provides the foundation for tracing Ottoman-Turkish-Jewish music making in the republic. By pursuing not only minority human and cultural losses in the twentieth century but also the musical lives of those Jews who remained in Turkey, the article elucidates continuities in Ottoman lines of transmission and interethnic music making to explain the performance of Maftirim in Istanbul today. It argues that it was through alternative patrons and civic spaces that Turkish Jewish religious musicians participated with their non-Jewish counterparts in sustaining at-risk, albeit changing, Ottoman cultural forms in the face of state and commercial cultural interests.

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Calligraphy and the Art of Statecraft in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkish Republic

State building and nationalism have been widely examined in the context of both the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish Republic. This article explores the role of Islamic calligraphy and calligraphers during the final decades of Ottoman rule and through the twentieth century in terms of their contribution, both materially and ideologically, to the development of national identity in Turkey. Because calligraphy in Turkey has always enjoyed a unique relationship with Islam, it has been impossible to fully separate the art from the Ottoman-Islamic past. Having survived the transition in modern Turkey from the Arabic to the Latin script, calligraphy thus serves as an alternative, and perhaps subtly oppositional, form of expression in the Turkish Republic. That Islamic calligraphy continues to be appreciated in Turkey demonstrates resistance to the national identity handed down by Kemalists in an attempt to erase Islam and the Turks’ immediate Ottoman past since the 1920s.

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Performing Mesk, Narrating History: Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices

This essay focuses on the multiple definitions and conflicting narrative performances of mesk that coexist in contemporary Turkish practices of music transmission. In Ottoman contexts, mesk referred to the prescribed unfolding of transmission over a long period of time between a master and an apprentice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul (during 2003 – 5), I examine contemporary interpretations of mesk as performances of history and memory directly engaged with musicians’ situatedness. Conflicting understandings of mesk within the distinctive discursive realms of the master-apprentice system, state-sponsored places, and consumer circuits indicate competing discourses that illuminate the workings of different hegemonic power structures. In performative statements of mesk, individuals are doing more than simply articulating practices of musical transmission. Rather, performances of mesk work to place individuals in a tradition in which their past, present, and future are fused together and constituted as social identity. In this essay, I unpack identity practices (how individuals position themselves through interpretations of mesk), performances (how individuals perceive and narrate themselves as belonging to history), and engagement with cultural and musical production (Turkish classical music and practices of transmitting the same) to come to an enlarged understanding of the historical composition of identity for musicians today.

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The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory

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Old Elites in a New Republic: The Reconversion of Ottoman Bureaucratic Families in Turkey (1909-1939)

The Kemalist officers who set up the new regime in the aftermath of the Turkish national struggle for independence (1919–22) officially declared against the prominent senior dignitaries who had served the Ottoman imperial state. However, far from deeming it necessary to destroy a complete segment of the society as a prerequisite for establishing full control over the masses, the republican leaders pragmatically vested old families with the right to explore their competences and make use of their abilities. As far as the imperial state had been unchallenged in supervising the ongoing changes affecting the organization of socioprofessional activities, that is, the emergence of journalists, lawyers, or academics as elite segments, not only did old established families use their positions to organize their reconversion at the margins of the classical administrative sphere, but they were also promoted through the new official apparatus as diplomats, professors, and even politicians. Interestingly enough, the republican regime associated two apparent oppositions: declared antipathy toward Ottoman bureaucratic elites and the effective use of their heirs both as a way to organize the state.

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Contributors

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The Mughal Book of War: A Persian Translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata

This article presents the first in-depth textual analysis of the Razmnamah (Book of War), the Persian translation of the Mahabharata sponsored by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century. I argue that the Razmnamah was a central literary work in the Mughal court and of deep relevance to Akbar’s imperial and political ambitions. I pursue my analysis of the Mughal Mahabharata in two sections, focusing first on the work’s Sanskrit sources and then on the translation practices one finds evidenced in the Persian text. In the first section, I outline how the Mughal translators accessed Sanskrit materials and identify the Sanskrit texts that served as the basis for the Persian translation. This framework helps reconstruct the nature of the Mahabharata as the Mughals knew it and provides both the conceptual and literary tools needed to pursue comparative textual analysis. In the second section, I examine the text of the Razmnamah in comparison with its Sanskrit sources to highlight some of the Mughal translators’ key strategies in reimagining the epic in Persian. This close reading traces several literary paradigms that offer insight into the crucial role the Razmnamah played in the production and reproduction of Mughal imperial culture. Taken as a whole, my analysis argues that the Razmnamah was a crucial component of the politico-cultural fashioning of Akbar’s court, whereby the Mughals developed a new type of Indo-Persian imperial aesthetic.

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Comparing Arab Diasporas: Post-9/11 and Historical Perspectives on Hadhrami and Syro-Lebanese Communities in Southeast Asia and the Americas

This introductory article discusses comparative approaches and research topics explored by contributors to the issue’s special section "Comparing Arab Diasporas." The article reassesses debates about early meanings of the term diaspora that reveal the potentials of comparative research in the study of diasporas. The article also reviews the body of contemporary work on diasporas and its use of comparative analytical approaches. It discusses in more detail the contributions to this special section with regard to major topics in the field of comparative diaspora studies, including the complex relations between diasporas and host countries, their majority populations, and the identity politics involved in these processes. Based on the case studies assembled in this special section, the article contrasts internal divisions in the Hadhrami and Syro-Lebanese diasporas, their institutionalization in formal organizations, and the role of trade in their integration into host societies and examines how relations to their homelands changed over time. Finally, the article pays special attention to Hadhrami and Syro-Lebanese diasporas after 9/11, analyzing forms of othering, discrimination, and stereotyping in various (inter)national and local contexts. By comparing the Hadhrami and Syro-Lebanese cases located in the Americas and Southeast Asia, this introductory article traces the spread of the global war on terror to different corners of the world and thus demonstrates how this war became a genuine "global" military and ideological venture.

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Paths of Institutionalization, Varying Divisions, and Contested Radicalisms: Comparing Hadhrami Communities on Java and Sulawesi

The article compares Hadhrami communities located in two different parts of Indonesia: Java, Indonesia’s central island, and rather peripheral Central and North Sulawesi. The comparisons generated the following results: in Sulawesi, regulations implemented by the Dutch colonial administration to constrain the mobility of Hadhramis were not as strictly implemented as on Java, which contributed to different settlement and integration patterns on the two islands. This leads the article to another difference in the historical development of the diaspora: in Central and North Sulawesi its institutionalization in Islamic organizations occurred several decades later than on Java. Al-Khairaat, the major Hadhrami organization in Sulawesi, also has a different outlook than its pendants on Java, as it is not only a Hadhrami but also an expanding multiethnic institution. Moreover, while on Java Hadhramis of different groups, that is, mainly those Hadhramis who claim descent from the prophet Muhammad (so-called sada) and those who do not (non-sada), are organized in different institutions that rival each other, in Sulawesi sada and non-sada Hadhramis are united in Al-Khairaat. The article further analyzes these topics of integration into host societies and internal divisions with regard to major ritual activities of Hadhramis. In the context of post-9/11 Indonesia, the article also discusses Hadhramis’ different positions in opposition to and within Islamist radicalism and their engagement in deradicalization and interreligious dialogue. Building on this range of comparisons, the article concludes that Hadhramis in the peripheries of Central and North Sulawesi have obtained a central position in the field of Islam (and also in other societal fields), whereas the communities on Java are much more affected by division and contestation.

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Diaspora and "Arabness": Limits and Potentials for Critical Analysis

The article discusses and assesses the theoretical and conceptual approaches to diaspora research presented in this special section. By pursuing multiple forms of comparison, these contributions highlight several weak points inherent in the diaspora concept as it stands and demonstrate potentials for possible elaborations. Specific consideration then is given to the more detailed discussion of questions of power; the dynamics of processes of identification; and the relevance of specific positions inside wider ethnic hierarchies, sociospatial distribution patterns and demographic issues, and, finally, kinship ties and the reproduction of diasporic communities. The argument concludes with the main point that prevailing theoretical approaches in diaspora studies are not sufficient to analyze the communities in question. Instead, those approaches have to be combined with additional input from sociocultural anthropology’s theorizing.

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Democratic Values in the Muslim World

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The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port

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Arab Ethnicity and Diasporic Islam: A Comparative Approach to Processes of Identity Formation and Religious Codification in the Muslim Communities in Brazil

The Arab community in Brazil comprises an estimated 4–6 million immigrants and their descendants and was created by an almost continuous flux of immigrants from the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) since the nineteenth century. While until the 1970s the Arab immigrants were Christians in their great majority, since the 1980s most immigrants from the Middle East are Muslims. The Muslim community in Brazil has about 1 million members today. The Muslim presence is almost exclusively urban, with important communities in São Paulo, Foz do Iguaçu, Curitiba, and, to a lesser extent, Rio de Janeiro. The vast majority of Muslims in Brazil are Arab Middle Eastern immigrants from Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories or their descendants. There are also some African immigrants (from Senegal and Nigeria) and a small but growing number of Brazilian converts without any Muslim or Arab ancestry. Arab Muslim communities and identities in Brazil are formed by very complex articulations between transnational and local interpretations and practices of Islam and Arab identities, which emerge and gain reality within the cultural and sociological framework of each locality. Therefore, this article aims to analyze the constitution of Muslim identities among Arabic-speaking immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, showing how the relation between Arab ethnicity and Muslim identity is shaped by processes that connect local, national, and transnational realities.

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In Search of Iran: Resistant Melancholia in Iranian American Memoirs of Return

This article brings Iranian American return narratives into dialogue with reinterpretations of Freud’s analysis of melancholia in the works of Judith Butler, Jonathan Flatley, David Kazanjian, David Eng, and Shinhee Ham, among others. By refusing to relinquish Iran as a physical, geographical location, these narratives reverse the one-way motion of migration and assimilation, undermine the model-minority stereotype, and contradict the subtext of dominant Western discourses around Iran—that it is a place every sensible Iranian would leave behind if given the opportunity. Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again, Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad, and Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky each seek confrontations with loss, contesting the relationship between the past and its remains by bringing personal and historical memory into direct encounters with present-day Iran. In this way, they articulate versions of Walter Benjamin’s call to interrogate the tensions among history, memory, and the present, to "brush history against the grain." Seen as melancholic acts of rebellion, with failure necessarily embedded within from the start, Iranian American memoirs of return raise a series of questions: What happens at the site of return, when subjectivity fragmented by migration and assimilation seeks to recover a lost sense of coherence? How does the text itself become a geographical location in which narrative strategies are employed to bring the past into dialogue with the present? What creative potential is unleashed through a melancholic engagement with history, trauma, and memory, and what new forms of community and resistance become available as a result? This article takes up these sites of inquiry and sketches the contours of return narratives as a new archetype of ethnic American literature.

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The Persian Novel in French: A Hybrid Genre

Writers of Iranian origin who compose in French have published a fair number of novels in France since the beginning of the 1990s. This article analyzes the genre specificity of novels by Franco-Iranian authors and the challenges that the inevitable influence of the French novelistic tradition present to the authors of this Iranian diaspora. I put the Persian novel in French into the context of the contemporary Persian literary system and then give a close reading of one novel to illustrate my point. I have chosen Sorour Kasmaï’s The Glass Cemetery (Le cimeti"re de verre, 2002) as representative of the trend. The analysis of this text, through its formal and content narrative features, shows that the use of French as a language of writing imposes certain literary norms and helps create a hybrid genre, which reflects the diasporic experience.

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Autobiography and Authority in the Writings of the Iranian Diaspora

The proliferation of popular memoirs by Iranian American women that began in 2003 engendered a vigorous debate in the scholarly community, particularly among Iranian American scholars. Much of the debate has centered on the perception that the memoirists are offering a personal story that is frequently misinterpreted by its popular readership as a national story, thereby distorting the more accurate picture that can be offered by scholarly research and writing. Critics argue that this is particularly dangerous at this critical juncture in the history of American–Middle East relations, when the American reader is particularly hungry for information about Iran and the Middle East. Ironically, though most of the critics of the memoirs have established scholarly records, they have responded to the memoirs in forms that emphasize their own autobiographical experience. Why this insistence on the autobiographical by scholars to legitimate information about Iran? Heretofore an immigrant group largely absent from public discourse as such, I argue that the debate over the memoir has made the Iranian diaspora community produce (and reproduce) itself by publicly staging textual debates over autobiography, scholarship, and the limits of authenticity and authority.

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The Significance of the Rediscovery of Arabs in the Malay World

This article explores how Arabness has been rediscovered in the Malay world—in this instance Indonesia and Malaysia and, to some extent, Singapore—from the early 1990s to the present. Arabs, mostly of Hadhrami descent, are an intimate part of local culture, given the shared faith of Islam, and yet remain a measure apart because of historical and cultural differences. They constitute significant communities in the region whose histories have been elusive if not altogether suppressed. It is against these elusive narratives that I consider the recent accentuation of Arabness—through writing in print and on the Internet, conferences, and public occasions—to be a rediscovery. The article focuses on two areas, namely, the accentuation of Arabness and the concurrent identification of Arabs as a link in what some see as a global chain of political extremism. I delve into these areas by asking the following questions: What is significant about the present assertions of Arab identity in comparison to developments more than a century earlier? How have these assertions developed in Indonesia and Malaysia, respectively? And what, if anything, is shared between the two cases that may hark back to the fluid identities of the precolonial Malay world?

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Public Performances of Identity Negotiation in the Iranian Diaspora: The New York Persian Day Parade

In the last decade Iranian Americans have increasingly taken to the same streets and fair-grounds as Irish, German, and Puerto Rican American communities before them to hold ethnic parades and festivals to assert their cultural and ethnic identity to an American public often hostile to Middle Eastern immigrants. Through interviews and visual analysis of the New York Persian Day Parade, one of more than 180 annual ethnic parades in Manhattan, I track, analyze, and compare the use of space, signs, and performance to argue that Iranian American public events such as the parade offer productive case studies of diasporic reappropriations of local genres used to present selective views of homeland and diaspora to diverse audiences. Furthermore, these public diaspora events do as much to continuously negotiate Iranian diaspora identity across generations as they do to represent Iran to non-Iranian spectators. In this study, I utilize methods from visual anthropology to examine parade and festival events through use of photography and video while also assessing production and reception to evaluate the ways in which visual representations in public performances can lead to and themselves reveal contested visions of diasporic identities.

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Transnational Diasporic Identities: Unity and Diversity in Iranian-Focused Organizations in Sweden

War and political persecution led thousands of Iranians to migrate to Sweden in the 1980s and 1990s. Forced to flee from their homeland to a relatively unknown place, the lives of these migrants changed both abruptly and dramatically. Since their arrival in Sweden, and up to the present day, Iranians have struggled to negotiate their relationship to both their home- and host land. Iran-focused associations, oriented toward both Sweden and Iran simultaneously, have aimed to capture the transnational positioning of this diverse group. Today in Sweden there are more than one hundred Iranian-focused organizations catering to the community’s cultural, political, social, and economic needs. Based on an in-depth analysis of nine associations in five cities in Sweden, this article explores how Iranian-focused organizations have developed over the past two decades and how they reflect identity issues within Sweden’s Iranian community. It is argued that Iranian identity is not static but, rather, has been both internally and externally defined in a transnational field influenced by changing home- and host-land identity politics.

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Crossing the Americas: The U.S. War on Terror and Arab Cross-Border Mobilizations in a South American Frontier Region

George W. Bush hardly finished his declaration of war on terror when the U.S. government turned its attention toward a trinational region where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, called the triple frontera (Triple Border, in Spanish) and the tríplice fronteira (in Portuguese). My article traces how border residents of Muslim Lebanese origins responded to this post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorist encompassment. I suggest that Arabs publicly mobilized through three media- and state-sponsored initiatives that sought to combat U.S.-derived suspicions. Beginning in September 2001, they led the Peace without Frontiers movement, bringing together some forty-five thousand Triple Border residents; in late 2002, they participated in a border city government’s lawsuit against the Cable News Network (CNN) for defamation; and in mid-2003, they supported the publicity campaign that satirized the alleged visit of Osama bin Laden. Arabs crossed ethnic and national boundaries in order to collaborate with South American media and state powers against the U.S. war on terror. At the same time U.S. counterterrorism traversed the continent, Brazilians and Paraguayans of Arab origins mobilized across the post-9/11 Americas as well.

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Selective Accommodation: The Hadhramis in Indonesia during World War II and the Struggle for Independence

After the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands East Indies, the Hadhramis living in the archipelago were, at least initially, treated as untrustworthy by the new colonizers. At the same time they were cut off from their homeland Hadhramaut and had to reconsider their relationships with the indigenous Indonesians. After the Japanese capitulation they were forced to side with either the new Indonesian republic or the returning Dutch administration. In both periods all kinds of new relationships came into being, both transient and lasting, and often mutually contradictory. World War II as well as the struggle for Indonesian independence led to drastic changes in the orientation and identity of the Hadhrami minority. Besides dealing with the vicissitudes, strategies, and loyalties of these inhabitants of Arabs descent, this article argues that the turbulent time they went through increased the pace of their awareness of belonging to Indonesia.

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Translating Colonial Fortunes: Dilemmas of Inheritance in Muslim and English Laws across a Nineteenth-Century Diaspora

This article argues for the importance of concepts of translation, conversion, and articulation in the study of inheritance and the transmission of goods among diasporic populations. It focuses on the Hadhrami migrations to Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, migrations that crisscrossed multiple jurisdictions, local, British, Dutch, and that of the Ottoman Empire. Properties of different kinds were held in different places under different legal rulings. Colonial and Islamic legal practices in the colonial period are illuminated by a detailed treatment of a complex petition to Queen Victoria by a Hadhrami claiming that he and his wife had been denied their proper inheritance due to them under Islamic law. The article explores the implications of the interrelations of such legal practices in relation to conflicts over wills and dispositions of properties across diasporic space and the problems of translation facing Muslims in colonial courts.

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A National Filmmaker without a Home: Home and Displacement in the Films of Amir Naderi

Amir Naderi is one of Iran’s most internationally acclaimed directors, and he is considered to be among the central figures in the nation’s postrevolutionary film industry. Paradoxically, his choice to leave Iran in hopes of expanded artistic opportunities in the United States has cost him the critical and scholarly recognition bestowed on his former compatriots Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. This essay seeks to address this imposed cultural exile by analyzing Naderi’s work and situating him as an important diasporic Iranian filmmaker. Films discussed include The Runner (1985), the Manhattan Trilogy (1993–2002), Sound Barrier (2005), and Vegas: Based on a True Story (2008). The analysis foregrounds continuities of displacement and confinement between Naderi’s films about Iran and his subsequent portraits of the United States. The journeys and paths undertaken by Naderi’s protagonists are explored as reflections of a diasporic filmmaker who left the constraints of one home for the limitations of another.

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Law's Inhumanities: Peripheral Racialization and the Early Development of an Iranian Race

This article examines the racialization of Iran and Iranians by excavating the treatment of Iran in the naturalization cases from the early twentieth century. In so doing, the article highlights both the continuities and disjunctures of a racialization process that began long before there were identifiable populations of Iranians in the country or the United States had developed a coherent foreign policy vis-á-vis "the Middle East." Iranians and Iranian Americans find themselves in a precarious position in contemporary race discourse. On the one hand, Iranians are formally categorized as white by the state. Likely as a result of this categorization, few scholars have taken up the question of how Iranians are raced, particularly in the context of law and public policy. On the other hand, if and when the community is discussed in academic or popular literature on race, it is thrown into the emergent, amorphous category of "Arab and Muslim." While it is true that the racialization of Iranians, Arabs, and Muslims is an overlapping process that similarly affects all three communities, an analysis of the law reveals that the racialization of Iranians has a distinct lineage in American foreign and domestic policy, such that in the same moment that the state rendered Arab Americans white for purposes of naturalization, Iranians were deployed as the primary colored referent from which Arabs should be distinguished. I call this process "peripheral racialization." This article attempts to prompt questions about the role of American foreign policy interests in race-ing Iranians in the United States. The example of Iran is particularly salient in the contemporary context, for it has much to tell us about the operation of white supremacy in America’s efforts to develop and maintain a modern empire in "the Middle East."

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Introduction: Iranian Diaspora

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A Road Map for Future Studies: The Language of the Gods in the World of Scholars

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Islamic Militancy and Resentment against Hadhramis in Post-Suharto Indonesia: A Case Study of Habib Rizieq Syihab and His Islamic Defenders Front

The article discusses a particular Islamist militant movement in Indonesia, the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam, or FPI). Gaining considerable following and influence in post-Suharto Indonesia, the FPI called for the implementation of Sharia law addressing the existential worries and moral concerns of lower-class Muslims. Under the leadership of Habib Rizieq Syihab, an Indonesian of Hadhrami descent, the FPI attracted particular attention because of its use of violence against minority groups and so-called immoral businesses, such as cafés, bars, and nightclubs. However, as this article shows, their violent acts have sparked considerable controversy in Indonesia, as many Indonesians began to question the role of Rizieq in particular in the violence and of Arab Indonesians in general. Examining the growth of the organization and Rizieq’s rise to leadership, the article thereafter analyzes the various responses both by indigenous Indonesian Muslims and by Indonesian Hadhramis to the FPI’s violent activities. By paying specific attention to the voices of indigenous non-Arab Muslims, this article portrays Muslim resentment toward Rizieq not only in terms of his persistent use of violence but also with regard to his background as a Hadhrami Arab. This analysis brings to light prejudices and stereotypes that are directed against Arabs and that have their roots in the colonial period but are nevertheless present in today’s Indonesia. Furthermore, by focusing on critical Hadhrami voices, the article points to new divisions inside Indonesia’s Hadhrami community, particularly among the Ba’alawi or sada, that is, those Hadhramis who—like Rizieq—claim descent from the prophet Muhammad.

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Cosmopolitanism in Hobson-Jobson: Remaking Imperial Subjects

As a contribution to critical studies of colonial discourse, this essay offers an analysis of Hobson-Jobson, the well-known nineteenth-century British colonial glossary of Anglo-Indian argot, as an instance of a colonial attempt to resolve the contradiction between benign intent and the violence of colonial rule in India under the Raj. The analysis draws on concepts in linguistic anthropology such as language ideology and generic intertextuality, as well as a Peircean approach that emphasizes indexicality as a key means of signification. The essay performs a close reading of Hobson-Jobson as a primary text and draws on secondary historical and theoretical literature to make the argument. It demonstrates both the need for more sober readings of the primary text than are typically offered and the particular value of the Peircean notion of indexicality in analyzing discourses with an eye to relations of power that constitute sociohistorical contexts. Finally, the essay argues that what is problematic about Hobson-Jobson despite all its linguistic richness is not just the history from which it arose but its active participation in facilitating and constituting both that history and its agents.

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Arab "Amirka": Exploring Arab Diasporas in Mexico and the United States

Many Arab immigrants came to the Americas—the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina (to name only a few countries)—primarily with the intent to make money quickly and return home. Their enduring presence, however, is marked by ambiguous categorizations of Arabs in the United States and Mexico that relate to confusions of place, people, and history. The article is divided into six sections. In the first section, I describe the complex categories of personhood for those who migrated from the Middle East. The second section provides a broad Arab demographic profile in the United States and Mexico and leads to the third section, where I address the conflation of Arabs and Muslims with ethnographic detail. The fourth section offers a comparative analysis of selected immigration laws in Mexico and the United States that have shaped the Arab diasporas in each country. In the fifth section, a brief description of how some Arab elites in Mexico have drawn on their foreignness to assert a Lebanese identity illustrates the complexity of describing Arab diasporas in the Americas and anticipates the sixth section, which concerns the reception of Arab immigrants in the United States. The article aims both to engage scholars studying Arab diasporas for points of comparisons and to problematize the homogenous use of terms such as Arab in mainstream Mexican and American discourses.

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Eyewitness Accounts and Political Claims: Transnational Responses to the 2009 Postelection Protests in Iran

Through an examination of the use of media in the 2009 postelection protests in Iran, this article contextualizes the use of social media as a form of eyewitness account within the broader context of media distrust in Iran and Iranian expatriate satellite television. What emerges through this analysis is a set of concerns related to the eyewitness account offered through digital media as a potentially uncontrollable and indeterminate form. As I show through a media analysis of online content and debates, these concerns are evident both in the context of Iran and among Iranians in the diaspora. In the latter case, this article considers the protests as a transnational media event, focusing on the use of social media in the Iranian diaspora, and examines how Iranians around the world have used social media to connect to the events in Iran as a form of activism and in the performance of Iranian identities. Surveys and interviews conducted with Iranians in Los Angeles and Toronto reveal among Iranian immigrants a deep concern with the global image of Iran, an emphasis on publicity as a form of political action, and anxieties related to the representation of the "Iranian community" in Western media.

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Contributors

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Faithful Life in an Urfi State

This essay's purpose is twofold: to problematize the question of the urfi (secular) system versus the religious system and to examine the question of faithful life in a modern and urfi world. As for the first part, the Islamic state is defined by "divine legitimacy of power" and "full implementation of Sharia" as a political platform sanctioned by revelation. This essay suggests that neither claim is legitimate. Political power is a worldly question. Neither the Koran nor Prophet Muhammad himself claimed that he ruled on behalf of God. Nor did Muslims in the early age of Islam have such a perception about the Prophet's authority. The Prophet's rule in Medina was the result of a social contract. As for the full implementation of Sharia law, if governance is not defined and sanctioned by divine authority, then Sharia too, which is in part social regulations and laws within the jurisdiction of the state, cannot be divine. Laws and the legal system are contingent on the existing realities; no law is eternal. As for the second part, the faithful, to live faithfully in an urfi and nonreligious political system is not only possible, but it is indeed preferable. The ideological monopoly of the Sharia-centered system makes free faith much more difficult than it is under nonreligious dictatorships. Nonetheless, historical and existing experiences also reveal that the faithful can have something constructive to offer in civil society and in the public sphere. Religion is not and cannot be fully separable from politics as a social matter. While we can normatively separate the institution of religion and the institution of state, the role that religion can play in politics must nevertheless be acknowledged.

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Secularism and the Iranian Militant Left: Political Misconception or Cultural Issues?

This essay draws on an original study of the history, theories, and organizational life of Iran's most influential leftist organization in the 1970s, the People's Fedayee Guerrillas, to examine the symptomatic misconception of secularism as well as the secularization of everyday life and politics by a specific generation of Iran's Left. The essay argues that because of its ideological adherence to Marxism, the militant Left of this era simply assumed its role as a secular political force, while riveted by cultural elements that in fact undermined secularism. Moreover, it shows that a stark political dualism between the people and the shah's regime and its capitalist supporters caused the militant Left to advance a certain political binarism that later paved the way for the 1979 Islamic revolution, a phenomenon that indicates how the Left lost sight of the perils of political Islam or discounted its future impact on society. These arguments are complicated by the demographics and cultural inclinations of the members and supporters of the Fedayeen that indicate the extent of permeation of traditionalism and semireligious beliefs in the militant Left. These observations lead the author to inquire whether the Iranian Left has ever been consciously secular.

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Print Capitalism and Women's Sexual Agency in the Late Ottoman Empire

Increasingly, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, publications appeared in the Ottoman Empire that took issue with traditional norms of gender and sexuality and advocated alternatives. They criticized arranged marriages and supported companionate unions, attacked polygyny, stressed the importance of a fulfilling sex life in which the wife is an equal partner entitled to gratification, acknowledged sexual attraction as legitimate and viewed the choice of a partner as personally empowering, and even hinted that sexual relations outside marriage were acceptable. Studies of such publications have tended to focus on writers, their thoughts, and the influences that shaped them, generally neglecting the institutional framework that enabled this surge of publications. Focusing on book publishing, this article seeks to document the emergence of Ottoman-Turkish print capitalism and reveal its role in the production of publications that challenged established ideas of personal relations between men and women.

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Egyptian Views of Ottoman Rule: Five Historians and Their Works, 1820-1920

The Ottoman sultan was Egypt's titular sovereign until 1914, but in the late nineteenth century some historians of Egypt were already locating the terminus of Ottoman rule in the French invasion (1798) and the inauguration of Mehmet `Ali's government (1805). This periodization was later canonized in Egyptian academia, so that Egypt's Ottoman history was defined as beginning in 1517 and ending in 1798. However, the vagaries of Egypt's relationship with Istanbul meant that this periodization was neither obvious nor uncontested. The purpose of this article is to compare evolving, discordant interpretations of Ottoman history presented in four works by notable Egyptian historians: `Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (ca. 1824), `Ali Pasha Mubarak (ca. 1889); Muhammad Farid (ca. 1912); and `Umar al-Iskandari and Salim Hasan (ca. 1919). The article investigates how the defeated Mamluk sultanate (which preceded the Ottomans) is related to Egypt's identity in these works, how the Ottomans are positioned in the flow of Egyptian and Islamic history, and how their conquest and rule over Egypt is characterized. The article also reviews these authors' reflections on the causes of Ottoman "decline" and analyzes what Mehmet Ali's rule portended for Egypt. The findings show that Egyptian historians differed radically on the relationship between the Mamluks and Egypt—oppressors versus protonationalists—and in their assessment of the Ottoman conquest's impact. There is no linear evolution of opinion before Egypt's independence in 1922 or a strict correlation between an Egyptian-nationalist orientation and attitudes toward the Ottoman state: Mubarak was a moderate nationalist but anti-Ottoman/anti-Turk, while Farid was an ardent and outspoken nationalist but treasured and promoted Egypt's organic bond with the Ottoman Empire. Broadly, one may distinguish between an appreciation of the Ottomans in their defense of Islam and implementation of Muslim justice (al-Jabarti and Farid), and a repudiation of the Ottoman period as Egypt's "dark ages" (Mubarak, Iskandari, and Hasan). However, Iskandari and Hasan's book's acceptance as a secondary school textbook represents the fixing of a historiographical orthodoxy that categorized Ottoman rule as alien, corrupt, and retrograde, a view that remains dominant in Egyptian popular consciousness until today.

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Ottoman Beirut: Crisis, History, and Sectarian Memory

History writing is a powerful tool in the construction of collective memory. Typically in postcolonial states, history is linked to a national project. Methods and tropes of national history writing aim to create or reinforce a sense of shared identity rooted in past experience. Particular historical actors are valorized and emphasized, as they become protagonists of the national narrative. Often the outlines of the present-day state are anachronistically projected backward as part of attempts to construct a modern national identity. Lebanon's contested history offers a window—or indeed a laboratory—for considering the uses of history in addressing issues of subnational identity. Alongside attempts to construct a national Lebanese narrative rooted in the politics and history of the country's Christian and Druze mountain communities, there exists a counternarrative of the major coastal cities and their predominantly Sunni Muslim populations. Shifting the geographic focus this way means that some of the same tropes and methods used to construct putative national histories can be applied to develop subnational sectarian narratives. This article studies the 1980s-era output of a prolific Sunni Muslim historian of Ottoman Beirut, Hassan Hallak. Hallak's construction of history is interesting by virtue of his close links to Beirut's Sunni communal power structure. His books, published during a period of crisis and trauma in Beirut's and Lebanon's modern experience, paint Beirut in essentialist terms as a timeless Arab and Muslim space. Ottoman-era materials provide the documentary and material evidence to support this interpretation or claim. The present article explores and analyzes Hallak's invocation of the Ottoman past to support a confessionally partisan vision of Beirut's present.

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Introduction: Secularism and Islamism: Iran and Beyond

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Retreat and Return of the Secular in Iran

For nearly a century and a half, Iranian intellectuals' demands for secularism and democracy have remained unfulfilled. Needless to say, the establishment of a religious state has further exacerbated the formidable challenges in achieving their goals. Nonetheless, amid the current difficulties, there are new opportunities that were not available to previous generations of intellectuals. Thirty years of Islamic rule has made the calls for the separation of religion from the state far more widespread; despite ceaseless suppression of the opposition, a lively and vibrant civil society challenges the clerical oligarchy; the postrevolutionary secular Left and liberal intellectuals tend to be more tolerant and more independent-minded than their predecessors; and a new genre of secular Muslim intellectuals, unlike the Muslim reformers of the past, have begun challenging some basic tenets of Islam and the Islamic state. The article discusses the evolution of secularist thought in Iran and the tormented relationship among secular forces in the past. It explores the possibilities for more collaborative action among secularists of diverse persuasions, on the basis of new consensus models of secularism, with the goal of establishing a more effective counterhegemony to the clerical state.

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When the Clock Strikes Twelve: The Inception of an Ottoman Past in Early Republican Turkey

This article contains, first, an analysis of some of the work done to date on the Ottoman legacy in republican Turkey, and, second, a consideration of the moment of transition from Ottoman to Turkish history. It argues that while a range of approaches and issues have been raised regarding the memory of the Ottoman past in the Turkish national present, little attention has been paid in this discussion to the moment the Turkish national present came into being—the 1920s. A short story, "Bir guguklu satin azizligi" ("A Cuckoo Clock's Prank"), published in 1922, and a satirical play, titled, Deli (Mad), written in 1930, both by by Refik Halit Karay, an intellectual and journalist living in exile in Aleppo, serve as two points of entry into this decade. The plot of the play, in which a man falls into a coma two days before the restoration of the constitution in 1908 and wakes up in the republican Turkey of 1929, serves as an excellent opportunity, both for the play's author and for readers today, to consider the experience of transition from Ottoman past to Turkish national present from a new vantage point. The short story, about a tea party in 1922 Istanbul, betrays a similarly critical distance on a very different set of circumstances and serves as a foil to "Deli." Karay's position was not only geographically outside the Turkish nation-state but it was also an elite view that was intellectually removed from the Kemalist project, both as it took shape in 1922 and at its apex in 1930.

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Ideology and Political Action in the Iranian Revolution

Scholars of the Iranian revolution have often explained the 1979 overthrow of the Pahlavi regime in terms of the rise of an Islamic movement that inspired Iranians to challenge the shah, confront the powerful army, and engage in martyrdom to bring down the monarchy. Leaders of the Islamic regime also consistently endorsed these views and claimed that the revolution was for Islam. This article analyzes the nature of the collective actions of major actors immediately before and during the revolution. Specifically, it examines the timing, demands, and claims of major collectivities and challengers that participated in the revolutionary process. It concludes that although segments of Iranian intellectuals and students fought for an Islamic government, the vast majority of the Iranian people never fought for a theocracy, established by Khomeini and his allies. The causes, processes, and outcome of the Iranian revolution were too complex to be explained by single, overarching, ideological explanations.

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The Islamic Republic of Iran and Its Opposition

This essay takes a stylized paradoxical fact of Iranian politics under the Islamic Republic of Iran as its starting point: the stark confusion between the position and a good portion of the opposition. Such a blurred frontier between "position" and "opposition" did not exist during the shah's regime. Without the decisive support of non-Islamic organizations, secular intellectuals, and political forces on the ground, the creation of a theocratic regime in Iran and its consolidation could not be realized. Now on the thirtieth anniversary of the Islamic Republic, the open opposition of many influential clerics toward how the government is run under the present supreme leader and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provides a new episode of "opposition" within the theocrats' circles. To put this paradoxical fact differently, it should be emphasized that no regime in Iran's modern history has produced so much opposition within its own ranks and enjoyed the loyalty of its oppositions at the same time. How could this paradox be explained? Our essay tackles this issue by describing the peculiar type of social order under the Islamic Republic of Iran as ordered anarchy or "destructive coordination." Analyzing the sources of this type of coordination, we proceed in two steps. The first is to question whether there has ever been a laic or secular movement in Iran's recent history. The second consists in defining the institutional setup and recent dynamics of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a strange, if not unique, mutant of Samuel P. Huntington's praetorian state, led by "priests" and armed religious militants.

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Islamic Feminism Revisited

Women in almost every Muslim society have placed issues of women's rights firmly at the heart of their societies' politics. Women-centered secular religious and/or nonreligious perspectives and activities, through their resistance against Islamist gender politics, have introduced a new dynamism into debates over religion and the secular and the separation of state and faith. This essay questions the outcome for women who in their continued and persistent intellectual tendencies push for Islamic feminism as the only homegrown, locally produced, and culturally appropriate frame for feminist activism in Muslim-majority countries.

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Rethinking the Role of Religion in Iran's History and Politics, 1796-2009

Two basic related arguments have informed and shaped much of the scholarly discourse and public consciousness of recent Iranian history. The first is that Shiism is an integral part of the Iranian religious and cultural landscape. The second is that the ulema have played a crucial role in the Iranian political structure despite their internal theological differences and political divisions. I challenge these assumptions and propose a different line of inquiry in studying the role of the religious institution and the ulema in Iranian history and politics. My overall argument is that certain historical conditions and adopted strategies of state making in Iran gave rise to the power and the institution of the ulema and consolidated Shiism as a part of the Iranian national identity. Ironically, this process was intensified during the Pahlavi secular regime (1926–79), and the Islamization of the 1979 revolution and the formation of Iran's first theocratic state, the height of the power of religion and the ulema, could be also the starting point of the constitutional separation of the state and the religious institution.

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The Ottoman Empire from Present to Past: Memory and Ideology in Turkey and the Arab World

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The Ottoman Legacy: Urban Geographies, National Imaginaries, and Global Discourses of Tolerance

Turkey emerged from the ruins of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire to become a secular, ethnically Turkish, and culturally Sunni Muslim nation. While the Ottoman legacy refers to an ideal of multiethnic tolerance located in the distant past, and is deployed as a critique against a presumably intolerant state, this legacy is produced by a diversity of social groups that compete for different imaginations of Turkey's national identity. This essay argues that the Ottoman legacy, and the discourse of tolerance it represents, has two important geographic dimensions. First, the Ottoman legacy relies on and is reproduced through Istanbul's urban geography; places and landscapes that represent a multiethnic tolerant past come to serve as evidence for what the Ottoman legacy represents. Second, while discourses of Ottoman tolerance are grounded in a local past, they are informed by, and thus respond to, very contemporary geopolitical notions of cosmopolitanism and of an imagined dichotomy between East and West. The Ottoman legacy is produced locally, in engagement with national imaginaries, while it is also meant to locate Istanbul internationally as a global city. The open struggle to critique state intolerance by invoking and representing an Ottoman legacy of multiethnic harmony illuminates the dynamic and contested nature of national identity in Turkey even while it is employed in processes that redraw national boundaries of belonging and exclusion.

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Crisis and Recovery Narratives in Maghrebi Histories of the Ottoman Period (ca. 1870-1970)

This article examines the role of the Ottoman state as a reference point in Maghrebi historiography through two works from each of Algeria and Tunisia and from two generations of historical writers. Ahmad al-Sharif al-Zahhar (1781–1872), naqib al-ashraf of Algiers at the end of the Ottoman regency, and the Tunisian historian and reformer Ahmad Ibn Abi Diyaf (ca. 1804–74) wrote in conditions of "crisis" in the nineteenth century; the Tunisian establishment intellectual and educator Hasan Husni Abd al-Wahhab (1884–1968) and the Algerian nationalist journalist and publicist Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani (1899–1983) each sought in different ways to "recover" their countries' histories in the twentieth century. Comparisons and contrasts across these generations and in each country, with their different relationships to the memory of Ottoman rule and their different colonial experiences, illustrate the different ways in which the Ottoman period has been interpreted in the Maghreb. Assimilated as a "natural" aspect of the region's history in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman presence required more overt interpretive work by writers in the twentieth. Across generations, differing preoccupations about the formation of community and state determined how writers approached the Ottoman legacy, which in both cases has generally remained marginal to more widespread perceptions of history and national origins.

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Post-Islamist Trends in Postrevolutionary Iran

Today's Iran under the Islamic state represents the most complex forms of post-Islamism in the Muslim world. The unintended consequences of the Islamic Republic have empowered and enlightened the public, transformed the people from subjects to citizens, and in effect have undermined the intellectual, political, and social foundations of the Islamic state. Post-Islamism in postrevolutionary Iran signifies the paradoxes of the Islamic state. This article examines the nature and the diversity of post-Islamist trends in today's Iran symbolized by the current Green Movement. It conceptualizes and contextualizes post-Islamist discourses in Iran and then analyzes the sociopolitical origins of three intellectual trends of post-Islamism in postrevolutionary Iran: quasi/semi-post-Islamism, liberal post-Islamism, and neo-Shariati's post-Islamist discourse. The conclusion problematizes the potential future of post-Islamism in the country.

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Sectarian Strife and "National Unity" in Egyptian Films: A Case Study of Hassan and Morqos

Egyptian filmmakers have braved the issue of religious tension since the beginning of the new millennium occasioned by the rise in religious violence between the two communities. Hassan and Morqos (2008) is the first popular film to address the issue of sectarian tensions directly and openly. In this essay, I argue that while Hassan and Morqos does not attempt to paint a rosy picture of national unity in Egypt, it nevertheless perpetuates the state's official spin on events by laying the blame on "extremists" on both sides, thus exonerating the government from its responsibilities. However, the film poignantly underscores the gap between the official viewpoint of friendship between the two communities, on the one hand, and the deep-seated prejudice and mistrust that govern their daily lives, on the other. Despite its shortcomings, the film opens up a public space for debate where anxieties can be expressed. It does not silence Coptic "difference" in the name of "national unity," as Coptic religious symbols and culture are strongly present in the film.

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Two Concepts of Secularism

Secularism, for many of us, is not a terra incognita, and yet it is certainly an improperly defined and unexplained concept. For more than 150 years, intellectuals, politicians, and theologians have used secular and secularism in a rather ambiguous way. These terms therefore need to be clarified. The time has come to rethink our whole approach to the question of secularism. Given the inapplicability of the French model of secularism to the Muslim world, it becomes necessary to find a criterion by which state involvement, when it occurs in the domain of religion, can appear to the members of a religious group as both legitimate and fair. The Indian concept of secularism based on the toleration and equal protection of all religious communities without being supportive of any particular religion can supply this criterion. That said, to pursue a secular politics of rejecting sectarianism and demanding toleration requires that strategic priorities be rearranged without making historical shortcuts. In this case, a secular politics of toleration is a twofold struggle, a resistance to uniformization and an invitation to democratization. If such a strategy is to find any role in the regulation of the lives and activities of Islamic societies today, an alternative concept of secularism, rather than simply an alternative to it, needs to be worked out. The challenge is not to abandon secularism but to formulate it as a philosophy with spiritual values, rather than solely a policy of the state. This is the only way of rethinking our whole approach to the future in Muslim societies to the extent that the pluralist model of a "shared home" can be presented as "a third way" solution to the crisis of political societies in the Middle East and in opposition to the secular authoritarianism of the state and the rise of religious fundamentalism in civil society.

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Secularism in the Middle East, Palestine as an Example

Twenty years ago, religious trends were hardly visible in Palestine. Various factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were all secular. This is not the case today, as the religious discourse is overwhelming and the secular one is on the retreat. This so-called Islamic awakening has several explanations: (1) the cultural heritage beginning with the end of the Rashidi era of the Abbasids when the backward streams erased rational thinking and judgment from public life; (2) colonialism, beginning with the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt and the rise of nationalist forces and their opposition to all that the West represented, including Western secular values; (3) the formation of the state of Israel and Zionism, which continued to represent the viscous face of occupation and the misrepresentation of secularism; and (4) oil and the Saudi-backed Wahhabi movement and their control over most Arab television channels, in contrast to secular Arab groups and their lack of financial means to compete with the Islamists' propaganda (some turn to religious programs to win the street back). Nonetheless, the possibility for progressive secular movements to recover and act again is increasing in Palestine and in other countries in the region.

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Secularism, Ethics, Philosophy: A Case for Epistemic Humility

Secularists have aimed to make reason the motor of human progress to counter the supposed rigidity, absolutism, and condescending superiority of religious thought. I argue that reason cannot play this role, at least not as reason is most popularly conceived. In a world with a single dominant ideology, it is not religion but instead a certain arrogant approach to both reason and philosophy that should be the target of secularists desiring human freedom. Epistemic humility is identified as the key to genuinely free and progressive philosophical inquiry. I suggest that such humility is probably even rarer among nonreligious analytic ethicists than it is among religious ethicists.

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Creeping Secularism

The Islamic revolution in Iran at the closing decades of the twentieth century was a shocking, unexpected phenomenon in the context of modern history. Its religious emblem, the presence of the Shiite clerics as it's mobilizing motor for mass demonstrations and, eventually, the bizarre composition of Islam and revolution—an amalgam of two conceptually alien elements, with unprecedented ideological claims— created a new peculiar model of state and statecraft. The substitution of a fundamentalist regime for a semisecular monarchy replaced the crown with the turban as the paramount symbol of the Iranian national sovereignty, under the fundamentalist formulation of the "governance of the canonist" (velayat-e faqih). This new state manifesting itself through specific signs, symbols, slogans, discourses, and behaviors, as well as by appropriation of modern means of ideological propaganda, the use of revolutionary violence, and organized terror, embodied in the very structure of a state, addressed itself to the world as a new militant ideological and political power aiming, once again, to change the world. How could this extremely unexpected event happen? Explanations are various and they focus either on the dictatorial manners and erroneous actions of the shah, alongside the role played by the Western powers, specifically the United States, or on the presence and the political role of Shiism and its clergy in Iranian history. However, a few fundamental questions remain unanswered. How could a radically traditionalist religious establishment, which was normally marked by modern revolutionaries as reactionary, merge with the most radical revolutionary groups and views? What are the universal results of such a "chemical" composition for both the otherworldly religionism and secular revolutionism? How do they essentially differ in action and discourse from what they had been previously? What were the innermost historical forces that made possible this seemingly impossible phenomenon?

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Pre-secular Iranians in a Post-secular Age: The Death of God, the Resurrection of God

The issues of religion and secularization are among the most pressing concerns in Iran today. Religion has historically played different roles and has been present at different levels within the society. Followers of different religions either have chosen total submission based on literal readings of the scriptures or have followed a rationalist perspective using their own interpretations of religious teachings. During the past several centuries, as a result of the dominance of secularization and laïcité, religion throughout the world took a backseat and the "death of God" was witnessed. After this lengthy retreat, we now observe the reemergence of religions in different forms. Religion has proved to have "nine lives," and each time, the death of God turned into the resurrection of God. But the resurrected God and reemerged religions are not one and the same as before. They have now assumed new roles. Along the same line, in its long historical process secularization has also had its ups and downs and has thus evolved. In some cases it has been open and flexible, and in others, rigid and fundamentalist. Hence new theories must closely explore the evolving relationship between secularization and religion. In both theory and practice, the boundaries within which religion can or cannot operate, and the extent to which religion should or should not play a role in the public sphere, must be scrutinized. There are two types of religiosity, one rigid and literalist and the other rationalist and humanist, and there are two types of secularism, a rigid and fundamentalist one that denies any role for religion in society and a flexible and tolerant one that only restricts religion from interfering in the state. In this "post-secular" environment, the rationalist religious intellectuals and the tolerant secularists can coexist and find mutual understanding. Iranian intellectuals, whether religious or nonreligious, or liberals, nationalists, socialists, or social democrats, should agree on one principle and that is that they all can freely compete in civil society, but they should not bring their ideologies into the state.

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Ijtihad and Lower-Middle-Class Women: Secularism in Rural Bangladesh

Scholars who argue for the compatibility of Islam with democracy tend to gloss over the fact that the separation of religion and state has not taken place in the history of the Muslim world. In fact, little research has been carried out on contemporary efforts to make this structural distinction, an imperative of the democratic state. I begin this article with an analysis of the nineteenth-century debates between Islamic scholars and European positivists and how they created a polarized perspective that frames Western secular tenets as inherently opposed to Islamic religious principles and that continues to the present day. I then examine the call by scholars and activists to separate religion and state in the Muslim world. Against this backdrop, I analyze the Bangladesh Supreme Court's decision in 2001 to declare the fatwa unconstitutional. I investigate to what extent this decree has led to the separation of religion and state and how it has influenced the future of political Islam in Bangladesh. Since fatwas target low-income rural women, I conclude by exploring the implication of this decision on notions of gender, Muslim identity, and citizenship in Bangladesh.

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