Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East

In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his cham- bers, the veins in his arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Pasa, a political foe of the autocratic sultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirty-three years. The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed suicide re- mains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.

Now more than ever the role of icons and monuments in shaping a national identity is a subject of vital importance to scholars of both nationalism and memory studies. While the nation-state undoubtedly has a powerful influence on a society's cultural memory, it cannot necessarily control the ways in which icons are perceived. Once created, national symbols and perceptions of them take on a life of their own. Taking an innovative approach to the study of Iranian nationalism, Merhavy examines the way symbols from Iran's past have played an important role in the struggles between political, religious, and ideological movements over legitimacy in the last five decades. Using a rich variety of primary sources, he traces the process by which these symbols have been appropriated, rejected, and reinterpreted by the Pahlavi state, the Islamic opposition, and finally, the Islamic Republic. In doing so, this volume contributes to our understanding of cultural symbols that survive political upheavals, dramatic and significant as they may be. It also contributes to the growing body of literature that challenges the state centered perspective of much research on modern Iran by exposing the ever growing importance of civil society in the Iranian public sphere from the second half of the twentieth century onward.

One of the most prominent Sunni clerics in the Muslim world today, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi influences the discourse around matters central to the Islamic faith and to Islam's relationship with Western culture. As the spiritual leader of the wasat.iyya movement, he is the voice of the moderate current in contemporary Islam. In this volume, Polka explores al-Qaradawi's life and development as a Muslim scholar and likewise examines the philosophy of the wasat.iyya movement. In so doing, Polka compares wasat.iyya to two rival schools of contemporary Islamic thought-jihadist Salafism and secular liberalism-creating a thorough analysis of the Islamic tradition. Polka offers a broad panoramic view of these three trends and their positions on core issues debated in the Muslim world: Islamic reform, democracy and human rights, feminism, the concept of jihad, and suicide attacks and the killing of civilians. Through his writing and preaching, al-Qaradawi has become the Islamic legal authority for Hamas and for the current generation of the Muslim Brotherhood but remains a controversial figure. While his many students admire him as their spiritual mentor, others have accused him of exploiting his pulpit and his media stardom in order to promote terrorism and violence toward both Muslims and non-Muslims. Polka helpfully explores this duality, providing a much-needed comprehensive analysis of al-Qaradawi's philosophy and the centrist approach within Islamic thought.

When protests erupted in response to the 2010 Egyptian parliament elections that were widely viewed as fraudulent, many wondered. Why now? Voters had never witnessed free and fair elections in the past, so why did these elicit such an outcry? To answer this question, Weipert-Fenner conducted the first study of politics in modern Egypt from a parliamentary perspective. Contrary to the prevailing opinion that autocratic parliaments are meaningless, token institutions, Weipert-Fenner's long-term analysis shows that parliament can be an indicator, catalyst, and agent of change in an authoritarian regime. Comparing parliamentary dynamics over decades, Weipert-Fenner demonstrates that autocratic parliaments can grow stronger within a given political system. They can also become contentious when norms regarding policies, political actors, and institutions are violated on a large scale and/or at a fast pace. Most importantly, a parliament can even turn against the executive when parliamentary rights are withdrawn or when widely shared norms are violated. These and other recurrent patterns of institutional relations identified in The Autocratic Parliament help explain long spans of stable, yet never stagnant, authoritarian rule in colonial and postcolonial periods alike, as well as the different types of regime change that Egypt has witnessed: those brought about by external intervention, by revolution, or by military coup.

Becoming Turkish deepens our understanding of the modernist nation-building processes in post—Ottoman Turkey through a rare perspective that stresses social and cultural dimensions and everyday negotiations of the Kemalist reforms. Yimaz asks how the reforms were mediated on the ground and how ordinary citizens received, reacted to, and experienced them. She traces the experiences of the subaltern as well as the experiences of the elites and the mediators in the overall narrative—highlighting the relevance of class, gender, location, and urban and rural differences while also revealing the importance of nonideological, social, and psychological factors such as childhood and generations.

In October 1875, two months after the takeover of the Somali coastal town of Zeila, an Egyptian force numbering 1,200 soldiers departed from the city to occupy Harar, a prominent Muslim hub in the Horn of Africa. In doing so, they turned this sovereign emirate into an Egyptian colony that became a focal meeting point of geopolitical interests, with interactions between Muslim Africans, European powers, and Christian Ethiopians. In Emirate, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Ben-Dror tells the story of Turco-Egyptian colonial ambitions and the processes that integrated Harar into the global system of commerce that had begun enveloping the Red Sea. This new colonial era in the city's history inaugurated new standards of government, society, and religion. Drawing on previously untapped Egyptian, Harari, Ethiopian, and European archival sources, Ben-Dror reconstructs the political, social, economic, religious, and cultural history of the occupation, which included building roads, reorganizing the political structure, and converting many to Islam. He portrays the complexity of colonial interactions as an influx of European merchants and missionaries settled in Harar. By shedding light on the dynamic historical processes, Ben-Dror provides new perspectives on the important role of non-European imperialists in shaping the history of these regions.

Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987) is recognized as one of the most important figures in the history of modern Arabic literature. Considered a pioneer in many literary forms, including drama, novels, and short stories, al-Hakim influenced generations of Egyptian writers. The Revolt of the Young is a collection of essays originally published in 1984 that shows al-Hakim as a public intellectual addressing the ongoing conflict between generations. Al-Hakim muses on the cultural, artistic, and intellectual links and breakages between the old and the young generations. He focuses on the young and their role in the continuing development of Egyptian society, which over the course of the last century or so has undergone foreign occupation, an experiment in parliamentary democracy within a monarchical system, a socialist revolution characterized by both successes and failures, the emergence of a dictatorial presidency, and now the development of a complex political scenario currently dominated by groups with varyingly strong ties to the tenets of Islam. Al-Hakim did not live long enough to witness the most recent phases of this elongated and often disruptive process of experimentation and change, but in his writing, he focuses on the institution that he regards as crucial to any forward progress: the family. The essays present readers with a voice from the past, with uncanny foretelling of issues raised by the events that occurred in Egypt more than twenty years after al-Hakim's death. Radwan's translation, along with Roger Allen's foreword, brings to light al-Hakim's lucid and erudite commentary, much of it as relevant to the problems facing Egyptian youth today as it was when first published.

Like other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Moroccans were inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. Nine days after the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, thousands of Moroccans began protesting in the capital of Rabat on February 20. However, unlike other countries, Moroccans did not call for the overthrow of the king or the regime. Instead, Moroccan protesters initially demanded reforms to the constitution, and, specifically, a transition from an executive monarchy to a democratic parliamentary monarchy. Drawing upon narratives from the primary activists involved in protests, Badran examines the Moroccan movement to understand why it failed to escalate in the same way that others in the region did. He finds that the state's strategy of offering a series of reforms along with limited repression eventually ended the protest movement. Badran develops a framework to analyze how internal social movement dynamics along with regime strategies and regional events led to successful, and relatively peaceful, demobilization. Based on nine months of fieldwork, Killing Contention deepens our understanding of modern political movements and the complicated factors that lead to their demise.

Treating the everyday as central to the study of regional and international politics, this book reconstructs the last two decades of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. It provides a unique and vivid look into the political dynamics that characterized the everyday lives of Libyans, offering a compelling counterargument to those who insist on framing the history of the country as a stateless, authoritarian, and rogue state. Based on the collection of oral histories, what sets the tempo of this journey is an extensive collection of personal anecdotes, moods and emotions, popular jokes and rumors. In weaving the threads that link these quotidian lives to Libya's interaction with wider international and geopolitical dynamics, the book offers a unique and timely analysis of the 2011 events that witnessed the fall of the regime reaching the current state of violence, war, and hope.

In Ottoman Passports, Ilkay Yilmaz reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yilmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Hamidian government targeted "internal threats" to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yilmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to targeting groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries. Taking up these new policies on surveillance, mobility, and control, Ottoman Passports offers a timely look at the origins of contemporary immigration debates and the historical development of discrimination, terrorism, and counterterrorism.

Why do leading Islamist movements like the Egyptian Muslim Brothers embrace electoral politics while insisting that their main goal is "working for God," and how do they reconcile political with spiritual goals? Expectations that tension between political and religious organizing would pull the movement apart were not realized when the Brothers achieved electoral success following Egypt's 2011 uprising. Instead, movement "conservatives" rather than "moderates" came to dominate political work; and political activists framed the movement's electoral mandate as both popular and divine-arguing that campaigning, policy, and legislation could all be forms of worship. To understand how the movement threaded these disparate missions, Sumita Pahwa examines the movement's internal debates on preaching, activism, and social reform from the 1980s through the 2000s. She explains how framing political work as ethical conduct, essential for building pious Muslim individuals as well as an Islamic political order, became central to the organization's functioning. Through a comprehensive analysis of texts, speeches, public communications, interviews, and internal training documents, Pahwa offers a constructivist argument for how the movement has folded religious ideals into political discourse, enabling the leadership to shift the boundaries of justifiable and righteous action. Melding these aims, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood built an influential Islamic political project and a unified identity around "working for God."

Since 2011, the Arab world has seen a number of autocrats, including lead- ers from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, fall from power. Yet, in the wake of these political upheavals, only one state, Tunisia, transitioned successfully from authoritarianism to democracy. Opposition parties forged a durable and long-term alliance there, which supported democratization. Similar pacts failed in Morocco and Mauritania, however. In Why Alliances Fail, Buehler explores the circumstances under which stable, enduring alliances are built to contest authoritarian regimes, marshaling evidence from coalitions between North Africa's Islamists and leftists. Buehler draws on nearly two years of Arabic fieldwork interviews, original statistics, and archival research, including interviews with the first Islamist prime minister in Moroccan history, Abdelilah Benkirane. Introducing a theory of alliance durability, Buehler explains how the nature of an opposition party's social base shapes the robustness of alliances it builds with other parties. He also examines the social origins of authoritarian regimes, concluding that those regimes that successfully harnessed the social forces of rural isolation and clientelism were most effective at resisting the pressure for democracy that opposition parties exerted. With fresh insight and compelling arguments, Why Alliances Fail carries vital implications for understanding the mechanisms driving authoritarian persistence in the Arab world and beyond.

In this volume, a group of distinguished scholars reinterpret concepts and canons of Islamic thought in Arab, Persian, South Asian, and Turkish traditions. They demonstrate that there is no unitary "Islamic" position on important issues of statecraft and governance. They recognize that Islam is a discursive site marked by silences, agreements, and animated controversies. Rigorous debates and profound disagreements among Muslim theologians, philosophers, and literati have taken place over such questions as: What is an Islamic state? Was the state ever viewed as an independent political institution in the Islamic tradition of political thought? Is it possible that a religion that places an inordinate emphasis upon the importance of good deeds does not indeed have a vigorous notion of "public interest" or a systematic theory of government? Does Islam provide an edifice, a common idiom, and an ideological mooring for pre-modern and modern Muslim rulers alike? The nuanced reading of the Islamic traditions provided in this book will help future generations of Muslims contemplate a more humane style of statecraft.

Israel's 1977 political election resulted in a dramatic defeat for the ruling Labor movement, which had enjoyed more than four decades of economic, political, and cultural dominance. The government passed into the hands of the rightwing nationalist movement, marking a tumultuous episode in the history of both Israel and Jewish people at the start of the twenty-first century. Elmaliach chronicles the fascinating story of Israel's political transformation between the 1950s and the 1970s, exploring the roots of the Labor movement's historic collapse. Elmaliach focuses on Mapam and its allied Kibbutz movement, Hakibbutz Ha'artzi, a segment of the Israeli Labor movement that was most committed to the synthesis of socialism and Zionism. Although Mapam and Hakibbutz Ha'artzi were not the largest factions in the Israeli Labor movement, their ability to combine an economic organization, a political party, and cultural institutions gave them a strong foundation on which to build their power. Conversely, the Labor movement's crisis was, in large part, due to the economic upward mobility of the middle class, the emergence of new political orientations among supporters of the working-class parties, and the rise of cultural protests, which opposed the traditional workers' parties. Offering an innovative analysis, Elmaliach argues that, ultimately, the sources of the Labor movement's strength were also the causes of its weakness.

Mohammad Mosaddeq is widely regarded as the leading champion of secular democracy and resistance to foreign domination in Iran's modern history. Mosaddeq became prime minister of Iran in May 1951 and promptly nationalized its British-controlled oil industry, initiating a bitter confrontation between Iraq and Britain that increasingly undermined Mossaddeq's position. He was finally overthrown in August 1953 in a coup d'etat that was organized and led by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. This coup initiated a twenty-five-year period of dictatorship in Iran, leaving many Iranians resentful of the U.S. legacies that still haunt relations between the two countries today. Contents include: "Mosaddeq's Government in Iranian History: Arbitrary Rule, Democracy, and the 1953 Coup" - Homa Katouzian; "Unseating Mosaddeq: The Configuration and Role of Domestic Forces" - Fakhreddin Azimi; "The 1953 Coup in Iran and the Legacy of the Tudeh" - Maziar Behrooz; "Great Britain and the Intervention in Iran, 1953" - Wm. Roger Louis; "The International Boycott of Iranian Oil and the Anti-Mossaddeq Coup of 1953" - Mary Ann Heiss; "The Road to Intervention: Factors Influencing U.S. Policy Toward Iran, 1945-1953" - Malcolm Byrne; "The 1953 Coup d'etat Against Mosaddeq" - Mark J. Gasiorowski

If the surface of Turkish politics has changed dramatically over the decades, the vocabulary for sorting these changes remains constant: Europe, Islam, minorities, the military, the founding father (Atatürk). This familiar vocabulary functions as more than a set of descriptors of institutions, phenomena, or issues to debate in public. These five primary "figures" emerge from national identity, public discourse, and scholarship about Turkey to represent Turkish history and political authority while also shaping history and political authority. These figures unify disparate phenomena into governable categories and index historical relations of power that define Turkish politics. As these concepts circulate, they operate as a shorthand for complex networks and histories of authority, producing and limiting ways of knowing Turkish modernity, democracy, and political culture. These figures not only are spoken and discussed in public, but they also produce the context into which they are projected, in a sense speaking on their own. Figures That Speak explores the diverse mobilization and production of history and power in the primary figures that circulate in discourse about Turkey.

No Arab historical figure is more demonized than the Egyptian literati-turned-Islamist Sayyid Qutb. A poet and literary critic in his youth, Qutb is known to have abandoned literature in the 1950s in favor of Islamism, becoming its most prominent ideologist to this day. In a sharp departure from this common narrative, Šabaseviciute offers a fresh perspective on Qutb's life that examines his Islamist commitment as a continuation of his literary project. Contrary to the notion of Islam's incompatibility with literature, the book argues that Islamism provided as Qutb with a novel way to pursue his metaphysical quest at a time when the rising anti-colonial movement brought the Romantic models of literature to their demise. Drawing upon unexplored material on Qutb's life-book reviews, criticism, intellectual collaborations, memoirs, and personal interviews with his former acquaintances-Šabaseviciute traces the development of Qutb's thought in line with his shifting networks of friendship and patronage. In a distinct sociological take on Arab intellectual and literary history, this book unveils the unexplored dimensions of Qutb's involvement in Cairo's burgeoning cultural scene.

Rooted in the world historical methodology of John O. Voll, this collection brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the ongoing impact of revival and reform movements beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through to the present. Ranging from the MENA region to Africa, India, and China, and covering a variety of religious interpretations, from scripturalist to Sufism, these essays offer new perspectives on movements including the Wahhabis of Arabia, the Sokoto Caliphate, the neo-Sufism of Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, Sufi scholars and networks on the African continent, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Contributors explore encounters between Islamic revival and reform and modernity with a focus on the ways in which Islamic reforms influence the political sphere. Concluding with contemporary reinterpretations of Islam in the digital arena, this volume examines, but also moves beyond, texts to include embodiments of religious practice, the development of religious culture and education, and attention to women's contributions to education, cultural production, and community building.

In Egypt, something that fails to live up to its advertised expectations is often called a watermelon: a grand promise that later turns out to be empty talk. The political transition in Egypt after protests overthrew Husni Mubarak in 2011 is one such watermelon. Stacher examines the uprising and its aftermath to show how the country's new ruling incumbents deferred the democratic dreams of the people of Egypt. At the same time, he lays out in meticulous fashion the circumstances that gave the army's well-armed and well-funded institution an advantage against its citizens during and after Egypt's turbulent transition. Stacher outlines the ways in which Egypt's military manipulated the country's empowering uprising into a nightmare situation that now counts as the most repressive period in Egypt's modern history. In particular, Stacher charts the opposition dynamics during uprisings, elections, state violence, and political economy to show the multiple ways autocratic state elites try to construct a new political regime on the ashes of a discredited one. As they encounter these different aspects working together as a larger process, readers come to grips with the totality of the military-led counterrevolution as well as understand why Egyptians rightfully feel they ended up living in a watermelon democracy.