[The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) brings you the twentieth in a series of “Peer-Reviewed Article Reviews” in which we present a collection of journals and their articles concerned with the Middle East and Arab world. This series will be published seasonally. Each issue will comprise three-to-four parts, depending on the number of articles included.]
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (Volume 387, Issue )
The Date of Appearance of Philistine Pottery at Megiddo: A Computational Approach
By: Eythan Levy, Israel Finkelstein, Mario A. S. Martin, Eli Piasetzky
Abstract: This paper addresses the question of the date of appearance of Philistine Bichrome pottery at Megiddo through a new computational approach, using recently developed chronology software. Based on historical dates, we obtain a terminus post quem of 1183 b.c.e. for the start of Philistine Bichrome at Megiddo using a broad model, and a terminus post quem of 1124 b.c.e. under stronger chronological hypotheses. Adding radiocarbon results at 68.2% confidence level to the model yields a narrow range of 1111–1086 b.c.e. for the appearance of Bichrome (1128—1079 b.c.e. for 95.4%). The paper also presents results suggesting that Stratum VIIB ended during, or only slightly before, the reign of Ramesses III (1184–1153 b.c.e.).
The Southern Levantine Roots of the Phoenician Mercantile Phenomenon
By: Ayelet Gilboa
Abstract: I propose here a new way to look at the process through which, following the Bronze Age collapse and culminating in the second half of the 9th century b.c.e., polities in south Lebanon became the most important Levantine commercial hubs in the Mediterranean and the main patrons of the so-called Phoenician expansion. My approach differs from others dealing with the Phoenician question in that its definitions are not projected from a yet-to-happen “Phoenician” phenomenon in the West. It is an archaeological bottom-up diachronic approach and considers the entire Levantine coast and not Lebanon only, which is traditionally considered the Phoenician homeland. I argue that what may be termed the earliest Phoenician mercantile maritime ventures, in the early Iron Age, were launched mainly from the Carmel Coast and were directed mainly toward Egypt. Gradually this phenomenon expanded geographically, a process that can be followed closely. It was stimulated and conditioned mainly by the effects of Egypt’s withdrawal from Canaan, by the Late Cypriot IIIA collapse, by the slow recovery of the Syrian coast in the early Iron Age, and by environmental factors. The paper synthesizes several decades of research on Mediterranean issues, mainly in connection to Tel Dor on Israel’s Carmel Coast.
Ḥorvat Tefen: A Hasmonean Fortress in the Hinterland of ʿAkko-Ptolemais
By: Roi Sabar
Abstract: Ḥorvat Tefen is located on a prominent hilltop in the Western Galilee, overlooking ʿAkko-Ptolemais and its vicinity. The remains of several rectangular towers, curtain walls, a single gate, and reservoirs are well discernible and suggest it was a military post. This article describes the results of the first excavation undertaken at the site, conducted in 2019 on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The excavations in four of the towers uncovered accumulations above floors as well as the foundations of the walls. The finds indicate this was a short-lived military site that was apparently founded by Alexander Jannaeus in the last years of his reign and abandoned shortly thereafter. The finds are unique in their well-defined chronological range and shed important light on the material culture of the early 1st century b.c.e. Galilee—the heyday of the Hasmonean territorial expansion. Two appendices present the coins and the amphorae finds, both crucial for dating the foundation of the fortress and identifying it as a Hasmonean initiative. In this context, the location of Ḥorvat Tefen suggests it was built to defend a sensitive part of the northwestern border of the Hasmonean state facing ʿAkko-Ptolemais.
A Middle Bronze Age Assemblage of Bone Inlays from Lachish: Typological, Technological, and Functional Aspects
By: Noam Silverberg, Yosef Garfinkel, Michael G. Hasel, Naama Yahalom-Mack
Abstract: Decorated bone inlays are among the fossiles directeurs of Middle Bronze (MB) Age II and early Late Bronze Age assemblages, having been documented since the beginning of archaeological research in the Levant. During the Fourth Expedition to Lachish, an assemblage of 49 decorated bone inlays restored from ca. 200 fragments was found in the rooms of a late MB II monumental building. The inlays were apparently used to decorate wooden boxes. Although such inlays are usually recovered from mortuary contexts, here they were found among daily objects, indicating that the building played an administrative role. In this paper the typological, technological, and functional aspects of the inlays are examined. We reconstruct the use of these objects and discuss the social context in which they were produced and used, providing an additional perspective on such objects and their role in both life and death during the late MB II. Our technological approach included microscopic examination of the inlays, which provided new information on the variability of craft traditions, suggestive of a decentralized production mode.
Ambiguity of Divine and Royal Portraiture and the Hiyawan Image of Kingship: Political Identity through the Monuments of ÇİNEKÖY and KARATEPE
By: Nathan Lovejoy
Abstract: This paper examines the content of the ÇİNEKÖY and KARATEPE Inscriptions, the selection of scripts on the monuments, and the choices of iconography on the two statues of the Storm God. These monuments represent a regionally and temporally specific practice of representation that ambiguously blends elements of divine and royal imagery into a new form, while taking a similar approach to the semiotics of rulership as the Neo-Assyrian kings. The combined elements of the monuments suggest a unique cultural strategy in which the agency of the ruler is blended with that of the Storm God, exemplifying the specific worldview of Iron Age Cilicia that informed their composition. The rulers who created these monuments sought to assert their political identity through the combination of the figural representations, the visuality of the scripts, and the content of the inscriptions; the two monuments illustrate a drastic change in the political agenda of the kingdom of Hiyawa, reflecting a shift in power among opposing political factions. These identities also contain a sense of intentional ambiguity, as the various elements do not immediately support the same message, but rather work together to propagate a multifaceted message of military prowess, commercial interconnectedness, and royal legitimacy and kingship.
Early Islamic Copper Coins from Excavations in the Central Levant: An Indicator for Ancient Economy
By: Hagit Nol
Abstract: Legible copper coins from excavations of Early Islamic sites are scarcer than in other periods. They contain, however, valuable information for understanding economic operations. The focus of this paper is the mint-toponyms inscribed on coins that point to their production place. This identification enables network inquiries and economic interpretations on a level that is rarely possible with archaeological finds. The following study utilizes coins of the 7th–9th centuries from excavations in one area in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. It looks at mint names and the exact location of the coin’s discovery, maps these data with GIS, cross-references characteristics in the data, and detects possible correlations. The paper emphasizes two results. The first is a calculation of the distance that copper coins traveled—locally, regionally, or farther. This result challenges the view that copper coins were only circulated locally. The second result is the identification of sites with coins from four or more mints as marketplaces. Some of these sites are located at the center of large sites, such as Ramla or Beth Shean, but others are their neighboring small sites that acted in parallel. This result disputes Central Place Theory and similar paradigms.
Three Women from Elam: A Revision of the Haft Tappeh Metal Plaque
By: Babak Rafiei-Alavi, Faranak Bahrololoumi, Sabine Klein
Abstract: The metal plaque of Haft Tappeh was found more than 60 years ago, and except for a few scenes on terracotta plaques and cylinder seals from both Elam and Mesopotamia with similar but not identical settings, it still has no known parallels in metal and remains a unique example of Elamite art. The present article is a study of this object from the heartland of the Elamite kingdom in the Khuzestan Plain. It revisits the scenic plaque and attempts to correct some of the misunderstandings regarding the identification of its iconography and symbology based on new photos, X-ray images, and lab analysis. The article also tries to place the plaque in its proper spatial and temporal context, using comparative methods and chemical and isotope analysis.
Moving in Together? Synoikismos and Polis Formation at Sagalassos and in Southwest Anatolia
By: Dries Daems, Peter Talloen
Abstract: Topics such as polis formation and synoikismos have a rich background in classical studies, history, and archaeology. Such studies have mainly focused on the attestations of synoikismos events in literary sources and inscriptions. The archaeological side of such processes has not always been given equal weight. This paper presents a more encompassing view on patterns of synoikismos and polis formation by incorporating and assessing archaeological evidence in a model of push-pull interactions between local communities and the Hellenistic kingdoms in southwest Anatolia. This model will be applied on a case study of the origin of polis at Sagalassos and its relation with the nearby settlement at Düzen Tepe during its formative years in the Early to Middle Hellenistic period (3rd–2nd centuries b.c.). It will then situate this case in its wider context of settlement patterns and community formation in southwest Anatolia, focusing on the ancient regions of Pisidia, Lycia, and Pamphylia. The paper suggests that interactions between local communities and overarching central administrations offered suitable stimuli that resulted in local communities starting to participate in wider dynamics of economic and political importance. This ultimately resulted in observed patterns of polis formation and a potential synoikismos.
The Temple and the Town at Early Bronze Age I Megiddo: Faunal Evidence for the Emergence of Complexity
By: Lidar Sapir-Hen, Deirdre N. Fulton, Matthew J. Adams, Israel Finkelstein
Abstract: The Early Bronze Age is considered to be the period when complex and hierarchical societies first developed in the southern Levant. The appearance of specialization and social complexity is manifested through different aspects of the production stages of animal economy. In this paper, we examine faunal assemblages from two interconnected contemporaneous neighboring sites of differing characters in the Jezreel Valley, Israel: Megiddo, a cult site, and Tel Megiddo East, a town site. Both assemblages are dated to the Early Bronze Age IB (EB IB; 3090–2950 b.c.e.), at the dawn of urbanization in the Near East. The connection between sites, revealed in previous studies of other aspects, is supported by the analysis of faunal remains that reveals intriguing overlaps and divergences. The results of the current study show that the control of resources by the Great Temple in Megiddo also included access to animals and their products, and that it impacted the animal economy in settlements in its hinterland. The impact of this system demonstrates the Great Temple at the center of a larger regional economic organization in the late EB IB that would presage the urban developments of the EB II–III.
Comparative Studies in Society and History (Volume 64, Issue 2)
Can Muslims Drink? Rumi Vodka, Persianate Ideals, and the Anthropology of Islam
By: Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Abstract: Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges Islamic Studies scholars, (art) historians, and anthropologists to reconsider theoretical frameworks underpinning historical and ethnographic research. This article addresses Ahmed’s concerns that studies of Islam often conceptually privilege orthodoxy, by including drinking and intoxication as worthy of close attention in examining the history and the anthropology of Islam. The case of Wine Shop the Philosopher, run by a former Afghan refugee in The Hague and Amsterdam, is presented after establishing the comparative and interdisciplinary relevance of alcohol consumption in studies of Islam and Muslims. Ahmed’s conceptual framework is used and assessed in comparison with the wine shops’ contemporary pluralist reality by exploring the idealized boundaries of Persianate culture and Islam in dialogues between Persian-speaking interlocutors. It is argued that alcoholic drinks lend themselves to competing gastro-nationalisms and prompt ethnolinguistic tensions between and within groups with Turkish, Moroccan, Iranian, and Afghan backgrounds in the Netherlands. The focus on diverse, coexisting and clashing drink regimes, in conclusion, allows us to deconstruct dichotomies between sober Muslims and European drinkers, African and Asian believers and European unbelievers, and refugees and citizens.
The Talat-Tehlirian Complex: Contentious Narratives of Martyrdom and Revenge in Post-Conflict Societies
By: Alp Yenen
Abstract: The assassination of Talat Pasha by Soghomon Tehlirian on 15 March 1921 in Berlin, as well as Tehlirian’s trial and acquittal on 2–3 June 1921, have contributed to the formation of conflicting legacies of the Armenian Genocide. Though minuscule in terms of violence and legal ramifications, these events and their reimagination in contentious narratives have shaped a dominant prism of sensemaking in Turkish-Armenian relations. In the imagination of rival groups, Talat and Tehlirian compete for the very same normative categories of hero and victim at once and each are demonized as a villain and perpetrator. Moreover, it is each figure’s embodiment of martyrdom and revenge that explains why their heroizations have proved so enduring and effective across time and space. This mutual framework of sensemaking, which I call the Talat-Tehlirian complex, ultimately denies the chances of historical reconciliation. In terms of its theoretical implications, this case study explains how a martyr-avenger complex can continuously demand solidarity, sustain grievances, and sacralize violence in post-conflict societies. Based on a thick description of what happened in Berlin in 1921 and its contentious narratives across different generations, this paper calls for a transition to a post-heroic age in Turkish-Armenian relations.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Volume 42, Issue 1)
Apparatuses of Denunciation, Neoliberal Governmental Rationality, and the Potential for a Fascist Turn: The Case of Turkey in the 2010s
By: Biriz Berksoy
Abstract: This article explores the sociopolitical causes behind the proliferation of the apparatuses of denunciation in Turkey in the 2010s, and the escalation in the number of citizens denouncing their fellow citizens. These developments have taken place within an international context marked with the initiation of similar campaigns in core capitalist countries (e.g., the United States, United Kingdom) in the post-9/11 period mobilizing citizens to watch for suspicious behaviors that potentially signify “terrorist” activities. In Turkey, the Communication Center for the Office of the President, police hotlines/websites, community policing networks, neighborhood heads, the night-guard system, and legal statutes enabling denunciation are parts of these apparatuses. The article argues that the mechanisms of denunciation surfaced as part of the “security states” that emerged in the late 1990s under the dominance of neoliberal governmental rationality that encompasses components creating a fertile sociopolitical fabric both for the materialization of fascist tendencies and a preference for denunciation as a governmental technology. Accordingly, the apparatuses of denunciation in Turkey emerged at a point where the “security state” constructed by the Justice and Development Party government in its second term (2007–11) delivered a fascist turn within the context of the 2008 global financial crisis.
“The Love That Muslims Have for Mary”: Secularism and Christian-Muslim Coexistence in Lebanon
By: Raja Abillama
Abstract: The end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) brought a renewed insistence on the coexistence of Muslims and Christians. The “formula of Christian-Muslim coexistence” would seem to circumvent any injunction for the separation of religion and the state along “Western European” lines—for example, laïcité as state ideology—and to allow for religion to mark the state in one shape or another, without that entailing the legal grounding of the state in sharia as is prevalent among Arab states. It would seem an appropriate compromise between two different visions of the state, visions that are bound with the different experiences that Christians and Muslims have had of the circumstances and processes in which the modern Lebanese state was formed. “Muslim-Christian coexistence” would make it possible to deal adequately with religious difference and some of its more destructive political consequences. But, is it the case that the principle is as exclusive of the secular as it appears? In this article, the author argues that Christian-Muslim coexistence is a distinctively Lebanese articulation of a secular sensibility, one that privileges certain ways of being Muslim or Christian, ways that would require Christians and Muslims to constitute themselves, or be constituted, as proper legal subjects.
“Mourners Are the Soundtrack of Life”: Mourning, Time, and Aesthetic Geographies of the South in a Mizrahi Singer's Antibiography
By: Re'ee Hagay
Abstract: This article describes the mourning interwoven into the process of writing Ahuva ‘Ozeri's biography. The nonlinear temporality of the mourning produced by the child mourner from Tel Aviv's Yemenite Quarter is juxtaposed with national representations of Yemeni Jews, constructed as an origin of Jewish homogeneity rooted in the past. Hagay focuses on ‘Ozeri's cinematic performance against the background of south Tel Aviv, revealing a twofold memory of loss, both Mizrahi and Palestinian. ‘Ozeri emerges as a singer who drew on multiple resources of mourning positioned across putative national and regional borders of urban and global Southern geographies. ‘Ozeri is narrated not only as a child mourner but also as the last mourner, in the face of progressive national time. Hagay concludes by asking what is lost with the last mourner's departure from the world, when one loses the ability to recognize one's own loss through its reflection in the other's ruins.
Robinson Crusoe's Watch
By: Elizabeth M. Holt
Abstract: This article reads Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s 1861 translation of Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe into Arabic in Beirut alongside Karl Marx's contemporaneous critique of the popularity of Robinsonades among British political economists. Al-Bustānī’s translation of Robinson Crusoe sought to synch Arabic up with a global age of double-column bookkeeping, the telegraph, the steamship, and the newspaper, and in turn supplant the Indian Ocean stories of Sindbad the Sailor among Beirut's merchants. The latter story cycle constitutes Arabic literary capital appropriated, enumerated, and rendered exchangeable by the new novel form in the serialized English press of the mercantilist era. In Capital, Vol. 1, in the chapter “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx represents Robinson not as a well-armed slave trader, but rather as endowed with only a watch (unbeknownst to Defoe), paper, pen, and ink. With these tools Marx's Robinson enacts the theory of value in the time of factory labor and the incomplete abolition of slavery. Al-Bustānī—like Faraḥ Anṭūn forty years later—confronts this unevenly syncopated, up-to-the-minute temporality in Arabic, as imperial finance reshapes the resources of the Eastern Mediterranean and migrant laborers depart its shores to work in textile mills in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States.
Enclosing the Seas: Political Economies of Violence across the Nineteenth-Century Arabian Sea
By: Johan Mathew
Abstract: This article outlines a process of enclosing private property on the Arabian Sea through the colonial imposition of secure property rights during the nineteenth century. The article proceeds in two paralleled sections. The first section explores the violence of the natural world through the lens of shipwrecks. It traces a shift in the right to shipwrecked property from littoral communities to the merchants who owned the cargo before it was seized by the waves. The second section traces the shift from merchants who deployed violence as an essential tool in commercial competition, to relying on the British Empire for the security of their property and the strategic use of force. On the one hand, both these transitions involve the imposition of classical political economy and the colonial seizure of protection rents obtained by merchants. However, they also reflect the ways in which maritime potentates and influential merchants were able to co-opt imperial policies and profit from this transition. Over the course of the nineteenth century, violent coercion was expunged from the skillset of Arabian Sea merchants, but only after compensating merchants and coastal communities for relinquishing the profits of protection.
Circulation and Capitalism in a Maritime Bazaar: Notes from a Pearl Merchant's Chest
By: Fahad Ahmad Bishara
Abstract: This article takes a single genre of the Persian Gulf pearl dive—the chau manual, used to determine the weight-based value of a pearl—and draws on it to think about circulation and commodification in the Indian Ocean world. In reading the chau manual, as well as other writings, it highlights the active processes by which economic actors in the region thought about, and indeed produced, capitalism at sea. As technologies—as means of doing—chau manuals allowed pearl merchants to move from the specificities and idiosyncrasies of nature to the abstractions of the market. More generally, texts like these formed part of the infrastructure through which circulation took place in the maritime marketplace. By thinking through these marketplace genres, we can gain a more textured sense of the processes of knowing, measuring, abstracting, and circulating that underpinned the maritime—a process of active economic thinking that went into the making of global capitalism in a corner of the Indian Ocean world.
The High Tide of Colonialism: Sovereignty and Governmentality at Sea
By: Karim Malak
Abstract: This article explores a seaborne genealogy of sovereignty and governmentality by drawing on the case of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. It argues that a particular form of totalizing sovereignty emerged through the Levant Crisis and its resolution in 1841 when the Mediterranean became mare clausum. Subsequently, it demonstrates how a rivaling seaborne genealogy of sovereignty and governmentality complicates the standard Foucauldian narrative of the emergence of governmentality. In contrast to the classic land-based history of sovereignty and governmentality, a seaborne story can point to a different and earlier periodization of colonization that involves the acquisition of naval stations, outposts, and customs houses hidden under the veneer of naval science.
Oceans of Finance and Commodification
By: Laleh Khalili
Abstract: In this essay Khalili surveys the maritime as a space of commodification and of creation of new financial forms and instruments. Maritime transportation made possible the colonization of the Americas, Asia, and Africa and the enslavement and transoceanic commodification of millions of humans. Since then, not just what is transported upon the deep, but the sea itself has also been commodified. The seas’ geophysical contours, their seabeds, the species of flora and fauna that inhabit them, and even the ephemeral routes on their surfaces have been transformed into commodities, ripe for exchange, speculation, and juridification.
New Methods for Governing Death in Istanbul: Early Modern Ottoman Necropolitics
By: Nükhet Varlık
Abstract: The management of the dead underwent major transformations in early modern Istanbul, owing to rapid population growth and its consequences in the city's urban layout. Starting around the turn of the sixteenth century, the majority of the urban dead began to be buried outside the city walls in the newly emerging communal graveyards. As the physical space of the living and deceased residents of the capital gradually came to be separated, death and burial rituals started to be performed by individuals outside the immediate family or community members of the deceased. This was especially the case for those who did not have family or community ties in the city. This article examines the ritual processes by which corpses were prepared for interment, through washing, shrouding, and burial; how funerals, coffins, tombstones, and graveyards were managed; and how individuals, communities, and institutions participated therein. In particular, the author's goal is to question (1) how urban transformations led to modifications in death and burial rites; (2) how those rites became professionalized and impersonalized through the early modern period; and (3) whether these changes created new relationships between the living and the dead in the physical, mental, and emotional landscape of Istanbul.
The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz: Unclaimed and Anonymous Death in Turkey
By: Aslı Zengin
Abstract: The Turkish cemeteries for the kimsesiz (literally, people who have no one) are graveyards where the state buries the bodies of those people who remain unidentified or unclaimed after a certain period of time. In practice, they are burial sites for the social outcast, namely homeless and underclass people, victims of honor crimes, disowned members of blood families, premature babies, and more recently, unaccompanied refugees. They also contain the bodies of political detainees who have been “disappeared” under police interrogation and state violence, along with radical leftists and Kurdish guerrillas deemed “unidentified.” This article focuses on the cemetery for the kimsesiz in Kilyos, Istanbul in order to discuss the spatial ordering of death in the margins of social and political life in Turkey. These margins may be ethnic, religious, sectarian, or economic as well as gendered or sexed and sometimes medical. A close focus on this mortal topography of margins demonstrates the state's complicated relationship with the category of kimsesiz and the limits of social legibility and belonging in Turkey.
Phantom Limbs, Embodied Horror, and the Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide
By: Elyse Semerdjian
Abstract: The affective horrors of the Armenian genocide leave traces upon the living. Most pilgrims who visit sites of mass killing in contemporary Syria and Turkey note that they feel a profound sense of sadness and are overcome with tears of mourning while visiting the sites. This essay explores these experiences along with two anomalous cases of visitors who had an altogether different experience of the uncanny including physical ailment. Semerdjian suggests that some who visit spaces where Armenian genocide atrocities were committed a century ago are unsettled temporally, geographically, and bodily because they are visitors to haunted spaces or what Roma Sendayka has called “non-sites of memory.” How do communal memories of horrific bodily violence sometimes result in embodied hauntings? How have visitors historically enacted rituals—including collecting bones of martyrs—in an attempt to vacate the affective necrogeography of ghosts by naming the unnamed dead?
The Figure of the Martyr in Iran-Iraq Postwar Movies: The Case of Safar be Chazzabeh
By: Minoo Moallem
Abstract: This article focuses on the post–Iran-Iraq War representations of the martyr figure, with a close reading of the film Safar be Chazzabeh. The author interrogates the gendered representation of martyrdom and masculinity as central to the narration of the postwar films. She shows how postwar films continue to keep Islamic nationalism in circulation through the martyr figure by conveying a fictive yet affective time of the nation where death opens space for the continuation of life. While post–Iran-Iraq War movies collapse men's emotional relations in the war zone with their heroic martyrdom for the nation-state's sake, they aesthetically mediate the possibility of men's homosociality in the precarious and affective intensity of the war zone.
The Surplus of Death: Asylum Management and the Affective Atmosphere of Complicity
By: Eirini Avramopoulou
Abstract: This article focuses on the temporal and spatial proximity mediating the lives of those who have been institutionalized in distinctive (albeit similar) ways on the Greek island of Leros, like asylum seekers and the mentally ill—and those working in asylum institutions—who appear co-implicated in the circuit of crisis capitalism and the biopolitical/necropolitical effects of managing populations deemed disposable in the name of care and protection. Drawing closely on the double meaning of the term asylum, this article explores the gendered and racialized biopolitical apparatus of vulnerability management in asylum contexts, especially the deadness and livingness they produce. It argues that complicity arises within the dense atmosphere of the surplus of death and the unattainable accumulation produced by multiple crises. It approaches the associated “surplus of death” as essential to the political economy of asylum management, which operates on a logic of “slow death” and the wearing out of populations struggling to endure its unbearable affects. This affective atmosphere is imbued with ethico-political questions that are neither owned by particular subjects nor disavowed in their universal reach but sustained (in their unsustainability) through norms and morals reiterated in their articulation, sense-making trouble, and measurement of worth.
The Transnational Afterlives of European Muslims
By: Osman Balkan; Yumna Masarwa
Abstract: How do European Muslims navigate death and burial in countries where they face systematic barriers to political inclusion? The authors of this article investigate the complex negotiations surrounding end-of-life decisions for Muslim communities in France and Germany. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research among Algerian and Turkish diasporas in Marseilles and Berlin, they illustrate how burial decisions reflect divergent ideas about citizenship, belonging, and identity. While some Muslims are interred in local cemeteries, many more are repatriated out of Europe to be laid in ancestral soils in countries of origin. Through interviews with Muslim death-care workers and community members the authors analyze the significance and symbolic value that such posthumous journeys carry in postmigratory settings. They argue that the Muslim corpse embodies a range of overlapping desires, experiences, and expectations connected to histories of migration, settlement, and return, as well as attitudes toward death and beliefs about the afterlife. Consequently, the corpse offers a compelling window into the transnational afterlives of migration and empire.
Against Abstractions: On Geopolitics, Humanness, Virus, and Death
By: Sima Shakhsari
Abstract: This article focuses on different iterations of virality to explore the racial logic of death and the crisis of our time during the coronavirus pandemic. By examining the war on the coronavirus, the sanctions on Iran, and the rise of white supremacy in the United States, this article argues that the optimistic analyses of virus and virality are predicated upon the abstraction of the human, thus overlooking race and geopolitics.
Dead Sea Discoveries (Volume 29, Issue 2)
Reading for Resonance: Divine Presence and Biblical Hermeneutics in the Temple Scroll
By: Annie Calderbank
Abstract: This article offers a hermeneutic approach attentive to the tangled idiomatic and literary interconnections among biblical texts and other Second Temple literature. It focuses on the expressions of divine presence in the Temple Scroll and their prepositions; the divine presence is ‘upon’ the temple and ‘in the midst’ of the people. This prepositional rhetoric engages recurrences and interconnections within and beyond the Hebrew Bible. It thus evokes multiple interlocking resonances and offers a window onto concepts of temple presence across biblical texts and traditions.
Decrees for the “Volunteers” of the People
By: Bryan Elliff
Abstract: The Damascus Document’s Pesher of the Well (CD 6:2–11) has generally been treated as an isolated unit, either as an example of Qumran exegesis or as evidence for the history of the sect. The present study offers a fresh reading of this section that gives special attention to its rhetorical function within the document and its relationship to the document’s legal material in particular. It is argued that the pesher was intended to authorize the body of legal rulings found within the document by interpreting the two lines of Numbers 21:18 as an outline of two stages of the sect’s history. The pesher is built around two anchor-words in the lemma: שרים (“officials”), a reference to the sect’s founders who established an authoritative body of torah rulings, and נדיבי העם, a reference to the sect’s later “volunteer initiates” who were to remain faithful to these rules throughout the Epoch of Wickedness.
“Make Me a Sanctuary”: Revisiting 4Q364 (4QRPb) 15
By: Ariel Feldman, Faina Feldma
Abstract: This contribution offers a new reading and reconstruction of an addition found in the text of Exod 24:18–25:1 as preserved in 4Q364 (4QRPb) 15. Alluding to Exod 25:8 (and possibly 9), it appears to elucidate the purpose of Moses’s forty days’ long stay atop Mount Sinai and serves as a nexus between Exod 24:18 and the following discussion of the Tabernacle.
What Has Esther to Do with Qumran?
By: Bronson Brown-deVost
Abstract: This article investigates some of the previous claims that have been made for the knowledge of the book of Esther at Qumran. Following the recent advances in the study of textual allusion and re-use, it is no longer tenable to posit any reference to or knowledge of Esther within the writings from Qumran. In addition, it is argued that the one case where a relationship to Esther seemed most certain is better explained amongst other literary references to Amos.
Iran and the Caucasus (Volume 26, Issue 1)
Far away from Pārsa: Empire, Borders, and Ideology in Achaemenid Bactria
By: Marco Ferrario
Abstract: Recently, a corpus of primary sources related to the Northeastern fringes of the Achaemenid Empire (courtly-style seals bearing narrative depictions of warfare between representatives of the King and Central Asians) has been used to support the hypothesis that, at least from Xerxes’ reign, the people of the eastern satrapies provided a constant threat to the Empire in these crucial regions and, consequently, to its stability. Given its implications (e. g., in the light of evidence like the ADAB documents, from which a different picture emerges), such a statement deserves closer scrutiny. After having summarized the main arguments supporting it, the paper problematizes it, while arguing for a dialectical framework as the theoretical paradigm better suited to understand the relationships between Achaemenid power and the people(s) living at its Central Asian borderlands.
A Copper Statuette from South-Eastern Iran (3rd Millennium B.C.)
By: Nasir Eskandari, Mojgan Shafiee, Ali Akbar Mesgar, Federico Zorzi, Massimo Vidale
Abstract: We present a copper alloy statuette confiscated by the Iranian security forces in the surroundings of Jiroft (Kerman, Iran) with other artifacts of the 3rd millennium B.C. Its iconography is discussed with synthetic reviews of selected snake-related iconographic themes in coeval ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, and southern Central Asia. Two micro-fragments, analyzed by ESEM, revealed the alloy and an unusual decorative treatment of its surface. The statuette hints at an important mythological or religious identity so far unknown.
On the Emergence of the Iranian Apocalypse Between the Sixth and Seventh Centuries
By: Domenico Agostini
Abstract: The Iranian apocalyptic texts belong to the body of Pahlavi literature that was written in the ninth and tenth centuries. While most scholarship points to the early Islamic reworking and redaction of these apocalyptic accounts, which is clearly evident in the overlapping narratives, various late Sasanian historical and apocalyptic material still seems to be detectable. This article reassesses the identification of some Iranian apocalyptic figures, in order to discuss the origin of some literary models that were likely shared with some coeval neighboring traditions. It will thereby situate the emergence of Iranian apocalyptic ideas between the end of the sixth to the first decades of the seventh century.
Armeno-Iranica, Indo-Europaeica, and Gathica
By: Martin Schwartz
Abstract: I shall review the various etymological proposals for Armenian skay/hskay ‘giant’/ To be refuted is the pervasive hypothesis that the collocation Paroyr Skayordi represents the name of a Scyth (Assyrian Partatua, Greak Προτοθύης) who is supposedly ‘son (ordi) of a Saka (skay)’, whereby skay ‘giant’ is taken from Saka- ‘Scyth’. Then it will be discussed whether and how skay comes from Middle Persian kay, which will entail an exploration of the history of the latter word, from Avestan kauui- to various Middle Iranian forms, and relevant attesttaions in the Manichean Book of the Giants. With rejection of the explanations hitherto for the s- of the skay, a new account will be offered, with further discussion of the h- of hskay. APPENDIX I will set forth the Proto-Indo-European root *kelĝ and its intricate semantics. APPENDIX II will be devoted to phonic encryption in the Gathas.
An Etymological Note on YAv. mūra-: Is it Really “Idiot, Stupid, Foolish”?
By: Sara Belelli
Abstract: The present contribution is a first step of an ongoing investigation on the conceptualisation of “stupidity, foolishness, madness” in Iranian, as a selected case-study for an assessment of the controversial role played by phonosemantic/ideophonic paradigms in lexical production and areal diffusion of cognate words. The discussion will challenge the commonly- accepted interpretation of the Young Avestan term mūra- as prototypically referring to mental/cognitive impairment, based on a review of the attempts at etymological reconstruction and a closer scrutiny of disregarded evidence from Middle and New Iranian.
New Persian yādgār
By: Nadereh Nafisi
Abstract: The paper is devoted to the analysis of the specific terminological usage of a polysemantic lexeme, yādgār (generally meaning today “souvenir, keepsake; remembrance”), in New Persian of the Classical period, particularly in the Shahnama by Firdausi (10th century).
The Ethno-Religious Contradictions as Threats to the North Caucasus Stability and Integration
By: Maxim Popov
Abstract: Latent ethno-religious conflicts remain the most destructive of contemporary threats to the North Caucasus integration and stability. The fundamental issue that requires a constructive solution in order to ensure security in this region is the promotion of ethnic peace and tolerance. This research aims to analyse how deep-rooted ethno-religious contradictions can affect regional stability and conflict resolution strategy. The paper attempts to answer an essential research question that unresolved protracted contradictions have fundamental consequences for the North Caucasus. The growing regional disintegration, deep social inequalities, and ineffective institutions all add significantly to the appeal of radical Islamist ideology, erode trust in the state, and constitute a key reason the North Caucasian conflicts are so difficult to resolve. All of these increase the citizens’ alienation from the state and promote the search for radical alternatives, including ISIS and jihad: ethno-religious radicalism becomes a major conflict driver.
Islamic Law and Society (Volume 29, Issue 1-2)
Abū Yūsuf’s Ikhtilāf Abī Ḥanīfa wa-Ibn Abī Laylā and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Formative Period of the Ḥanafī School
By: Sohail Hanif
Abstract: In this essay, I address the longstanding debate on attributing legal texts to formative-period authors by focusing on the transmission of one early text: Ikhtilāf Abī Ḥanīfa wa-Ibn Abī Laylā, attributed to Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798), and its reception by one early jurist: Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933). I argue that al-Ṭaḥāwī’s written work attests to the existence of multiple independent transmissions of Abū Yūsuf’s text and that these transmissions confirm the attribution of the text to Abū Yūsuf. I then reflect on the formative-period written materials consulted by al-Ṭaḥāwī and his contemporaries, arguing that their access to material from a period in which oral transmission was predominant gave them a unique standing in the eyes of classical-era jurists. Finally, I reflect on the role of digests (mukhtaṣars), particularly those of al-Ṭaḥāwī and al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037), in sealing the movement from orality in the formative period to fixed written texts in the classical period.
Al-Shāfiʿī Against the Kufan School
By: Christopher Melc
Abstract: One of the short works of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820) is Ikhtilāf ʿAlī wa-ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd (“the disagreements of ʿAlī and ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd”). It comprises first quotations of the Companions ʿAlī and Ibn Masʿūd advocating rules that the Kufans reject, secondly counter-reports supporting the rules that al-Shāfiʿī advocates. It seems to be one of the earliest of al-Shāfiʿī’s works. It argues mainly by authority against an undifferentiated Kufan school. It testifies to a time when regional schools were predominant and legal reasoning primitive, also when divisions within Kufa, especially between adherents of raʾy and hadith, were less important than they seemed later. Its argument tends to imply that al-Shāfiʿī’s doctrine is better than the Kufans’ because it is eclectically based on the learning of all centers, suggesting that loyalty to a regional tradition was becoming an embarrassment.
Authority in the Classical Ḥanafī School: the Emergence & Evolution of Ẓāhir al-Riwāya
By: Salman Younas
Abstract: The madhhab in its classical form was an authoritative entity with substantive boundaries that established the outer limits of the school and its authoritative doctrine. The latter involved, among other things, confronting the plurality of opinions found within the school. In this essay, I will analyse the manner in which Ḥanafī jurists attempted to limit this plurality through an authorizing discourse that created a taxonomy of legal doctrine ranking different opinions present in the corpus juris of their school. Specifically, I will examine the most authoritative corpus in this taxonomy, namely ẓāhir al-riwāya, in five parts: the first part will investigate the concept of legal authority prior to ẓāhir al-riwāya; the second part will identify the earliest usage of the term ẓāhir al-riwāya; the third and fourth parts will analyse the popularization of this doctrine, its spread, and earliest theorization; the final part will briefly investigate what ẓāhir al-riwāya denoted.
Canonization in Islamic Law: A Case Study based on Shāfiʿī Literature
By: Norbert Oberauer
Abstract: The present study analyzes processes of canonization in Islamic law, with a focus on the Shāfiʿī madhhab. I argue that the formation of schools of law may be described as the emergence of distinct networks of intertextual references. This intertextuality – which is manifest inter alia in the choice of commentary and abridgement as key literary genres – transformed legal insight into a collective project centered on a common textual tradition. While these textual traditions were initially multivocal and indeterminate, specific doctrinal positions began to be prioritized in the 11th century. This resulted in the gradual standardization of school doctrine and, in the 14th century, in canonization, when certain texts came to be regarded as the authoritative articulation of the madhhab. The impact of canonization on the development of law has been the object of considerable discussion in Islamic studies. Drawing on a systematic survey of Shāfiʿī doctrine on commercial partnership as represented in commentaries and abridgements of the 9th to 19th centuries, I argue that canonization made a significant contribution to stabilizing legal doctrine, and thus to conferring an element of rigidity on Shāfiʿī law. At the same time, I argue that this rigidity is specific to commentaries and abridgements, which in turn represent only one of many layers of Islamic legal discourse. The marked conservatism of these texts should be interpreted against the backdrop of the functional differentiation of different genres of legal literature: commentaries and abridgements served to preserve and transmit the inherited doctrinal essence of a school, while other genres helped contextualize this doctrinal tradition within an ever-changing environment of social practices.
Journal of Arabic Literature (Volume 53, Issue 1-2)
Interrogating the Sacred: Radical Religious Revisionism, Agnosticism and Atheism in the Modern Arab World
By: Ralph M. Coury
Abstract: The article analyzes the thought of modern Arab Muslim and Christian critics of religion (believing radical and left liberal revisionists, agnostics, and atheists) who have challenged prevailing religious repertoires of both Islamists and their liberal opponents. Topics include: traditional Orientalist understandings of the fragile role of reason in Arab societies; the construction of religion in the modern West and non-West; the influences that account for the emergence and nature of Arab critiques, their similarities and differences, and the various responses that they have engendered; the degree to which the critiques have paralleled those of the modern West, and their influence on modern Arab thought; the variety of genres, including the novel, short story, poetry, fable, drama, Qur’anic exegesis, scientific theory, philosophy, metaphysics, and historical studies, in which these critiques have appeared.
Something as Essential as Life Itself: Ghassān Kanafānī’s Returning to Haifa as a Parable of the Integration of Trauma
By: Pasquale Macaluso
Abstract: Classic trauma theory has been criticized for ignoring the possibility of healing and growth for the traumatized, especially in a non-Western context. This reading of Ghassān Kanafānī’s Returning to Haifa tries to overcome such limitations by employing a framework that articulates Ibn Khaldūn’s thought on group feeling with Pierre Janet’s theory of trauma. Accordingly, the novel construes the Nakbah as a traumatic event that, despite its subjective meaning having long remained elusive, has never stopped affecting refugees’ consciousness. It then proposes that the Arab defeat of 1967 offered an opportunity for collective engagement and historical change to the Nakbah generation because it enabled them to reconcile their traumatic memories with their lives, inspiring their support for the Palestinian resistance. Such a parable of trauma integration counters the essentialist positions that Kanafānī attributed to some Zionist literature and points to the reversal of the schemes aimed at humiliating the Palestinians.
Global 1968 in Egypt: Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s Farag and the Disarticulation of Area Studies
By: M.J. Ernst
Abstract: This article reads Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s novel Farag as an afterlife of the global anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist political culture of 1968. I argue that Farag entangles post-1968 Egypt and France from a position of decentered interlocality, which places the histories of Egypt’s 1970s student movement and France’s Third-World-Marxist left in critical dialogue. At a time when the Egyptian left was paralyzed by state co-optation, the political awakening of the novel’s protagonist, Nadā, is fostered by her exposure to the independent left of 1968 France. After she is imprisoned in Egypt several years later for participating in the student movement, however, Nadā must reckon with the incongruities of her postcolonial experience and interrogate French theory’s Eurocentric claim to universality. Thereafter, ʿĀshūr’s novel charts the tragic demise of the radical left across the Global South through the declining parallel figures of Nadā’s French mother and two Egyptian student movement leaders.
Mutual Adversaries, Fellow Dissidents: Multilingual Dissent from Waṭṭār’s al-Zilzāl and Djaout’s Le Dernier Été de la raison
By: Alejandra Padín-Dujon
Abstract: In mid- to late 20th-century Algeria, the language in which an author wrote reflected more than personal preference: it indicated a political affiliation and a position within the culture wars that merged with the violent conflict of the 1990s. Taking the tension between francophone, arabophone, and pluralist factions in Algerian literature as its point of departure, this article sheds light on the transcendent and multilingual “language” of dissidence exemplified in the novels of al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār and Tahar Djaout. Previous work on Waṭṭār and Djaout has portrayed their mutual antipathy as an unbridgeable political divide. This article challenges this interpretation through an analysis of Waṭṭār’s novel al-Zilzāl (1974) and Djaout’s posthumous novel Le Dernier Été de la raison (1999). The article concludes that Waṭṭār and Djaout were not simply antagonists. Rather, they were fellow dissidents opposed to a cultural monolith on the one hand, and political and economic malpractice on the other.
Transmission and Transit in Contemporary Arabic Literature: Naql and Its Limits
By: Drew Paul
Abstract: In this essay, I use the concept of naql to connect textual transmission and physical movement in two contemporary Arabic fictional works that are structured around questions of the circulation of narratives and bodies: Khālid al-Khamīsī’s Tāksī, a fictional collection of tales about Cairo taxi drivers, and Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād, which depicts a monster roaming the streets of Baghdad. I begin with a discussion of naql as both transmission and movement, reading a tension between fixity and change that complicates notions of authenticity and authority in realms such as language, time, and mobility. I then argue that Tāksī uses the mobility of the taxi and the types of transmissions that it receives and produces to reposition cultural and political knowledge gleaned from cabdrivers who move through the gridlocked streets of Cairo. In Saʿdāwī’s novel, the monster’s movements and actions begin as a response to violence but fail to cohere as an alternative to structural corruption, revealing the limits of naql as political critique. I conclude by considering how this reading of naql is reflected in the global circulation of these texts.
The Traditional Qaṣīdah and Kitāb al-Zahrah by Ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī
By: Iyas Nasser
Abstract: This article examines the structural affinity between the traditional qaṣīdah and Kitāb al-Zahrah, an anthology of poetry compiled by Muḥammad Ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī (d. 297/910) that consists of one hundred chapters. While the first half is devoted to love poetry, the second half presents a number of different genres, beginning notably with panegyric religious poetry. Here I explore a significant passage in which Ibn Dāwūd justifies his arrangement: love poetry followed by religious poetry. Since this passage presents some ambiguity in Nykl’s edition—which is based on the Cairo manuscript containing only the first half of Kitāb al-Zahrah—I have consulted the Turin manuscript, where the anthology appears in full, to propose important emendations for a satisfactory understanding of the anthologist’s justification. I show that Ibn Dāwūd arranges his anthology in two halves corresponding to the two sections of the Abbasid panegyrical qaṣīdah: amatory opening and panegyric. This potentially makes Kitāb al-Zahrah the only anthology to be based on the traditional structure of qaṣīdah.
Journal of Contemporary History (Volume 57, Issue 2)
Colonial Exceptions: The International Labour Organization and Child Labour in British Africa, c.1919–40
By: Sacha Hepburn, April Jackson
Abstract: From 1919, the International Labour Organization sought to improve protections for workers globally. Concurrently, the organization was dominated by colonial powers whose economies relied on the exploitation of colonized workers. This article explores how the International Labour Organization navigated this contradictory situation during the interwar period, focussing on its approach to child labour in British Africa. The introduction of a universal minimum employment age and the abolition of child labour were founding goals of the International Labour Organization. However, colonial powers wanted to maintain the extensive employment of children and the use of child labour in their colonies. Britain used its influence within the International Labour Organization to promote racialized constructions of childhood and to pluralize working children’s rights in International Labour Organization instruments. While the International Labour Organization’s tripartite structure did also provide a forum through which colonial labour practices could be challenged, Britain and its supporters ultimately succeeded in constructing a two-tier system of international labour law which rendered colonized children less protected than children in the industrialized West. In creating colonial exceptions, the International Labour Organization pursued and promoted a hierarchical and exclusionary form of internationalism. Overall, the article provides new insights into the development of the International Labour Organization and its legislation, as well as broader histories of childhood and of internationalism.
‘Hidden Motives’? African Women, Forced Marriage and Knowledge Production at the United Nations, 1950–62
By: Rhian Elinor Keyse
Abstract: The period following the Second World War saw much international debate around African marriage, especially practices believed by Western observers to be coercive, and the emergence of international instruments ostensibly designed to counter these practices. Drawing on feminist readings of governmentalities, this article explores United Nations debates around the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, and the 1962 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages. Despite the United Nations’s preferred impression of benign universality, neither the international debates around forced and early marriage, nor the instruments they generated, were the product of neutral ‘expertise’. Rather, they represented attempts to reframe and govern marriage and the family through knowledge production. The interventions produced did not – and were not intended to – produce tangible benefits in the lives of African women and girls. Instead, they served political ends in the adversarial atmosphere of the decolonization and Cold War-era United Nations, and also represented continuities with earlier colonial ideas. In the creation of these discursive framings, African women’s voices were largely ignored, excluding them from debates that concerned them and minimizing their contributions to international ‘knowledge’.
Journal of Islamic Studies (Volume 33, Issue 2)
Ṣiffīn Arbitration Agreement and statecraft in early Islamic political documents
By: Ibrahim Zein, Ahmed El-Wakil
Abstract: In this article we study the different recensions of the Ṣiffīn Arbitration Agreement and classify them into six different versions. Despite the differences in length and language among them, we note that these can be traced to a source document. We then highlight the key features and terminology found in the different versions of the Ṣiffīn Arbitration Agreement and observe the striking parallels that they share with the covenants attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad. We argue that the key political actors who composed the Ṣiffīn Arbitration Agreement were in all likelihood part of the same governing and administrative body that had a hand in drafting the Covenants. The startling similarities between the Ṣiffīn Arbitration Agreement and the Covenants therefore set the foundations for a comparative method that will help us better understand statecraft in the study of early Islam’s political documents.
A ‘Sufi’ epistle on spiritual poverty, and its authors: authenticity, authority, and genre in textual reproduction
By: Aydogan Kars
Abstract: A range of widely copied Arabic works on asceticism and spiritual poverty attributed to prominent Muslim scholars, Najm al-Dīn al-Kubrā, ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī, Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī, and Aḥmad Zarrūq, are either identical, or contain significant overlaps. This paper analyses the content and reception of this work, and the 36 manuscripts of it available, in order to clarify the issues around its authenticity, authorship, and genre. It makes four key arguments. First, it argues that Minhāj al-sālikīn widely attributed to al-Kubrā is not an authentic work. It is a recent ascription that invents this title and changes the creedal content of an originally longer work. Second, a shorter version of this work can be ascribed to ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī in a particular sense of pre-modern authorship. He compiled a selection from the longer work that was penned by someone else––in the same way his Irshād al-murīdīn is mostly selections from al-Qushayrī’s Risāla. Third, different versions of the treatise are mistakenly attributed to Zarrūq, Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī, and Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī in various publications and manuscripts. Finally, the original version was penned by one of the less-known teachers of Ibn al-ʿArabī, Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān al-Abharī, and soon attributed to more celebrated figures. Through these later agents and their attributions, reproductions, redactions, and publications, the text came to be situated within a Sufi framework and genre. Thus, the epistle on poverty exemplifies not only the construction of ‘Sufism’ as a genre beyond the authorial intention, but also the dispersal of the author-function typical for this genre.
Journal of Near Eastern Studies (Volume 81, Issue 1)
A Synchronized Early Middle Bronze Age Chronology for Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia
By: Felix Höflmayer, Sturt W. Manning
Abstract: Not available
The Price of Justice: Revenues Generated by Ottoman Courts of Law in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
By: Zeynep Dörtok Abacı, Boğaç Ergene
Abstract: Not available
Magical Obstetrics: Abunis, Bird Blood, and a Black Shrew
By: Andreas Winkler
Abstract: Not available
New Evidence for an Early Islamic Arabic Dialect in Eastern Arabia? The Qatrāyīth ("in Qatari") Spoken in Beth Qatraye
By: Mario Kozah
Abstract: Not available
Oriental Institute Museum Notes No.17: An Abydos Setting Stela of Osiris Sety I
By: Foy Scalf
Abstract: Not available
"The Garden of the Reasonable": Religious Diversity Among Middle Eastern Physicians, AD 1000-1500
By: Thomas A. Carlson
Abstract: Not available
Rebel’s Advocate: How Abū ʿUbayda Maʿmar b. al-Muthannā Came to be Labelled a Khārijite
By: Raashid S. Goyal
Abstract: Not available
The Date of the Arrival of the Judeans at Elephantine and the Foundation of Their Colony
By: Dan'el Kahn
Abstract: Not available
Middle Eastern Literatures (Volume 25, Issue 1)
Dream interpretation and parodies of translation in Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq
By: Phoebe Bay Carter
Abstract: In Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s 1855 semiautobiographical picaresque al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq (Leg Over Leg), the author’s double, the Fāriyāq, holds a series of jobs that parodically stand in for al-Shidyāq’s own employments. This article addresses the Fāriyāq’s career as an oneiromancer, reading it as an allegory of al-Shidyāq’s work as a Bible translator for European Protestant missionaries. By representing the muʿarrib (translator into Arabic) as the muʿabbir (dream interpreter), I argue, al-Shidyāq places the translator in a genealogy of professional interpreters, inheriting the tradition of early-modern Ottoman court interpreters who wielded the power of expertise against the social and economic power of their patrons. At a moment of historical shift from circuits of scribal patronage to a more horizontal print market, al-Shidyāq removes the oneiromantic tradition from its hierarchical patron economy and parodically reinscribes it in an emergent print culture, initiating an anonymous yet intimate community of laughter.
Palestine’s YA fiction and identity in Ahlam Bsharat’s Code Name: Butterfly
By: Aida Fahmawi Watad
Abstract: The article addresses a relatively neglected area of research: Palestinian literature for adolescents, adab al-yāfiʿīn [literature for adolescents] or Young Adult (YA) literature. It sheds light on how this literature addresses the unique problematics of growing up under occupation and considers how novels for young adults reflect the Palestinian teenager's consolidation of his or her identity in relation to the political and social conditions imposed by oppression. The essay surveys the phenomenon of Palestinian YA literature and focuses on a reading of Ahlam Bsharat’s novel Code Name: Butterfly [Ismī al-ḥarakī farāsha]. Bsharat's work is unique in the relatively limited tradition of Palestinian YA literature in its avoidance of ideology and didacticism, and in its attempt to turn the text itself into a holding space for Palestinian teens. Analysis shows how Butterfly legitimizes the experiences of young adults and gives voice to their lived experience.
The problem with hybridity: a critique of Armeno-Turkish studies
By: Aram Ghoogasian
Abstract: The study of Armeno-Turkish Literature, or Turkish written in Armenian script, has boomed of late, posing a challenge to Turkish literary historiography's neglect of Armeno-Turkish texts. Though this scholarship has argued against the exclusion of Armenians from late Ottoman cultural history, it has also unintentionally reproduced the nationalist, exclusionary logic that such segregation rested upon in the first place. This article offers a critique of the now dominant scholarly understanding of Armeno-Turkish as a “hybrid” of ostensibly distinct late Ottoman-era Armenian and Turkish languages and cultures. It does so by reframing Turkish as an Armenian language, moving beyond the shortcomings of hybridity theory toward a more productive, “depropriative” idiom for the study of Armeno-Turkish that denationalizes the Turkish language.
Middle Eastern Studies (Volume 58, Issue 2)
Anti-alcoholism, Turkish and American non-state actors, and their mutual pursuits of national and global sobriety
By: Emine Evered
Abstract: In April 1920, few months after America’s implementation of Prohibition, several MPs of Turkey’s renegade Grand National Assembly in Ankara proposed a ban on the production, sale, import, and consumption of alcohol. Some MPs questioned the need to prohibit what Islam already forbade centuries earlier, but others stressed the medical, social, and moral imperatives for an injunction. After many contentious debates, the bill passed and remained law until 1924. This article adds to historical scholarship on the parliamentary passage of the ban through its interrogation of the American and Turkish non-state actors (NSAs) that worked towards this end. Following the passage of the US’s Eighteenth Amendment, leading Prohibition figures moved quickly to internationalize their agenda and created the World League Against Alcoholism in 1919. It became the principal American NSA to engage with Turkey’s emergent anti-alcohol interests; interests that coalesced into what became Yeşilay (the Green Crescent), which today is Turkey’s leading anti-addiction organization. Through analysis of American, Ottoman, and Turkish documents regarding both NSAs’ origins and various leading figures’ agendas, this study reveals the emergence of these relations while also identifying the plurality of agendas at play that exceeded simply mandating sobriety in lands of Ottoman and early republican Turkey.
States of drunkenness: bar-life in Istanbul between empire, occupation, and republic, 1918–1923
By: Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal
Abstract: The article examines the operation of the multiple regimes of alcohol control formulated by Istanbul’s Allied, Ottoman, and Turkish Nationalist authorities that distinguish the period 1918-1923 and their impact on alcohol entrepreneurs and drinkers. By combining Allied and Ottoman police and newspaper reports and the personnel testimony of soldiers, officials, and civilians in the occupied city, the article supplements the small existing literature on Turkish prohibition, which has been mostly focused on the debate in the Grand National Assembly in Ankara and neglects the impact of restrictions and eventual prohibition of alcohol on its sellers and consumers in Istanbul.
Winemaking between the claims of the local and the international in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine (1860s–1948)
By: Philippe Bourmaud
Abstract: Wine-making estates in the late Ottoman and Mandatory period shed light on the relations between land, know-how and nationalism which have shaped up alongside the Arab-Zionist, then Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The dynamics explaining the growth of the estates were grounded primarily in the changing commercial settings of Palestine between the Ottoman and the British mandate periods, with a shift from more quality-oriented production to everyday, low end or mid-range production. In the process, indigenous taste was discarded as of low market value, due to the domination of the increasingly globalized wine market by European wineries. As a result, pressure to adopt European standards of vinification and quality came from various quarters. The article examines to what extent this is due to the anticipation of estate founders, global commercial dynamics, the support government and public debt administrations for the main wineries of the country, and the influence of the nascent international sphere.
Alcohol consumption, economic resource and League of Nations pressures in French Syria and Lebanon (1923–1946)
By: Nessim Znaien
Abstract: Syria and Lebanon were declared French mandates by the League of Nations just after the First World War at the climax of a global prohibition, especially in the United States. Contrary to North Africa, Levant was already a great land of wine and arak production, especially through religious congregations. In that context, especially during the 1930s crisis, the French authorities were asked to protect and sustain the Lebanese vineyards, and more generally the alcohol levant economy. However, at the same time the administrators were pressured by Muslim lobbies and the League of Nations to ‘improve the social situation’ in the territories they had to manage, which could mean a stronger control of alcohol consumptions. In that context, alcohol regulation was a part of the paternal Republicanism that, according to Elizabeth Thompson, characterized the social policy of France in the Levant. How could the authorities manage these two different stakes? To try to answer, I have analysed the Lebanon newspapers from the nineteen-twenties in Saint-Joseph University and special issues on alcohol control, from French security services of the mandate, at the French Diplomatic Archives of Nantes (CADN).
Stella vs. Sadat or how beer helps explain post-1970 Egypt
By: Omar D. Foda
Abstract: From 1963 until 1975, Heineken, the Dutch brewing giant, was in dispute with the Egyptian government. The battle over compensation for the nationalization of the company’s assets in Egypt would become an international issue and a referendum on Egypt’s economic future. Although the two sides would eventually come to an agreement, the intense back and forth, preserved in Heineken’s company archives, sheds light on Egypt and its economy in a transitional period. This article, using unstudied archival material from Heineken, the Egyptian government, and local breweries, argues that the battle lays bare the roots of Egypt’s economic problems since the 1970s.
Near Eastern Archaeology (Volume 85, Issue 1)
Çemka Höyük, Late Epipaleolithic and PPNA Phase Housing Architecture: Chronological and Typological Change
By: Yunus Çiftçi
Abstract: In recent studies carried out at the Çemka Höyük settlement on the western flank of the Tigris River in Upper Mesopotamia (Mardin province, Turkey), new information has been obtained on the Late Epipaleolithic and Early Neolithic periods, defined as the Proto-Neolithic. Despite the short-term nature of the excavations, the settlement provides new data about these eras in the region; in particular, the settlement is significant in terms of the Late Epipaleolithic–Neolithic transition as well as of architectural finds belonging to both periods. The rise of permanent settlements and domestic architecture is a focus of examination.
Nude Awakenings: Early Dynastic Nude Female Iconography
By: Stephanie Lynn Budin
Abstract: This article considers the earliest examples of so-called Nude Female iconography that emerged in Mesopotamia in the Early Dynastic period, with a particular focus on the aspects of nudity and gesture. Rather than concluding that these images represent goddesses or concepts such as fertility, the data reveal that in the Early Dynastic period female nudity was no different than male nudity.
From Excavation to Vitrine: The Afterlife of Late Hellenistic Bovine Terracottas from Niğde Kınık Höyük
By: Roberta Casagrande-Kim, Deniz Üçer Erduran, Emily Frank, Izel Güngör
Abstract: In this article the authors present the preliminary results of the study, conservation, and display of a corpus of Hellenistic terracottas from Niğde Kınık Höyük consisting of bovine figures ranging from small protomes to medium-sized bull statues, and to close-to-life-size hoofs and chests. Images of Greek divinities attached to the bulls’ necks suggest that the corpus was pertinent to a cultic tradition related to the Olympic pantheon. The ongoing work combines data collected through excavation, scientific analysis, conservation, and museum practices to understand this unique body of material and effectively present it to academic and museum audiences.
Progress, Design, and Hyperreal Spectacle: The Ancient Near East in Nineteenth-Century Expos, Fairs, and Geographical Amusements
By: Kevin McGeough
Abstract: As Near Eastern archaeology developed into an academic discipline throughout the nineteenth century, it led to serious considerations on the relationships between those ancient civilizations and contemporary cultures. Issues of progress and decline were particularly paramount as citizens of the European and North American powers considered what the collapse of ancient civilizations implied about the present. Related to these concerns were interests in material and technological progress, and thus the materiality of the ancient Near East became a subject of debate in regard to contemporary design. Here are explored some of the ways that ancient Egypt and the Near East were presented in these hyperreal spectacles, why the past was so fundamental to discussions of the present and future in the nineteenth century, and why comparative geographical approaches to the topic have been so compelling for nonacademic audiences.
Oriens (Volume 50, Issue 1-2)
Avicenna on Equivocity and Modulation: A Reconsideration of the asmāʾ mushakkika (and tashkīk al-wujūd)
By: Damien Janos
Abstract: This study investigates Avicenna’s conception of philosophical terminology through an analysis of the relation between equivocity (ishtirāk) and modulation (tashkīk) and by drawing evidence from a broad array of logical, physical, and metaphysical texts. In so doing, it also re-examines the notion of the modulation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd). Although the intrinsic definitional ambiguity of tashkīk makes it possible to approach it alternatively through the lens of univocity and equivocity, there are strong textual and philosophical reasons to believe that Avicenna preferred to regard tashkīk as a kind of moderate equivocity, as opposed to both univocity and a kind of pure or absolute equivocity. As a corollary, it is preferable to construe tashkīk al-wujūd as a “modulated equivocity of being” rather than as a “modulated univocity of being.” On the one hand, this underscores the continuity with Aristotle’s theory of pros hen predication and its late-antique Greek and early Arabic reception, which Avicenna, as heir to a long commentatorial tradition, reinterprets in his own way. On the other hand, the reading of the asmāʾ mushakkika and tashkīk al-wujūd proposed here may explain some of the origins of the ontological debates on the construal of existence that developed from the post-classical reception of Avicenna’s works.
A Study in Early Māturīdite Theology: Abū l-Yusr al-Bazdawī (d. 493/1100) and His Discourse on God’s Speech
By: Sheridan Polinsky
Abstract: Abū l-Yusr al-Bazdawī (d. 493/1100) was a notable early Māturīdite theologian who made an important contribution to the formation of his school by embracing kalām and promoting the image of al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944) as a Sunnite leader when the science was not yet popular in his region of Transoxania. This produced some tension in his thought as he negotiated rationalist and traditionalist doctrines and their adherents. Indications of this are found in his discussion of God’s speech in which he argues for the Sunnite doctrine of eternal divine speech while effectively affirming the createdness of scriptures; at the same time, he defends those who assert the uncreatedness of the Quran and maintains that God’s speech is truly written, memorized, recited, and heard.
Physics and Metaphysics in an Early Ottoman Madrasa: Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī on the Nature of Time
By: Richard Todd
Abstract: Not available
Cosmic Order in the Microcosm: Ethical Guidance in Post-Classical Astronomy Texts
By: Robert G. Morrison
Abstract: This article is the first to focus on statements about ethical guidance in post-classical astronomy texts. A number of astronomers in post-classical Islamic societies remarked that the study of astronomy, specifically the mathematical analysis of the uniform motions of the celestial orbs, had ethical benefits. These astronomers’ statements are significant because, through them, scholars can learn more about the role of reason in Islamic thought and about sources of ethical guidance other than Sharīʿa and philosophical ethics. The details of the ethical guidance imparted by the study of astronomy tell us more about the relationship between astronomy and the disciplines of fiqh and kalām, respectively. The existence of ethical guidance in astronomy texts is additional evidence that post-classical astronomy texts were part of an Islamic intellectual tradition.
The Possibility of the Nobler (imkān al-ashraf) in Ṣadrā’s Philosophy and Its Historical Origins
By: Agnieszka Erdt
Abstract: The principle known as the possibility of the nobler (qāʿidat imkān al-ashraf) is arguably one of the most often employed principles in later Islamic philosophy. In its standard formulation it states that if something baser exists, a nobler thing must have existed prior to it. A similar argument from the degrees of perfections has had a long career in the history of Western philosophy as well, with its beginnings reaching Stoicism. In Christian theology and philosophy it serves most importantly as a proof for the existence of God in the so-called henological argument of Aquinas. In Islamic philosophy it directly derives from the ex uno non fit nisi unum principle. Since the formulation of its standard version by al-Suhrawardī, the validity of the principle has been conditioned on that it is only applicable to the intelligible beings, hence its main objective is to offer a proof for the existence of the intellects. The article analyzes the application of the principle in Ṣadrā’s philosophy and enquires about its historical roots.