This issue centers on two predominant themes: space, boundaries, and belonging from the end of empire to the early nation-state era; and the relationship between political discourse, political praxis, and values. The first section, “Belonging, Boundaries, and Law,” opens with Asher Kaufman's article, “Belonging and Continuity: Israeli Druze and Lebanon, 1982–2000,” on the spatial perceptions and practices of communities in the Middle East under the nation-state. Kaufman observes that only over the past few decades have scholars of the post–World War I order in the region begun to question “the ‘nation-state’ as the natural geographical and political unit of analysis.” Using Druze citizens of Israel before, during, and after Israel's occupation of South Lebanon as his case, he readjusts the lens toward substate, suprastate, and trans-state dynamics. Until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Druze communal and religious networks had spanned the whole of bilād al-shām, but these were radically interrupted by Israel's emergence as a bounded polity whose borders with its neighbors were reputedly sealed. This rupture precipitated the emergence of an Israeli Druze community that, isolated from broader Druze communal life and institutional frames, was expected to be loyal to the new state. Eschewing a national frame, Kaufman reveals how Druze, despite these obstacles, actually maintained “crossborder ties through marriage, licit and illicit trade, and religious practices.” Paradoxically, it was Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its eighteen-year occupation of the South that allowed for a resumption of pre-1948 spatial practices, though these were complicated by Israeli Druze's multiple and sometimes conflicting allegiances. Such practices, restricted again after the Israeli withdrawal of 2000, continued in limited fashion until the start of the Syrian Civil War, which has propelled Israeli Druze to organize politically in support of Druze in Syria. Observing that the Druze continue to live in state and suprastate spatial scales, Kaufman proposes “using the concept ‘hybrid spatial scale’ as a tool for studying communities such as the Druze that operate on multiple territorial scales.”

This issue examines the power of categories, both historically and in contemporary scholarly and public discourse. Whether focused on medicine in colonial Algeria, the varied meanings of the word “mamluk” in Ottoman Tunisia, discursive constructions of the “Jewish refugee,” gender as an analytical category in academic writing, or another topic, our article and roundtable authors push us to consider how categories have shaped modes of life and politics, and how they shape our scholarship.

This issue is focused on reframing analytical categories in ways different from how scholars have used them, and mechanisms of power in juxtaposition to how states intended them. We open with two articles on “Reading in Translation.” Anne-Marie E. McManus's “Scale in the Balance: Reading with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (‘The Arabic Booker’)” focuses on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, or IPAF. Founded in 2007 with funding from Dubai and based on the more well-known Man Booker Prize, the IPAF is awarded to one Arabic novel each year. The prize supports that novel's translation into English and catapults it from the national domain into a global marketplace of readers whose reading practices, McManus suggests, have already been shaped by the postcolonial Anglophone novel. Arguing that methods inherited from postcolonial studies are inadequate for addressing these modes of reading and interpretation (i.e., the national and the global), McManus develops a comparative “scale-based method” combining insights from postcolonial and world literary theory and from area studies, which she brings to bear on two IPAF-winning Egyptian novels: Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis) and Saud Alsanousi’s Saq al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk). In her analysis of these literary works, McManus shows us why “a stark either/or between national and world literary frames . . . cannot apprehend the ways in which a movement between them is institutionalized in bodies such as the IPAF, nor can it grapple with the implications for reading.” “Reading with the IPAF,” she suggests, requires instead “a resituation of national frames, institutionally and hermeneutically, within the nodal relation the IPAF represents.”

This issue is focused on the politics of belonging/exclusion at the level of rhetoric and everyday practice. We open with two articles—Jonathan Shannon's “There and Back Again: Rhetorics of al-Andalus in Modern Syrian” and Ellen McLarney's “Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Adab”—both exploring linkages between culture and political ideas. In his article, Shannon analyzes the interweaving of a mythologized al-Andalus (the Arab-Muslim Iberian Peninsula) into Syrian popular culture, particularly music, in order to show how it was critical to the formation of Syrian memory cultures and, by extension, nation building. Yet within past- and future-oriented nationalist discourse, this rhetoric of nostalgia—whose genesis dates to the Pan-Arab halcyon days of the 1960s—posits “not only a lost paradise of past glory, but also a (utopian) vision of a future state of glory in the Arab world itself, a sort of neo-Andalusia.” Financed by petrodollars and fostered by Arab migration to and investment in Spain, literary, cinematic, and musical productions evoking al-Andalus and linking it intimately to Syria continued in the subsequent era of what one of Shannon's interlocutors describes as “political, economic, and cultural decline,” in part as a source of solace. With today's Syria tragically fractured, Shannon concludes by suggesting that “the rhetoric of al-Andalus, so closely tied not only to Arabism but also to a broad understanding of community, may yet again offer a way to reimagine the Syria of tomorrow as a ‘first rate place.’”

This article brings area studies approaches to Arabic novels into dialogue with world literature through a critical engagement with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize launches Arabic novels out of national fields and into a world marketplace whose reading practices have been shaped by the Anglophone postcolonial novel, canonized by the IPAF's mentor: the Booker Prize Foundation. Against this institutional backdrop, the article develops a scale-based method to revisit the intersection of postcolonial tropes and national epistemologies in two winning IPAF novels: Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis, 2007) and Saud Alsanousi's Saq al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk, 2013). By interrogating the literary and political work performed by comparative scale in these novels, the article argues that dominant applications of theoretical methods inherited from postcolonial studies fail to supply trenchant forms of critique for Arabic novels entering world literature. Bridging the methods and perspectives of area studies with those of comparative literature, this article develops new reading practices that are inflected through contemporary institutional settings for literature's circulation, translation, and canonization.

This article expands our understanding of state–society interactions in rural Algeria under French colonial rule, focusing specifically on villages in the eastern department of Constantine. I analyze previously unstudied administrative records, newspapers, petitions, and complaints to show how sanitary regulations and medical expertise came to shape relationships among villagers, local elites, and the colonial state from the early 20th century. Villagers responded to state-led medicalization by seeking the protection of medical doctors, not only from disease but also from the state itself. In particular, they sought to avoid heavy-handed treatment by qaʾids and local elites who applied disease control measures without appropriate medical knowledge. Furthermore, close examination of petitions sent during World War I suggests that hardships experienced by rural communities during the war accentuated nascent feelings of entitlement across demographic, ethnic, and religious communal boundaries toward state medical treatment.

This article analyzes spatial perceptions and practices of Druze citizens of Israel before, during, and after the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in 1982−2000. It argues that the opening of the Israel–Lebanon border in 1982 and its closing in 2000 had three effects: it generated internal social, political, and cultural changes within the community in Israel; it changed the relationship of the Druze with the State of Israel; and it reestablished strong ties with their coreligionists in Lebanon and Syria. Drawing insight from the field of border studies, the article shows how Druze citizens of Israel live concomitantly in state and suprastate spatial scales, forming a third, integrated or hybrid, spatial scale. The article proposes using the concept “hybrid spatial scale” as a tool for studying communities such as the Druze that operate on multiple territorial scales.

This article explores the rhetorical function of al-Andalus (medieval Spain) in modern Syrian popular culture, with a focus on music. The rhetoric of al-Andalus in Syria is intimately related to the project of nation building. The nostalgic performance of links between modern Syria and medieval al-Andalus assumed great rhetorical force in the 1960s as a result of ideologies of pan-Arabism, the loss of Palestine, the rise of Islamist threats at home, and the emergence of petrodollar regimes in the Arabian Gulf. As a result, the rhetoric of al-Andalus became “good to think” for wide audiences of Syrians. Musical genres linked to al-Andalus play an important role as potent vehicles for constructing Syrian memory cultures. Drawing on heavily mythologized and nostalgic visions of an Andalusian golden age, musical performance in Syria sonically reinforces forms of nostalgic remembrance and enacts claims on Syrian pasts, presents, and futures.

In 1919, a new amir in Afghanistan named Aman Allah Khan launched an ambitious campaign to reorder his government into a constitutional monarchy. By 1923, Afghanistan had ratified its first constitution, supplemented by scores of legal and administrative codes. Whereas the latter have long been attributed to European borrowings or Kemalist imitation, this article uncovers two neglected features of Aman Allah's reformist project to argue that the making of Afghanistan's 1923 Constitution presents a distinctive path of state building in the region: Islamic legal modernism. First, by upholding the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence as the basis of Afghan substantive law, Amir Aman Allah sought a cohesive national judiciary through the codification of fiqh, not European civil law. Second, by synthesizing the expertise of a diverse cast of Muslim scholars and professionals—from Afghan clerics to Ottoman and Indian technocrats recruited to Kabul—he attempted to avert a rift between “Islamic” and “secular” lawmaking.

This essay examines how administrative documents categorized the mamluks who served Ottoman governors of Tunis from the early 18th to the mid-19th century. The categorization of these state slaves-cum-servants illuminates three issues, namely, the relationships between Islamic states and societies, interactions between the Ottoman Empire and its provinces, and forms of military slavery around the globe. Seeing registers, letters, and historical chronicles as spaces of interaction allows us to break free from an a priori definition of mamluks. By exploring how slaves and servants contributed to defining themselves in administrative documents, I not only argue for a new understanding of the mamluk category, but also show that mamluks did not separate state and society. On the contrary, in the Tunisian case, mamluks connected the state to various imperial and provincial social forces.

This article analyzes in depth four main writings by the pioneering nahḍa intellectual Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, who drew on classical kinds of adab to articulate new kinds of political subjectivities. He especially draws on the image of the body politic as a body with the king at its heart. But he reconfigures this image, instead placing the public, or the people, at the heart of politics, a “vanquishing sultan” that governs through public opinion. For al-Tahtawi, adab is a kind of virtuous comportment that governs self and soul and structures political relationships. In this, he does not diverge from classical conceptions of adab as righteous behavior organizing proper social and political relationships. But in his thought, disciplinary training in adab is crucial to the citizen-subject's capacity for self-rule, as he submits to the authority of his individual conscience, ensuring not only freedom, but also justice. These ideas have had lasting impact on Islamic thought, as they have been recycled for the political struggles of new generations.

In 1970, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center in Beirut published an Arabic translation of The Zionist Idea, an anthology of classic Zionist texts compiled originally by Arthur Hertzberg in 1959. This article compares how the two versions present the biographies and motivations of key Zionist ideologues. It suggests that, in contrast to Hertzberg, the PLO researchers tended to present Zionism, especially at its roots, as a Jewish religious movement. Attempting to discern what might lie behind this conception of Zionism, the article considers the significance of the religious backgrounds of the leadership of the PLO Research Center and of those involved in the translation project. It argues that the researchers’ concern about the status of Christians as a religious minority among Palestinians and other Arabs and certain deeply rooted Christian ideas about the nature of Judaism may help account for the particular view of Zionism that the Research Center developed in its—and in the PLO's—foundational years.

Under the Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli regimes, the early 20th-century women's rights advocate Tahar Haddad (1899–1935) was a symbol of “state feminism.” Nationalist intellectuals traced the 1956 Personal Status Code to Haddad's work, and Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli claimed to “uphold” his ideals and “avenge” the persecution he suffered at the hands of the ʿulamaʾ at the Zaytuna mosque-university. Breaking with “old regime” narratives, this article studies Haddad as a reformist within Tunisia's religious establishment. Haddad's example challenges the idea that Islamic reformists “opened the door to” secularists in the Arab world. After independence, Haddad's ideas were not a starting point for Tunisia's presidents, but a reference point available to every actor in the political landscape.

Similar to ruling elites in Western Europe, the Ottomans were preoccupied with foreign “public opinion” regarding their state. Historians have devoted attention to Ottoman state efforts at image building abroad and, to a lesser degree, related attempts to influence the European mass press. Yet, an in-depth study of this subject is lacking. This article turns to one of the prime, though largely neglected, actors in Ottoman foreign policy making: the sultan's diplomats. Through a case study of Ottoman envoys to Belgium, it demonstrates how foreign “press management” evolved and was adapted to shifting domestic and international political circumstances. Increasingly systematic attempts to influence Belgian newspapers can be discerned from the reign of Abdülhamid II onward. Brokers between Istanbul and “liberal” Belgium's thriving newspaper business, Ottoman diplomats proved essential to this development. Ultimately, however, Ottoman efforts to counter Belgian (and European) news coverage of the empire had little impact and occasionally even worked counterproductively, generating the very Orientalist images they aimed to combat in the first place.

This article examines the impact of the Ottoman Empire's battle against legal imperialism on the status of Central Asians in its domains, specifically after the promulgation of a nationality law in 1869 that classified them as foreigners. It traces how the threat of Muslim colonial subjects attaining European consular protections led to the emergence of a “Central Asian protection question”: whether Afghans, Bukharans, and Chinese Muslims had legitimate claims to European legal nationality and, by extension, capitulatory privileges. Through a number of case studies, the article shows how the Ottoman Foreign Ministry fused international legal norms and pan-Islamic claims to arrive at the position that Central Asians from informally colonized lands were not “real” subjects of European empires, and that they were under the exclusive protection of the caliphate. This strategy, I argue, undermined the creation of an Ottoman citizenship boundary and opened up a complex field of inter- and intraimperial contestation about who was a foreigner. In contrast to positive associations with legal pluralism in this period, Central Asian migrants and pilgrims who were protected by the caliph but not recognized as Ottomans or European subjects found that they could not benefit from practices such as forum shopping and affiliation switching. And while the notion of foreignness remained subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations across the empire, I argue that nationality as a legal category was incontrovertibly becoming a defining feature of these foreign Muslims' rights and status in the sultan's domains.

Over the course of the 18th–early 20th centuries, a curious narrative emerged in Central Asia wherein the Turko-Persian monarch Nadir Shah Afshar was converted from Shiʿism to Sunnism by a group of Islamic scholars outside of Bukhara. While this legend was rooted in Nadir Shah's theological ambitions to bring Shiʿism back into the Sunni fold as a fifth school of canonical law, the memory of that event in the subsequent two centuries was intimately tied to the establishment of several scholarly dynasties, which managed to perpetuate themselves all the way to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This article engages the memory of this mythological conversion to explore sharpening conceptions of sectarian divisions and the role of genealogy in projecting spiritual authority. Most broadly, it argues that—far from a passing depredation—the Afsharid Empire profoundly shaped the geopolitical and social landscape of Persianate Asia.

Since its founding in 2002, the group Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) has appealed to governments, international organizations, and Jewish communities worldwide to recognize post-1948 Jewish emigrants from Arab countries as refugees. Yet prominent scholars, Israeli government officials, and Jewish political activists in Israel and the United States have traditionally opposed this designation. Why, then, have JJAC's efforts met with success? This article draws on the experiences of JJAC and its predecessor, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, as well as the claims of their critics, to argue that JJAC's accomplishments are due to the organization's ability to extricate the term “refugee” from a Zionist discursive context and to apply it within the framework of international law and human rights.

Concerns about lying and sincerity in politics are common in most societies, as are concerns about conspiracy theories. But in the occupied Palestinian territory, these concerns give rise to particular kinds of effects because of the conditions of Israeli occupation. Political theorists often interpret opacity claims and conspiracy theories as responses to social disorder. In occupied Palestine, disorder and instability are standard. Opacity claims and conspiracy theories therefore require a different kind of analysis. Through an examination of the semiotic ideology of sincerity, especially as it has emerged in the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, this article argues that opacity claims act as a form of nationalist pedagogy, at once reinforcing the basic principles of sincerity of action and word, and encouraging a wariness of political spin.

Exploring generational changes and continuities among Palestinian families in Denmark, this article investigates why the children of the fidāᵓīn (fighters) and many of the fidāᵓīn themselves have turned their backs on secular politics and embraced Islam. The Palestinians who arrived in Denmark from Lebanon in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War were members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and were known as the generation of the revolution (jīl al-thawra). Extending Karl Mannheim's approach to generations, I argue that in order to explain the transition among Palestinians in Denmark from revolutionaries to Muslims we can rely on neither genealogy nor historical context alone, but need to pay equal attention to the structural continuities that crosscut generations. I suggest that rather than conceive of revolutionaries and Muslims as oppositions, we should think of them as substitutions, as liminal becomings that are actualized across historical generations.

This article traces the emergence of the early afternoon ẓuhr prayer as a key project of subject formation during the second half of the Anwar al-Sadat period (1976–81). Drawing on three Islamic magazines of differing ideological orientation (Muslim Brotherhood-Islamist, Salafi-Islamist, and state-sponsored), all containing letters to the editor and fatwa requests, it charts contestation among religious elites and the reception of their programmatic visions. Specifically, the article explores the performance of this daily prayer as a hybrid practice that disrupted the temporal and spatial claims of a state-sponsored bureaucratic order to produce national subjects within public schools and bureaucratic institutions, even as it reproduced the state's emphasis on temporal precision and social order. Based on these texts, this article challenges previous scholarly narratives that place Islamist projects of subject formation on the fringes of secularism and previous studies of Islamist mobilization that posit a separate social universe of Islamist activism.