This special issue on World War I appears on the centennial of the war. The issue went to press as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was challenging the borders set nearly a hundred years ago in the Middle East by the imperial powers. Guest editor Mustafa Aksakal introduces the six research articles, part of a wave of scholarship examining the “transformative processes spawned by the war” in response to new historical questions and newly available archival sources. That half of the articles touch on sieges (in Medina) and famine (Syria/Lebanon, and in particular Beirut) produces an eerie echo at a time when civilians once again face hunger and the ravages of an armed conflict, with large numbers of refugees on the move. As we look back, so do the articles, moving backward chronologically from the “minority protection regime” established by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 to “atrocity propaganda” of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The issues raised by these two articles resonate loudly, as does the matter of American influence in the region, which is discussed in an article on the wartime politics of Syrians in Cairo. So, too, does the photograph on the cover of this special issue: Ruins of Gaza at the Time of the Great Attack, 1917.

Interest in the study of space was already increasing in Middle East studies, as in other areas of scholarship, before the 2011 Arab uprisings and the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey—combined with the Occupy movement in the United States and similar phenomena elsewhere—turned worldwide attention to the politics of public spaces in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. This issue of IJMES reflects both the ongoing “spatial turn” in the scholarship and the more immediate and contingent attempts, sparked by recent events, to (re-)theorize public space in particular.

The image featured on this issue's cover depicts a 19th-century Greek Orthodox church in the Anatolian town of Derinkuyu. Decades after the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey that forcibly deported the town's Christian residents, the church would be converted into a mosque. This process is examined in the article by Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, Robert Hayden, and Aykan Erdemir, discussed below, but the photograph also resonates with the themes of diaspora and minorities that run through most of the articles and essays in this issue.

This special issue on the Politics of Benevolence is dedicated to the memory of Mine Ener (1965–2002). She died in tragic circumstances, having succumbed to postpartum depression and taken her own life. Her book Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003) appeared a few months after her death.

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

Almost two decades ago, Michael Bonner, Mine Ener, and I organized the first in a series of MESA panels on the general theme of poverty and charity in Middle Eastern contexts. We came to the topic using different chronologies, sources, and approaches but identified a common field of interest in shared questions about how attitudes toward benevolence and poverty affected state and society formation: in early Islamic thought, in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th and 16th centuries, and in khedival Egypt. At that time, we could confidently state that there was very little work in the broad field of Middle East and Islamic studies that focused explicitly on the study of charity and poverty.

Kuwait today is 99 percent urbanized. Though hosting a substantial desert population in the past, Kuwait no longer contains any Bedouin who practice a nomadic or pastoral lifestyle. And yet the term badū remains in popular use in Kuwait to designate a group considered sociologically and culturally distinct from the ḥaḍar, or settled urbanites, which in Kuwait's context refers solely to descendants of the pre-oil townspeople. This article explores why these social designations still exist in Kuwait and analyzes the origins of the conflictual relationship between the two groups. I argue that the persistence of the ḥaḍar/badū dichotomy is an outcome of state-building strategies adopted in the early oil years, mainly linked to citizenship and housing policies, that contributed to fixing ḥaḍar and badū as not only socially distinct but also geographically bounded groups. These state policies implemented between the 1950s and 1980s fostered the political integration but social exclusion of the badū. The article examines the lived realities of these incoherent policies as one way of explaining how the badū shifted from being the rulers’ main loyalty base in the early oil decades to becoming their primary opposition today.

This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrowing a template for studying the Middle East, Hitti and colleagues imbued it with a widespread sentiment that Arab and Muslim legacies of the Iberian peninsula had shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. They relocated a model of area studies but refitted its content. In revealing how the institution of area studies moved across and merged with varied sociocultural settings, these diasporic histories provincialize the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.

In this article I argue that the Egyptian state emerged as a welfare provider in the mid-20th century, first by depending on the services of charitable societies to feed, educate, and provide medical assistance to the poor, and later by imitating and harnessing the activities of charitable societies. Drawing on correspondence between the state and service societies from the 1880s to 1945, when King Faruq (r. 1936–52) granted the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) the authority to define and to circumscribe the activities of social welfare organizations, the article illustrates the interactions of and the similarities between private and state-sponsored charity. The article further suggests that the establishment of MOSA helped to consolidate the hegemony of the Egyptian state over society and, at the same time, exemplified a dialectical process of state formation engaged in by Egyptian heads of state, service organizations, and the Egyptians whose needs they served.

In Jordan, tribal dispute settlements have played a pivotal role in the management of various types of grievances between individuals since long before the establishment of the modern state. To varying degrees, Jordanians—from the East and West Banks, Muslim and Christian, urban and rural—cherish the kinship networks associated with these procedures, and the ʿaṭwa (truce) and ṣulḥ (reconciliation) processes remain time-honored mechanisms for preventing revenge and making amends for wrongs committed. However, under the state's influence, the purpose of observing tribal settlements is evolving within an increasingly heterogeneous society. Drawing on documentary analysis combined with ethnographic material from across the kingdom, this article investigates the current status of tribal dispute resolution traditions among different sectors of the population. I argue that observance of such traditions can signify conformity with the hegemonic values that the state promotes as well as resistance to aspects of state control.

This article focuses on the years after World War I, especially the first decade following the 1923 establishment of the Republic of Turkey, in order to analyze the position of minorities in the developing “we” of the new nation as projected by its political elite. Situating the discussion in the context of the League of Nations interwar minority protection regime, I demonstrate that the Treaty of Lausanne, which the Ankara government and the Allies signed in July 1923, played an important role in the conflicting treatment that minorities have since received in Turkey. The treaty's minority protection clauses entrenched divisions that had already been formed in the Ottoman Empire during the violence of the preceding decade, including the Armenian genocide. Moreover, reminding Turkish leaders of how 19th-century European imperial powers had used the cause of Ottoman Christians’ suffering as an excuse to infringe on Ottoman sovereignty, these clauses alarmed the Turkish political elite, especially as the “Great Powers” themselves were not bound by such minority protection guarantees. The goal of preventing a repetition of this unbalanced international power dynamic, which, according to the new Turkey's leaders, had led to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, engendered paradoxical policies toward non-Muslim Turkish citizens; they have been largely excluded from a Turkness (Türklük) to which they were sometimes included, even forcibly included.

Within the last few years, “Kurdish cinema” has emerged as a unique discursive subject in Turkey. Subsequent to and in line with efforts to unify Kurdish cultural production in diaspora, Kurdish intellectuals have endeavored to define and frame the substance of Kurdish cinema as an orienting framework for the production and reception of films by and about Kurds. In this article, my argument is threefold. First, Kurdish cinema has emerged as a national cinema in transnational space. Second, like all media texts, Kurdish films are nationalized in discourse. Third, the communicative strategies used to nationalize Kurdish cinema must be viewed both in the context of the historical forces of Turkish nationalism and against a backdrop of contemporary politics in Turkey, specifically the Turkish government's discourses and policies related to the Kurds. The empirical data for this article derive from ethnographic research in Turkey and Europe conducted between 2009 and 2012.

In this paper we focus on the Republican Mosque in Derinkuyu, Turkey, a Greek Orthodox church built in 1859 and transformed into a mosque in 1949 that still exhibits many obviously Christian structural features not found in most such converted churches. We utilize the concept of religioscape, defined as the distribution in spaces through time of the physical manifestations of specific religious traditions and of the populations that build them, to analyze the historical transformations of the building, and show that this incongruity marks a specific stage in the long-term competitive sharing of space by the two religiously defined communities concerned. This shared but contested space is larger than that of the building or even the town of Derinkuyu. We argue that syncretism without sharing correlates with a lack of need to show dominance symbolically, since the community that had lost the sacred building had been displaced as a group, and was no longer present to be impressed or intimidated.

Established in 1920, al-Nadi al-Homsi in São Paulo, Brazil was a young men's club devoted to Syrian patriotic activism and culture in the American mahjar (diaspora). Founded by a transnational network of intellectuals from Homs, the fraternity committed itself to what it saw as a crucial aspect of Syrian national independence under Amir Faysal: the development of a political middle class and a masculine patriotic culture. Al-Nadi al-Homsi directed this project at Syrian youth, opening orphanages, libraries, and schools in both Syria and in Brazil. In these spaces, men and boys congregated to celebrate a polite male culture centered on secular philanthropy, popular education, and corporeal discipline through sports. This article argues that during the 1920s and 1930s, al-Nadi al-Homsi's politics of benevolence was part of a larger social milieu that drew analogies between strong Syrian minds and bodies and a sovereign, independent Syrian homeland.

The governorships of Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (1859–68) and Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II (1868–78) in Qajar Kirman were highlighted by an extensive building campaign which initiated a period of significant social and economic change in the province. This article explores the activities of local elites in managing their family estates in the context of this project through a careful analysis of provincial geographical and historical writings, Persian-language travelogues, and commentary by European administrators and travelers. Kirmani elites began investing in land and commercial agriculture on an unprecedented scale, accelerating Kirman's absorption into global economic patterns as a producer of raw materials like cotton, wool, and opium. An integrated political economy developed regionally through the expanding networks of elite households and their estates, reinforced by families combining landownership with administrative functions in rural areas. This process demonstrates the extent to which Iranians were active participants in transforming their communities in the context of the advance of global capitalism, with longstanding patterns of elite household competition playing an important role in mediating social and political change locally.

This article explores the American role in the Syrian political scene in Cairo toward the end of World War I and in its immediate aftermath. It challenges the absence of the United States and of American actors as primary players in much of the historical writing on the Middle East in this period. It illuminates a neglected episode of regional American diplomacy, argues that the United States was not relegated to the periphery in local debates surrounding the dismemberment of Ottoman Syria, and emphasizes the broader uncertainties that characterized the competition for Mandate territories in the Middle East prior to 1920. In doing so, it takes a close look at the long-forgotten reports of William Yale, the U.S. State Department's “Special Agent” in Cairo in late 1917, and situates them within evolving trends in Syrian-Arab politics. Yale, who surfaced in Egypt after serving with Standard Oil in Palestine, was the key Arabic-speaking American “on the spot” and proved to be an astute if imperfect observer of the diversity of Syrian national sentiment. A survey of his reports allows for a new perspective on Cairo's Syrians and their pragmatic and ideological turn toward the United States as World War I unfolded. Alienated from Britain and France, they looked increasingly to the United States, and the appeal of a postwar American trusteeship over Syria gained currency among émigré intellectuals and aspiring powerbrokers.

This article analyzes the changing treaty law and practice governing the Ottoman state's attitude toward the subjects of its most important neighbor and most inveterate rival: the Russian Empire. The two empires were linked by both migration and unfreedom; alongside Russian slaves forcibly brought to the sultans’ domains, many others came as fugitives from serfdom and conscription. But beginning in the late 18th century, the Ottoman Empire reinforced Russian serfdom and conscription by agreeing to return fugitives, even as the same treaties undermined Ottoman forced labor by mandating the return of Russian slaves. Drawing extensively on Ottoman archival sources, this article argues that the resulting interimperial regulations on unfreedom and movement hardened the empires’ human and geographic boundaries, so that for many Russian subjects, foreign subjecthood under treaty law was not a privilege, but a liability.

This article analyzes different traditions of nocturnal conviviality in 18th-century Istanbul and demonstrates their importance for social, political, and cultural life. The main argument is that the palace used the night to demonstrate its power in spectacles of light and to cultivate personal relations within the elite, both of which were crucial for a patrimonial government based on face-to-face interaction. Yet, it was exactly the reliance on such interaction that marked the limits of the palace's hold of the night. With the neighborhood gaze blinded by darkness, communal policing lost much of its effectiveness, leaving nocturnal social life largely concealed from the eyes of the authorities. Nighttime therefore offered opportunities for illicit modes of socialization and, at times, for subversive political action.

This article analyzes interviews related to the 1916–19 Sharifian siege of Medina that were published in a collection on the city's history by Saudi Arabian historian Ahmad Murshid. These oral histories narrate how Fakhri Pasha (Turkish: Fahreddin), the Ottoman military commander stationed in Medina during the siege, expelled residents from their homes, strictly controlled the supply of food in the city, and managed military operations out of the Holy Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad. The article seeks to explore the perspective of ordinary civilians who experienced the siege, a perspective largely missing from the literature on the subject. The interviews are positioned here as a valuable historical source for understanding the impact of the siege on these individuals and on their families, communities, and identities. Their memories underscore the interviewees’ deep attachment to their city, as well as to their identity as madanīs and as legitimate narrators of Medina's history.

This article explores the role of Islam in contemporary Jordanian charities and social welfare organizations. In what ways do these organizations relate to Islamic traditions in their work? What role do religious convictions play in the construction of modern selfhoods among their employees and volunteers? Do these constructions relate to broader, globally relevant, social imaginaries? The article tries to answer these questions by applying a novel analytical framework to qualitative data from fieldwork conducted among Jordanian charities and social welfare organizations. We treat these organizations as “social sites” for the reinterpretation of Islamic traditions in the context of global modernity as well as for the construction of meaningful forms of modern selfhoods among their members. In doing so, we argue that these specifically Islamic identity constructions can fruitfully be understood with reference to different types of globally relevant social imaginaries.