Faruk Tabak, who died of complications following a stroke on 15 February 2008 at age fifty-four, passed his youth in central Anatolia. A childhood in industrial Eskişehir—where, he once told me, the Porsuk River's color varied with the day's textile-dye batch—and college winters in smog-enveloped Ankara made him (“a man of the north”) dream of the pristine landscapes and bright tableaus of Turkey's Mediterranean shores. Trained as an architect and later as a planner at the Middle East Technical University, Tabak charted the currents of modern hegemony, capitalism, ecology, and the spatial dispersion of populations through the deep waters of the Mediterranean's past.

The history of the women's movement in Iraq before 1958 has received little attention in contemporary scholarly literature published in English. Moreover, when surveying the brief accounts in secondary sources, one is struck by their inconsistency. Upon closer examination, two historiographical approaches emerge. One primarily follows the development of women's activities sanctioned by the regime, focusing on organizations and activists associated with the Iraqi Women's Union, established in 1945. The second approach traces developments and organizations linked with the underground League for the Defense of Women's Rights, founded in 1952. This essay argues that members of the rival union and league constructed two competing narratives in presenting the history of the women's movement in pre-1958 Iraq. The article unpacks these two different narratives as they were originally articulated by activists in order to piece together a more elaborate portrayal of the evolution of the early Iraqi women's movement. The essay also explores how scholars have reproduced these narratives, arguing that both activists and researchers were active participants in a “war of narratives” that left women's history the unfortunate casualty

This article discusses the modalities through which religious and secular nongovernmental medical organizations frame their work in relation to their constituencies. It argues that their discourses exemplify a differentiated approach to social work that can be explained in the context of massive aid disbursed to the occupied Palestinian territories. To understand how the political economy of aid impacts the framing of socioreligious movements, this article focuses on a case study of health organizations operating in the Hebron district, where a mixed matrix of charitable organizations, Islamic institutions, and zakat committees work along secular nongovernmental organizations. In the past decade, there seems to have been a revival of charitable organizations, which may shed light on current political victories of the Islamic sector. If Islamic socioreligious movements have been successful in promoting discourses of common good that attract more popular support than secular organizations, it is precisely because such discourses are in open (and sometimes conscious) tension with liberal conceptions such as good governance, strong civil society, and democracy promotion that are relayed generally by secular and professionalized nongovernmental organizations

Through a microanalysis of a diary written by Ihsan Tourjman during World War I, this article explores how the Arab–Ottoman elite in Jerusalem experienced and viewed the war and perceived their own position within the Ottoman Empire. It focuses on the ways multilayered levels of identity were negotiated and debated following internal and external changes taking place at the time. The diary serves as a unique and valuable testimony that sheds light on life in Jerusalem at a critical period in the city's (and region's) history. Through close reading of this diary and other sources, this essay investigates how economic and social crises affected city residents and scrutinizes how political changes, as well as Ottoman policies and treatment of the local population, affected how individuals placed themselves within the context of the empire.

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This article tells the story of ten Catholic women from Aleppo who, in the early part of the 18th century, sought to establish their own convent in the district of Kisrawan, Lebanon. Their project became the center of a conflict that entangled the devotees, their Jesuit confessors and supporters, the Melkite Church, and the Vatican. Thus, their story is a prism through which to refract the relationships among gender, class, and religion in the Levant. In particular it sheds light on the role of gender in the construction of a “modern” Catholicism. I contend that modernization predates the 19th century in the Middle East and question the opposition of secularism and history versus religion and faith as an artifact of modernity

Identifying ethnonational mixed towns as an analytical and comparative category, we show how in Palestine and Israel such towns underwent six major historical transformations and how their history under Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule displays an emergent and bifurcated sociospatial configuration. On one level, they personify the political conflict over space and identity as it evolved from millet-based confessional communities to modernist nation-based collectives shaped by milestones of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. On another level, they form political and cultural arenas that defy the binary logic of ethnonationalism and urban colonialism. Avoiding the restrictive Manichaean conceptualizations of the colonial, the divided, and the dual city, we show how such towns embody segregation and exclusion while actively resisting them. Scrutinizing demographic diversification, cultural expansion, intercommunal relations, and the secularizing, modernizing effect urbanity has had in the region, our analysis, which emphasizes relationality, reconfigures the sociospatial history of Jewish–Arab mixed towns.