This issue represents a formal transition for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, as it is the first to bear our names as coeditors on its masthead. Transitions, however, are rarely quite so abrupt. The articles included in this issue were all guided through the editorial review process by the previous editorial team, led by Joel Gordon and Associate Editor Sarwar Alam. We are both honored to step in for the final stage of these works, and deeply grateful to Joel for his extraordinary dedication to ensuring that IJMES has published the best possible scholarship in our field for six years.

In December 1936, producer Walter Futter announced that he had discovered a Sudanese princess named Kouka to play the romantic lead opposite Paul Robeson in Jericho (Thorton Freedland, 1937). “Princess Kouka” was not Sudanese, nor was she royalty, nor was she unknown. Kouka (née Nagiya Ibrahim Bilal; 1917–79) was an Egyptian actor who had been cast in supporting roles in Egyptian films. This article examines what media coverage of Kouka’s brief moment in the international limelight (1936–38) reveals about differing constructions of race across three race-conscious societies: the United Kingdom, where the film is made; the Jim Crow United States that Paul Robeson left behind; and colonial Egypt.

The Egyptian singer-composer Shaykh Imam (1918-1995) holds an almost mythical place in the social imaginary of the Arab left. An icon of dissent, he rose to fame in the late 1960s with a stream of songs commenting on current events and criticising the failings of successive political regimes. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt with fans of Imam (all of whom were involved with student / leftist politics to varying degrees during the 1960s and 1970s) and a close listening of his repertoire, explores why this generation of the Egyptian left embraced Shaykh Imam so wholeheartedly, and why they remain so attached to his songs. I argue that identifying with Shaykh Imam was not only central in bolstering leftists’ claims to be the authentic representatives of the Egyptian nation, amidst many competing claims, but importantly enabled his listeners to perform national belonging of a more intimate kind.

This study examines the transformation of the Weather Change Wedding, a seasonal ritual once performed in Isparta, a city in present-day Western Turkey. Rooted in the symbolic marriage between the son of the cold northern wind, Poyraz, and the daughter of the mild southern wind, Lodos, the ritual aimed to alter the severe weather conditions that adversely affected the town. Initially organized by male-dominated guilds, with the participation of local notables and religious institutions, the ritual gradually evolved into a performance increasingly shaped by women. However, this transformation was not merely a matter of women filling a void left by men, nor did it represent a form of substitute agency. Rather, it was the result of a historically specific process shaped by structural changes, such as the rise of women’s labor in the carpet-weaving sector and demographic shifts triggered by World War I and the War of Independence, which tipped the gender balance toward women. This transformation, however, did not emerge as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms; it took shape within a gender regime in which those very norms were being renegotiated.

This article examines the subject of Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean in the two and a half centuries after 1650. With reference to both Ottoman and European sources, it first grapples with the empirical problems involved in studying the subject. It then explores how a combination of trade dynamics in the Gulf and the economic preferences of both Ottoman state and private actors attenuated the expansion of Ottoman shipping. Taken together, these factors confirm that the comparative dearth of Ottoman vessels in the Indian Ocean trade was a product of geopolitical and ecological contingency rather than entrepreneurial neglect or state aversion. Even so, as shown by two case studies, Ottoman subjects of one type or another were found in ports from Surat to Batavia at various moments before 1800. The analysis then turns to later nineteenth-century attempts by Ottoman state actors to augment Ottoman shipping. These efforts were inhibited by the contrasting incentives of private Ottoman seafarers, the dominance of European and Indian ships in the empire’s trade with India, the dislocation of nominal Ottoman territories in the Gulf, and the political economy of the Ottoman Gulf itself. Despite the fact that state-sponsored shipping came to grief, the presence of Ottoman ships in the Indian Ocean invites reflections on the highly mutable character of Ottoman identity and sovereignty, as well as the empire’s relative position in the wider commercial world of the Indian Ocean, across these centuries.

A century ago, in summer 1925, the Great Syrian Revolt erupted in opposition to French mandate rule. In Saydnaya a village murder happened to coincide with the outbreak of the revolt. The young killer, in avenging his father’s earlier murder, became, first a fugitive, then an unlikely revolutionary hero, and eventually, during his long absence, a legendary figure, and repository for a number of mostly erroneous historical claims and memories. After ten years on the run, he surrendered and was defended by a famous nationalist lawyer. He was tried, jailed, and released. An American brother paid his legal bills and helped him emigrate to West Virginia. He never returned to Syria. This article is based on a French mandate archival court record, extensive interviews with eyewitnesses, American consular records, and finally, interviews and documents from surviving family in West Virginia. It offers a dizzying microhistory of rural Syria in upheaval, colonial myopia, sectarianism, revolution, international migration, and the immigrant experience in the United States. The article argues for the colonial origins of sectarian rule, but shows how a tool of colonial fragmentation changed and collided with revolution, colonial and postcolonial politics, migration, and memory in unpredictable ways.

This article provides a microhistorical case study centered on a Roma couple residing in Istanbul’s renowned Romani settlement, Sulukule. It sheds light on three significant historical processes related to modernity that influenced the interactions of the individuals involved: land commodification, the 1881 census reform, and the rise of both inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses within the Ottoman ruling elite. At the heart of the narrative are Sadık and Züleyha, who aimed to purchase waqf land subdivided and offered for sale by Mehmed Efendi in Yenibahçe. Their goal was to escape the spatial segregation they experienced. They leveraged the new census policy, which eliminated the classification of Muslim "Gypsy” from official records, allowing them to present themselves as Muslim refugees from Bulgaria. However, upon discovering the couple’s Roma identity from Sulukule, their new neighbors initiated a legal dispute, resulting in the Internal Affairs Section of the Council of State voting to annul the transaction. The differing opinions among council members highlighted the competing inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses. The article first reconstructs the case and examines the associated historical processes using extensive primary and secondary sources.

This article examines the recent transformation of marriage rituals in Turkey from the perspective of young brides. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul and Bursa in 2017–19, it discusses how young women construct their marital imaginaries through extravagant ceremonies and festivities such as proposals, photographs, henna nights, and weddings. Drawing from the theory of ritual economy, the article argues that their gendered desire for lavish spending does not position brides as victims of either traditional Turkish customs or the consumer market. Rather, the article emphasizes young women’s aspirations to romance and a sense of uniqueness, and their desire to feel as if they are “living a fairy tale.” These bridal imaginaries reflect the rise of neoliberal individualism, upward social mobility, and status-seeking in Bourdieu’s sense. The article’s findings contribute to the hitherto limited scholarship on changing marriage rituals and the wedding industry in Turkey.

What kind of weapon is sex? Scholarship on the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) has broadened the “war story” by foregrounding women’s perspectives as fighters and by adding complexity to militiamen’s narratives. Yet, while gendering the analysis, scholarship has not examined the role that sexual relations and sexual practices played in the war. Meanwhile, Lebanese Civil War–era cultural production, including films, novels and popular magazines, display sexual transactions and sexual violence as if they were common instances in the war. In this article, I engage an intertextual ethnographic reading of sex and sexual violence, combining the civil war’s cultural archive with oral histories that I conducted with former militiamen and militia women across Lebanon’s political spectrum, and with cis- and trans-women who had transactional sex with militia members, as well as urban participatory mapping and interviews with other participants in the war. Mapping the sex economy and sexual relations in the war reveals the central roles that sex played both as a traffic in and of itself, and as a tool of political governance of civilians, through a traffic in women. I argue that militias used sex and the threat of it for multiple purposes: as a form of mobility that enabled other goods to circulate more smoothly; as a tool of intra-sectarian extraction and coercion and as a weapon of patriarchal governance that kept civilians in their designated neighborhoods. While sex enabled cross-sectarian connections, the violent use of sex thus also reinforced sectarian social boundaries. My findings build on scholarship that has foregrounded the political economy of the war and on intersectional feminist analyses of political governance in Lebanon. The article is indebted to this scholarship as well as to ongoing civil society efforts to document sexual violence in the war.

This article focused on the erotic encounters between male characters in the Ottoman frontier epic of the Battalname that led to conversion to Islam. It argues that these moments of eroticism between two male warriors parallel other literary and cultural expressions wherein male-male eroticism was the norm. Romantic and erotic encounters in these frontier epics have focused on the much more limited cases of female-male interactions, obscuring the fact that these were more often the exception. While male-male eroticism has been largely studied for elite literary works, narratives considered to be expressions of folktale have been treated as if they belong to separate cultural worlds. I show that some of the language of eroticism and conversion had strong parallels between the two forms of cultural expression and thus highlight the normalized all-male space of eroticism both in the Ottoman frontier and in nascent Ottoman urban culture.

How did Arab poets experience the rise of the Islamic empire? How can Umayyad poetry help us understand this formative moment in human history? In this article, I explore the potential of Umayyad poetry for writing the history of the period, focusing on poetry of the soldiers in the Umayyad armies—men distant from political power yet serving as its instruments and deeply affected by the empire’s expansion and consolidation. Their verses complicate the traditional celebratory narratives of the Islamic conquests by giving voice to loss, grievance, and dislocation, revealing the human costs behind imperial triumph. Through its shared tone of nostalgia, this poetry not only preserves perspectives rarely heard in the historical record but also contributes to the emerging history of emotions in the early Islamic world.

This article examines the “beloved’s male camel section” in classical Arabic poetry, a structural and thematic component within the traditional ẓaʿāʾin section, which depicts the departure of the beloved. It investigates the development of this significant element and explores its usage in both Umayyad and pre-Umayyad poetry, with particular emphasis on the work of the early Islamic poet Mulayh b. al-Hakam from the Hejaz region, whose contributions have been largely overlooked in modern studies. The article concludes with several key findings, notably that the beloved’s male camel section is a defining feature of Umayyad-era poetry. This study also helps pinpoint when six poems from Mulayh’s dīwān were composed and reevaluates the timeframe of another poem attributed to an anonymous poet.

The Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78 was a pivotal event for the Ottoman Empire in various ways, but one of its defining characteristics is its association with the large-scale displacement of people. This article seeks to contribute to the history of migration and displacement in the late Ottoman Empire by exploring how Muslim refugees understood and narrated their experiences. Methodologically it underscores the use of narrative sources, such as memoirs and literary works. The aim is to examine displacement from the perspective of the refugees through sources reflecting their voices, rather than from the standpoint of state and administrative actors. The article focuses on an account of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78 and subsequent flight (hicret) by Hüseyin Raci, a Muslim ʿalim, teacher, and poet from Eski Zağra, a city in the Balkans, while also drawing connections with other literary works penned by Muslim refugees.

Is Meta a more decentralized organization today than twenty years ago, when it was known as “Thefacebook”? Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, certainly delegates a wider range of tasks to a wider range of intermediaries in 2024 compared to 2004. But Meta is also a far larger company today. Two decades ago, it was a small start-up; today, it is a multinational, publicly listed company. Given this organizational transformation, it would be odd to describe Meta as more decentralized today than “Thefacebook” twenty years ago without accounting for scale or giving more context. It is similarly odd when historians describe the Ottoman state as being more decentralized in the 18th century than in the 16th century.1

This article follows the history of migration from the mountain villages of the Jebel Nafusa in Ottoman Trablus al-Gharb (in today’s northwestern Libya) to the southern Tunisian island of Djerba in the early 20th century. It situates this local history of migration within the broader framework of Maghribi migration both before and during the colonial era in Libya (1911–43), while tracing the histories of two categories of migrants, in particular, manual laborers and Qur’an teachers (m’addibs). The article makes three claims: (1) Nafusi migration was as much the result of local historical circumstances as it was a response to colonialism; (2) the historical experience of migration of Nafusis differed according to social class; and (3) local circumstances shaped the dynamics of migrant integration in the Maghrib. In doing so, I demonstrate how Nafusi migration to Djerba both conforms to and diverges from the larger history of late Ottoman and colonial-era migration in Tunisia. By shifting the focus away from the colonial moment, I make the case for foregrounding longer-term regional connections and migrations that linked different spaces across the Maghrib and also attend to local histories and what they offer in the way of caveats and exceptions.

The essays in this roundtable emerged from a panel we organized at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association that took place in Montreal in 2023. With a focus on “ecocritical terrains,” the panel sought to rethink environments in the Middle East and Tamazgha (the broader North Africa) by paying attention to more-than-human ecologies. We use “Tamazgha” to acknowledge the reimagination by the Imazighen, the Indigenous people of North Africa, of the geography of their ancestral homeland, which encompasses the expansive space extending between the Canary Islands and west Egypt, from the Mediterranean Sea to sub-Saharan Africa.1 This remapping of the territory offers tremendous environmental and ecocritical opportunities that current methods of knowledge production about the region have not permitted to emerge or become part of academic conversations.

How should Jewish settlers live in the new environment? This question preoccupied early Zionist professionals, seeking to employ science in the service of Jewish “acclimatization.” This article focuses on the work of a specific man of science: nutrition scholar Moshe Wilbushewich, who lived and worked in Palestine since 1924 until his death in 1952. Much of Wilbushewich’s work in the interwar period was devoted to investigating the question, how to compensate for the physical inferiority of Jewish- compared to Arab workers, through nutrition and psychotechnics. As a scholar of nutrition, he performed scientific analyses of ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian kitchen and encouraged Jewish settlers to adopt some of them to make their nutrition more adjusted to the conditions of the land, and hence more “rational.” As I show, although Zionist experts embraced an environmental approach to “revitalizing” Jewish bodies, their perceptions were nonetheless shaped by assumptions about racial difference and hierarchy– between Arabs and Jews, and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.

Published in 2009, the edited volume Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia represents one of the most important English-language resources for the study of music’s entanglement in the workings of power and power struggles in the modern Middle East and beyond. In the introduction, the editing author and British Iranian ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin identifies three “axes of difference” that organize the production of social divisions and hierarchies in the region: (1) gender, (2) religion, and (3) nationhood.1 Class, although stated as intersecting with these categories, is not explicitly listed. This absence is illustrative of a tendency that can be observed across much of contemporary scholarship on musical cultures in Egypt and the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA)/Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, in which class is regularly mentioned but, in contrast to questions of gender, religion, and nationhood, has remained underexplored.