Although the social democrats fundamentally opposed the political order of the German Empire, they participated in parliament from the beginning. The party not only sat on the parliamentary benches, but its representatives also proved to be committed parliamentarians. Using a combination of parliamentary, party, and movement sources, this article shows that social democrats’ parliamentary participation followed two lines of reasoning. First, the party admitted that parliamentary participation served publicity purposes. In fact, social democrats took the Reichstag stage to present their political project to the masses. Second, the party was less willing to admit that parliament fitted perfectly into the associational tradition of working-class culture. Orderly and fair debate had been the norm of social democratic activism long before the party was founded. It is precisely this last aspect that provides an important and previously overlooked explanation for the social democrats’ surprising devotion to a political system they so deeply detested.

This article develops the problem of divine domination. Classical theism describes God as essentially all-powerful, sovereign, personal, omnipresent, and a se. If such a being exists, then he dominates humans in virtue of his essential properties. Since dominative relationships are unjust, the divine-human relationship is unjust. I reject solutions to this problem that appeal to humanity’s childlikeness or divine goodness, justice, or greatness. I conclude by gesturing towards what a solution to the problem might require.

Ethno-religious nationalism has been an integral part of the Georgian identity since the country regained independence. Since the early 2000s, Georgia has had a constitutionally enshrined pro-European foreign policy, which has been reflected in a strong identification with Europe, its culture, and values. Survey data show that Georgians prefer European and Christian ethnic outgroups to Asian and Muslim ones. These factors could have explained the rise of the far right in Georgia, had Georgia experienced a wave of refugees comparable to EU states in mid-2010s. However, only few people fled from the Syrian civil war to Georgia. Nevertheless, in and around 2016, various far-right groups with a strong anti-liberal ideology appeared in the Georgian public sphere. In 2017, a far-right rally was organized, demanding that the rights of Turkish, Iranian, and Arab business owners and citizens be restricted in Georgia. This was accompanied by violent incidents involving physical abuse and property damage of non-white foreigners. The sudden rise of the far-right political organizations in Georgia gives rise to various questions: Do the far-right ideas have grassroots origins, or was the activation of the far right a top-down process? Which domestic and external factors could have contributed to these developments?

This special issue stems from the 2022 Association for the Study of Modern Italy conference, reflecting on key turning points in modern Italian history through the lens of ‘small histories’. Drawing on contemporary international historiography and the contributions in the present volume, this introduction discusses how microhistorical, biographical and related approaches may challenge or refine dominant interpretations in that they abstract from ‘grand narratives’ to instead highlight dynamics and actors that may appear to be on the margins of major historical processes. The studies in this special issue engage in particular with the intersections of identity, space and memory. Themes such as Fascism, the reshaping of Italian identity through cultural policies and the creation of a collective memory, colonialism and postcolonialism, migration and evolving gender roles are explored in diverse contexts from interwar South Tyrol through to contemporary Palermo. Together, these ‘small histories’ demonstrate the methodological and interpretative richness of focused studies in tracing Italy’s transformation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They challenge binaries such as centre–periphery and local–global, while shedding new light on the relation between individual experiences and the creation of shared spaces, memories and identities.

This article offers a fresh account of the colonial processes that upended Muslim juridical regimes in South Asia between 1808 and 1885. Based on unexplored sources in Arabic and English, the discussion is set in the South Indian coastal towns of today’s Kerala and Tamilnad, where Muslims practiced Shafi‘i law and were not subject to continuous Muslim rule at any point in history. Given their longue-durée experience of non-Muslim rule, the Shafi‘i jurists had to rethink classical jurisprudential norms to empower the learned Muslims (the ‘ulama) as alternative sources of authority, so that they could elect and dismiss Islamic law judges (qazis) as their local leaders in the coastal towns. Qazis thus emerged and operated as a bastion of Shafi‘i power and Shafi‘i religious authority in the region. Once the British Empire claimed the mantle of the Mughal Empire that practiced Hanafi law, it could not as easily bring these Shafi‘is into its imperial fold. Their juridical autonomy provoked fears of political subversion for the British Empire in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, prompting its officials to bring the Shafi‘is under direct government control and reconfigure the community-elected qazis, which were the foci of Shafi‘i leadership.

If panpsychism is true then consciousness pervades the cosmos, and there exist many more conscious subjects than other worldviews contemplate. Panpsychism’s explanatory story about how human material composition and complexity grounds human consciousness seems to entail that there exist, notably, various conscious subjects within human organisms. Given the plausibility of the thesis that consciousness confers moral status – a thesis many panpsychists endorse – questions thus arise about the wellbeing of these inner subjects. In this article I raise the possibility that the lives of our inner subjects may not be morally suitable to a sophisticated centre of consciousness of the sort that likely exists, for example, inside various of our brain areas. Panpsychism, indeed, seems on the face of it to generate a good deal more suffering, in this way, than other worldviews. If that is correct, panpsychists who would embrace theism, and theists who would embrace panpsychism – for example pantheists – should be given serious pause. If panpsychism positively compounds the problem of evil, then one may have to choose between panpsychism and theism.

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.

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.

The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several key East European Zionist intellectuals through the period between World War I and the aftermath of World War II as they attempted to imagine a new geometry of transnational nationhood via international law. This account of their pursuit of national self-determination beyond sovereignty reveals the promise and limits of interwar Jewish worldmaking and provides an index of the changing meaning of nationhood itself in the interwar period.