In the fall of 2021, I taught a graduate seminar entitled Women and Gender in the Arab World at Georgetown University. It had been two decades since 9/11 and the start of the “War on Terror,” events that most of my students were not old enough to recall, but which still had, in one way or another, profoundly shaped their interest or experience in the region. In planning the course, I received a syllabus that had been used in past years. The first week was an introduction to the course, and it consisted of two essays intended to frame the state of the field of Middle East women's studies: Lila Abu-Lughod's “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” and Mounira Charrad's “Gender in the Middle East: Islam, State, and Agency.”

This article seeks to nuance our understanding of how the penal laws against Roman Catholics were interpreted in eighteenth-century England and how English Catholics of the era experienced their status as a penalised minority. Using evidence from Ushaw Library’s Vincent Eyre Mansucripts, it examines how propertied Catholics navigated proscriptions against owning and selling property. Although much scholarship has emphasised the flexibility that the statutes afforded Catholics, this article focuses not on the enforcement of these laws but on the pressure they exerted on Catholics’ daily consciousness. Vincent Eyre, a Derbyshire conveyancer, trained under Catholic conveyancers in London and worked as agent for the tenth Duke of Norfolk in Sheffield. His manuscripts, which consist principally of legal opinions and briefs on conveyancing cases, testify to the pervasive uncertainty under which Catholics laboured as they sought to assert a ‘good title’ to property, protect their faith from legal discovery, and assert their standing as subjects despite laws that disabled them from full belonging to the nation. This article builds on recent work that charts Catholics’ affective experiences in eighteenth-century Britain as their dynamic contributions in the period are increasingly recognized.

As the US-led global “War on Terror” enters its third decade, the structural, physical, and epistemological violence it has wrought continues to shape lives and landscapes in Afghanistan and Iraq. At present, the scholarship of an entire generation of Middle Eastern Studies has been embedded in the geopolitical realities of this indefinite war, even those whose work does not directly confront it. Yet despite the war's enduring presence, scholars working on Afghanistan and Iraq rarely find the opportunity to reflect with one another on how the global assemblage of international military intervention and the creation of a shifting target of terrorism has narrowed our foci. Instead, these geographies are yoked together in often destructive and superficial ways, erasing older forms of interregional connectivity and longer genealogies of violence.

Between the late-twelfth and early-sixteenth centuries, much music (both liturgical and non-liturgical) was written in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury. However, in the 1530s his cult became a major target for reformers and, in 1538, Henry VIII (1491-1547) ordered the destruction of his shrine and the obliteration of all music written in his honour. This article will examine how music composed to memorialise St Thomas was treated during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It explores the process of self-censorship prompted by Henry’s proclamation on the cult of St Thomas that led to his erasure from liturgical books in England. It analyses the attempts by reformers to discredit music concerning St Thomas, particularly by radical reformer John Bale (1495-1563). Finally, it examines music that was composed by Catholics for St Thomas during the Counter-Reformation and asks what it can tell us about the state of the cult in the late sixteenth century. This approach results in an overview of St Thomas’ cult during the later sixteenth century and contributes to our understanding of changing conceptions of the saint by Catholic communities in the post-Reformation world.

This article examines the causes and consequences of the 1922 postal strike which was the first nationwide strike to occur following the establishment of the Irish Free State. In the eyes of the government, the dispute was as much a threat to its authority as that posed by anti-Treatyies, and it was resolved to crush both. The significance of the postal dispute within the annals of Irish labour history has been obscured and overshadowed by the civil war. The strike was not only about a demand for a fair and reasonable wage: it also raised issues relating to workers’ rights, including the right to strike; government tactics, including the harassment and intimidation of workers by the military; victimisation; political propriety and probity; the abuse of government power; and the role and effectiveness of the labour movement. Furthermore, the historical collision of both the postal strike and the civil war produced strong emotions among all parties to this labour dispute – the postal workers, postal unions and the fledgling government. The coincidence of the dispute and the civil war determined the government's attitude towards labour unrest, labour affairs and labour relations until Fianna Fáil succeeded Cumann na nGaedheal in 1932.

In late 1936, two Irishmen arrived in the Spanish Basque Country. One was General Eoin O'Duffy, signing the terms of agreement for an Irish Brigade to support the military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic. Meanwhile, socialist republican George Gilmore journeyed across the Pyrenees in search of a Basque nationalist priest he had met four years earlier. While O'Duffy was drawn into the conflict by traditionalist monarchists from Navarre, his leftist opponents in Ireland mounted a pro-republic propaganda campaign focused on the war effort of the rival Basque nationalists. In effect, a civil war between Basques became entangled with the legacy of the Irish Civil War, as old rivals such as O'Duffy and Gilmore constructed alliances on opposite sides of the conflict as it played out in this small corner of Spain. This article places a new emphasis on the Basque dimension of Ireland's engagement with the Spanish Civil War and illustrates how it was shaped by earlier Basque-Irish relations.

This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place amongst Alevi and Sunni focus group participants, primarily in Istanbul. These conversations illustrate how sectarian difference can be made in the relations between neighbors as differences become coded as sectarian and taken up within systems of power and domination. At the same time, our research also shows how, in the entangled relations between neighbors, questions of ethics and mutual responsibility arise, though these relations sometimes become uneasy or even unbearable. Finally, we show how the question of “knowing” difference is taken up within a power-laden discourse of sectarianism, one that is tied to the history of Alevis (and others) in Turkey while also extending well beyond this context.