This chapter explores how a group of North African thinkers rethought the meaning of the Arab revolution in the 1970s. Departing from anti-colonial nationalism and Marxist orthodoxy, Abdallah Laroui and Hichem Dja?t called for a deeper cultural and intellectual transformation grounded in historicist thinking. Their seminal books—La Crise des intellectuels arabes (1974) and La Personnalité et le devenir arabo-islamique (1974)—articulated visions of a new Arab future that rejected both Salafism and westernization in favor of a rational and historicized approach to Arab modernity and the future. Though published in Paris and shaped by networks in Beirut and the Arab Left, their ideas were targeted at audiences back home in Morocco and Tunisia. The chapter situates their work by tracing the complex reception of these essays across North African intellectual publics. Ultimately, it argues that the effectiveness of revolutionary thought was not determined solely by publication or prestige, but by the ability to engage meaningfully with local contexts and contested ideas of tradition and modernity. As as their reception reveals, audiences were not passive: they questioned, resisted, and sometimes rejected these “prophets”— because they insisted on situating theory within lived political constraints.

This chapter examines the development of health services in late Ottoman Palestine. Through the eyes of a French physician living in Jerusalem in the first years of the twentieth century, it surveys the city’s medical institutions and personnel as a prelude to developments in the decades to come. It focuses on Jerusalem, which Western and missionary competition made into the city with the highest bed capacities in the empire, and on late Ottoman and regional developments, which set the stage for the medical profession’s development. Western encroachment, Zionist immigration and funding, late-Ottoman administrative reform, and local Palestinian initiative created an institutional and social setting that transformed Palestine’s medical landscape.

Through mapping the sociological origins of Palestinian doctors: their birthplace, class and family origin, early educational background, and university education, this chapter shows the social transformations of Palestinian communities during the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. It traces the development of the professional classes, from landed, mercantile, and religious notability, which converted, and sometimes supplemented, existing economic and cultural capital into professional education. It argues that throughout the Mandate period, the social origins of the professional community diversified to include families and individuals who gained mobility through sociocultural and economic capital. The chapter also looks at secondary and higher education as a meeting ground for the formation of lifelong professional and personal networks on a regional scale, as doctors were one of the only groups educated outside Palestine. The chapter builds on quantitative analysis of biographical data of about 400 doctors who worked in Palestine. Sources include biographical dictionaries, biographies and autobiographies, and various educational and employment lists.

This chapter brings to the fore a key theme across the second part of Mandatory Madness: the considerable agency exercised by families over the management of their mentally ill relatives. This chapter focuses in particular on the petitions that flooded the mandate government from the 1930s onwards, seeking the admission of relatives to the government’s mental institutions. These petitions are read both for what they reveal about the often-complex therapeutic strategies pursued by families, and as carefully crafted arguments about mental illness and the state’s obligations to its subjects. Petitions make clear that Palestinian Arab families in particular were much more actively engaged with questions of psychiatric care than has been often represented, incorporating the mandate’s processes, institutions, and indeed anxieties into their strategies for managing the mentally ill. Petitions reframe our understanding of the interactions between state and society in mandate Palestine, by revealing how these played out in the intimate stretches of people’s lives.

Chapter 7 is about the attempts to relieve and rehabilitate Ottoman Armenians that had survived the genocide. It focuses on two cities, Beirut and Aleppo, and a region: Cilicia. The chapter relativizes the importance of international actions and insists on the importance of the scholarly works of historians that show how local networks and Armenian networks operated and looked after their co-religionists more and better than international humanitarian institutions.

Following a comparative approach, this chapter foregrounds transcultural translation as it examines three different productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ play Rituals of Signs and Transformations in English, French and Arabic that were staged in Beirut, Chicago, Paris, and Cairo. The chapter argues that Wannous’ play carries a prophetic warning about the chaos that is released when rigid political, religious, and gender structures are undermined in a society deformed by a long experience of despotism.

This chapter draws on the author, Sahar Assaf's, experience directing two significant contemporary productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ plays in English in Beirut, Rituals of Signs and Transformations and The Rape.

Building on the extensive literature related to postcolonialism and magical realism, this chapter examines how diaspora writing and magical realism are related. It focuses on alienation, the uncanny and mobility, among other elements, demonstrating that these are elements that unite and are common to both modes of writing. It argues that the case of Arab diaspora writing is particularly and uniquely suited to exploring how these modes are related. A close examination of two novels, The Night Counter by Alia Yunis and The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine, illustrates how various forms of place, a central and key dimension of diaspora fiction, are refashioned and complicated through these novels’ engagement with and use of magical realism.

By the beginning of 1990, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (Untso) and its Australian observers were maintaining a well-established routine. On the Golan, the usual round of observation and patrolling continued, with little change in the level of activity. Observation duties in southern Lebanon were more challenging with low-level conflict between Hezbollah and other Muslim groups and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but as the long Lebanon civil war had formally ended in 1989, fighting between the Lebanese factions was decreasing. Within Israel, the Intifada – the Palestinian uprising – was still running, but Untso had no role in trying to end or even moderate the violence. The Untso observers and their families tried to keep away from any Intifada-fuelled riots or bombings.