@mastersthesis {1506516, title = {Al-Majaz: A Crossing}, year = {2023}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Shamma Faisal AlBastaki} } @mastersthesis {1506511, title = {Islam as a Source of Progress: The Project of the Progressive Islamists in Tunisia, 1977-Present}, year = {2023}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Giulia Benvenuto} } @mastersthesis {1506506, title = {Negotiating Sovereignty in the Kingdom of Libya: 1950-1954}, year = {2023}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Aaron Boehm} } @mastersthesis {1506501, title = {The Cold War Makings of Saudi Surveillance: Labor and Dissent in the Lifetime of the Dhahran Airfield Agreement, 1945-1962}, year = {2023}, note = {CMES Thesis Prize}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Ritika Lal} } @mastersthesis {1506496, title = {The Old Will Die but the Young Will Never Forget: The Role of Memory in Restoring Place, Presence, and Belonging for Palestinians}, year = {2023}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Nicole Plante} } @mastersthesis {1506491, title = {Economic Diversification for Oil-dependent Countries: Highlighting the Role of Institutional Quality}, year = {2023}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Lavinia Zhao} } @mastersthesis {1506481, title = {Untidy Households: Kinship, Service, and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Qajar Iran}, year = {2023}, type = {PhD dissertation}, author = {Belle Cheves} } @mastersthesis {1506476, title = {Reason, Dissent, and Ecumenism in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life and Thought of {\textquoteright}Shaykh{\textquoteright} Hadi Najmabadi}, year = {2023}, type = {PhD dissertation}, author = {Farhad Dokhani} } @mastersthesis {1506471, title = {Morality of Plunder and Economy of Protection: Ottoman Corsairs in Mediterranean Trade Networks and Warfare, 1574-1685}, year = {2023}, type = {PhD dissertation}, author = {Eda {\"O}zel} } @book {1505411, title = {Verifying the Truth on Their Own Terms: Ottoman Philosophical Culture and the Court Debate Between Zeyrek (d. 903/1497-98 [?]) and Ḫocaz{\={a}}de (d. 893/1488)}, year = {2023}, pages = {248}, publisher = {Edizioni Ca{\textquoteright} Foscari, Venice University Press}, organization = {Edizioni Ca{\textquoteright} Foscari, Venice University Press}, abstract = {

The present volume offers a detailed analysis of a fifteenth-century court debate on God{\textquoteright}s unicity (tawḥid), involving the Ottoman scholars Moll{\={a}} Zeyrek (d. 903/1497-98 [?]) and Ḫocaz{\={a}}de Muṣliḥuddin Muṣṭaf{\={a}} (d. 893/1488), as a chance to highlight the dynamics of knowledge production at the time: in post-classical Islamic scholarship, an essential element of the process was scholars{\textquoteright} adroitness in synthesizing arguments from differing schools of philosophy and theology {\textendash} via close readings of past masters. This dialectic unfolded during a period of imperial restructuring, at a time when Sultan Meḥmed II (d. 886/1481) realized his cosmopolitan and universalistic ambitions through his persistent patronage of philosophy and science, a case that is illustrated by his glorious palatine library. The setting, audience, and format of the debate, along with the analyses reveal that the production of knowledge in the early modern Islamic world was intricate, vibrant, and dynamic {\textendash} not stale or derivative as previously thought. This book attempts at reconstructing the debate through the information found in bio-bibliographical sources, and comments on certain social and cultural aspects of the fifteenth-century Ottoman scholarship. Analyses of lemmata in the plethora of commentaries and glosses reveal that Ottoman scholars could posit numerous and disparate doctrinal positions, each referencing specific texts, through which the scholars gave their own syntheses based on their unique perspectives. This method of scholarly arbitration is called {\textquoteleft}verification{\textquoteright} (taḥqiq) and is exemplified here in Ḫocaz{\={a}}de{\textquoteright}s defense and recontextualization of Avicennan philosophy in early Ottoman philosophical theology. The court debate at hand concerns Avicenna{\textquoteright}s often-contested ontological formulation, which equaled God{\textquoteright}s quiddity/essence to His existence and necessity, a view that went against the theological principle of God{\textquoteright}s singularity according to a tradition of Muslim theologians. Ḫocaz{\={a}}de{\textquoteright}s defense of the philosophers{\textquoteright} proof demonstrated that one of the senses of the ontological term {\textquoteleft}necessity{\textquoteright} that Avicenna put forth was identical to God{\textquoteright}s quiddity/essence, as well as His {\textquoteleft}pure existence{\textquoteright}. Having gained the upper hand in the debate by verifying Avicenna{\textquoteright}s thesis, Ḫocaz{\={a}}de{\textquoteright}s argumentative efforts proved that not only could the philosophers{\textquoteright} claim be reconciled with post-classical Islamic theology, but this proof also held true on their own terms despite Zeyrek{\textquoteright}s (and the theologians{\textquoteright}) objections.

}, url = {https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/libri/978-88-6969-644-2/}, author = {Efe Murat Bal{\i}k{\c c}{\i}o{\u g}lu} } @book {1477431, title = {The Accidental Palace: The Making of Y{\i}ld{\i}z in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul}, year = {2023}, pages = {272}, publisher = {Penn State University Press}, organization = {Penn State University Press}, abstract = {

This book tells the story of Y{\i}ld{\i}z Palace in Istanbul, the last and largest imperial residential complex of the Ottoman Empire. Today, the palace is physically fragmented and has been all but erased from Istanbul{\textquoteright}s urban memory. At its peak, however, Y{\i}ld{\i}z was a global city in miniature and the center of the empire{\textquoteright}s vast bureaucratic apparatus.

Following a chronological arc from 1795 to 1909, The Accidental Palace shows how the site developed from a rural estate of the queen mothers into the heart of Ottoman government. Nominally, the palace may have belonged to the rarefied realm of the Ottoman elite, but as Deniz T{\"u}rker reveals, the development of the site was profoundly connected to Istanbul{\textquoteright}s urban history and to changing conceptions of empire, absolutism, diplomacy, reform, and the public. T{\"u}rker explores these connections, framing Y{\i}ld{\i}z Palace and its grounds not only as a hermetic expression of imperial identity but also as a product of an increasingly globalized consumer culture, defined by access to a vast number of goods and services across geographical boundaries.

Drawn from archival research conducted in Y{\i}ld{\i}z{\textquoteright}s imperial library, The Accidental Palace provides important insights into a decisive moment in the palace{\textquoteright}s architectural and landscape history and demonstrates how Y{\i}ld{\i}z was inextricably tied to ideas of sovereignty, visibility, taste, and self-fashioning. It will appeal to specialists in the art, architecture, politics, and culture of nineteenth-century Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

}, url = {https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09391-8.html}, author = {Deniz Turker} } @book {1472311, title = {In the Shadow of the Prophet: Essays in Islamic History}, year = {2023}, pages = {640}, publisher = {Oneworld Publications}, organization = {Oneworld Publications}, abstract = {

In pieces drawn from over the course of his distinguished career, pre-eminent historian Roy Mottahedeh explores such diverse topics as the social bonds that connected people in the early Islamic Middle East, the transmission of learning in the Muslim world, religious and ethnic toleration in the past and in the present, and the theme of "wonders"\ in The Thousand and One Nights. His essays extend from the early Islamic period through the medieval era and on to modern times. A number concern Iran, the country of his father{\textquoteright}s birth, and again Mottahedeh{\textquoteright}s studies range widely, including Persian panegyric poetry, the origins of the city of Kashan, and Shi{\textquoteleft}ite political thought. Speaking to contemporary concerns, he also touches upon voting rights, academic freedom, and censorship.

Intended not only for those in Islamic studies but for students of history and interested lay readers, there are introductions to each section written with the non-specialist in mind, and these sections progress from more general topics to those more specialized. In the Shadow of the Prophet thus reflects Mottahedeh{\textquoteright}s desire that the Islamic world and its history become better understood so that cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims might become the order of the day.

}, url = {https://oneworld-publications.com/work/in-the-shadow-of-the-prophet/}, author = {Roy P. Mottahedeh} } @mastersthesis {1521286, title = {Miri and Mawat: From the 1858 Ottoman Land Code to Modern Israeli Land Grabs in the West Bank}, year = {2022}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Christina Bouri} } @mastersthesis {1521271, title = {Modernity and Cultural Invasion: Ali Khamenei, the United States, and the Software Movement}, year = {2022}, note = {CMES Thesis Prize}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Dutton Crowley} } @mastersthesis {1521261, title = {Artistic Expression and Memory in Conflict: The Politics of Iraq War Art 2003-2011}, year = {2022}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Ghazi Ghazi} } @mastersthesis {1521256, title = {Arab Palestinian Labor in Israel, 1880-2000}, year = {2022}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Uri Inspector} } @mastersthesis {1521251, title = {Patterns of Ongoing Conflict Reconstruction Contract Distribution: Evaluating the Syrian Conflict}, year = {2022}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Sumaya Malas} } @mastersthesis {1521246, title = {Halid{\'e} Edib Ad{\i}var{\textquoteright}s {\textquoteright}melting-pot{\textquoteright} in the {\textquoteright}ghost-sky{\textquoteright}: Drawing the Early Turkish Republic into the Indian Ocean}, year = {2022}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Faria Nasruddin} } @mastersthesis {1521241, title = {Incarcerated in Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Palestinian Social Temporalities{\textquoteright} Development and Shift from the Nakba to the New Millennium}, year = {2022}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Xuechen Wang} } @mastersthesis {1521236, title = {A Perplexed Wanderer toward Modernization: The Jadid Movement as the Seed for the Flourish and Collapse of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism in Early 20th Century Xinjiang}, year = {2022}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Sheng Zhang} } @mastersthesis {1506461, title = {Writing Slavic in the Arabic Script: Literacy and Multilingualism in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire}, year = {2022}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

Envisaged as a contribution to the early modern Ottoman social and intellectual history, this dissertation focuses on the region of the Ottoman-ruled South-Slavic Europe in the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries and investigates how imperial language ideologies and communicative practices embedded in the written word radiated back and forth among Ottoman provinces and regions. The discussion in this dissertation is centered on the texts written in South-Slavic language/s by the use of the Arabic script and the ideas that informed their production and reproduction. Some of these texts have been studied by the primarily ex-Yugoslav philologists and linguists as belonging to the so-called Slavic/Bosnian aljamiado literature which emerged in the early seventeenth century and stopped being productive in the early twentieth century. This study seeks to show that this textual corpus was larger than the received wisdom leads us think and that it was not just a product of non-elite Muslim literati of Slavic/Bosnian origin as previous interpreters have argued. The Slavic aljamiado{\textemdash}here reconceptualized as Slavophone Arabographia{\textemdash}was reflective of the various trajectories of the incorporation of South-Slavic Europe into the Ottoman imperial structure, on the one hand, and historical change of the position of Slavic language and its speakers within the Ottoman multilingual regime, on the other hand. Arguing that a relative marginality of Slavophone Arabographia within the Ottoman media ecosystem did not imply its ideological insignificance, this dissertation investigates the instances of Slavic written in the Arabic script as windows into how various individuals and groups navigated a hierarchical, and changing social order in one of the densest linguistic and cultural contact zones of the early modern world. The Ottoman Slavophone Arabographia, this dissertation suggests, is an excellent case for investigation of the relationship between language and power in the context of the early modern Ottoman empire, as well as other, comparable contexts. Last but not least, it forces us to rethink contemporary{\textemdash}and ahistorical{\textemdash}conceptions of language, culture and script that are often uncritically used by modern historians.

}, url = {https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37373728}, author = {Marijana Mi{\v s}evi{\'c}} } @book {1477911, title = {Familial Undercurrents: Untold Stories of Love and Marriage in Modern Iran}, year = {2022}, pages = {184}, publisher = {Duke University Press}, organization = {Duke University Press}, abstract = {

Not long after her father died, Afsaneh Najmabadi discovered that her father had a secret second family and that she had a sister she never knew about. In Familial Undercurrents, Najmabadi uncovers her family{\textquoteright}s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran. She traces how the idea of {\textquotedblleft}marrying for love{\textquotedblright} and the desire for companionate, monogamous marriage acquired dominance in Tehran{\textquoteright}s emerging urban middle class. Considering the role played in that process by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance novels, reformist newspapers, plays, and other literature, Najmabadi outlines the rituals and objects--such as wedding outfits, letter writing, and family portraits--that came to characterize the ideal companionate marriage. She reveals how in the course of one generation men{\textquoteright}s polygamy had evolved from an acceptable open practice to a taboo best kept secret. At the same time, she chronicles the urban transformations of Tehran and how its architecture and neighborhood social networks both influenced and became emblematic of the myriad forms of modern Iranian family life.

}, url = {https://www.dukeupress.edu/familial-undercurrents}, author = {Afsaneh Najmabadi} } @book {1457636, title = {A History of the Middle East Since the Rise of Islam}, year = {2022}, pages = {496}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, organization = {Oxford University Press}, abstract = {

As David Lesch writes in his Preface, "Historians are a kind of secular priesthood, seemingly endowed with the power and means to select what is and what is not important for the rest of us." In A History of the Middle East Since the Rise of Islam, Lesch focuses on the longue dur{\'e}e. Choosing the rise of Islam as the general beginning point of his one-volume history of the Middle East, Lesch argues that there is an indelible link between the rise of Islam and the overall environment that exists today in the region. The continuum of this chain of events is the primary focus of his book. Combining a comprehensive approach and an appealing, informal tone, Lesch offers the reader enough specifics to digest the flavor of particular periods, dynasties, movements, cultural markers, and ideological developments, yet general enough so that the totality of this history can be compared and contrasted. The result is a brilliant tour de force.

}, url = {https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-history-of-the-middle-east-since-the-rise-of-islam-9780197587140?cc=us\&lang=en\&}, author = {David W. Lesch} } @book {1447320, title = {The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies}, year = {2022}, pages = {912}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, organization = {Oxford University Press}, abstract = {

Muslim societies are largely absent from the study of religion and politics in the social sciences, despite the fact that scholarly literature often presumes that religion exercises a colossal influence on social, political, and economic outcomes in predominantly Muslim countries. This volume utilizes real world events and newly available data to more fully integrate the study of politics in Muslim societies into mainstream comparative analytical frameworks. Moreover, it explores the extent to which theories about core topics of inquiry in political science apply to Muslim societies. The aim is to interrogate rather than presume both whether and how Islam and Muslims are distinct from other religions and religious communities.

Through 40 chapters by leading specialists, the Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies examines a wide range of topics concerning regimes and regime change, electoral politics, political attitudes and behavior beyond voting, social mobilization, economic performance and development outcomes, and social welfare and governance. The Handbook shifts focus away from the Arab world as the barometer of politics in the Muslim world, recognizing that the Islamic world spans several regions including Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia. This expanded geography enables a thorough investigation of which relationships, if any, hold across Muslim majority states in different regions of the world.

}, url = {https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-politics-in-muslim-societies-9780190931056?cc=us\&lang=en\&}, editor = {Melani Cammett and Pauline Jones} } @mastersthesis {1439403, title = {Leaking Empires: The Struggle over Information in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1870{\textendash}1952}, year = {2022}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This is a history of information and its control as a political battleground. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the explosion of mass media and communications connected people across much of the world and made it possible to transmit more information across longer distances than ever before. But in many places, the same period witnessed the reimagining and retrenchment of official secrecy. This dissertation investigates this apparent paradox from the vantage point of Egypt. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Egypt lay at the center of global networks of trade, transport, and technology. Coveting an empire of its own in East Africa, it was enmeshed in the Ottoman Empire and, after 1882, in the British Empire, too. Between the 1870s and the 1950s, a series of challenges to imperial governance, each tied to war or its specter, brought a pair of contentious questions into focus: What did the public have the right to know? And what was the state entitled to conceal?

When the nineteenth century began, states did not share basic details of how they functioned, such as the scale of debts and revenue, or the size of their armies, with people outside government. By the century{\textquoteright}s end, a vocal {\textquotedblleft}public{\textquotedblright} was demanding to know more. In Egypt, a conception of information about the state as a public good{\textemdash}about a public {\textquotedblleft}right to know{\textquotedblright}{\textemdash}crystallized in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was due to the confluence of three main factors. First, and most important, was a political environment riddled with frictions due to Britain{\textquoteright}s semi-colonial rule, which foreclosed Egypt{\textquoteright}s own imperial project and independence. The second was the widespread use of telegraphy, a technology on which the state relied heavily but did not fully control. The third was the expansion of the Arabic press, which attracted dissidents from across the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds to Egypt and gave public demands a prominent platform.

Demand for more information about affairs of state provoked a backlash with long-lasting consequences. At first, authorities were ill-prepared to provide a rationale for secrecy. This changed in the decade before World War I, when high-profile assassinations prompted them to link the circulation of information to political violence. A corresponding shift from policing deeds to policing ideas took tighter hold amid the nationalist revolution of 1919, as colonial officials feared collusion between their Egyptian colleagues and a wider hostile society. When British officials began a gradual retreat following Egypt{\textquoteright}s nominal independence in 1922, the compartmentalization of information within organs of state entrenched a renewed culture of concealment. In 1948, the Arab defeat in Palestine drew scrutiny to the secrets and silences this climate had nourished, and popular anger at the absence of information that convincingly explained the loss contributed to the ouster of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952. Yet rather than leading to a new era of trust and transparency, the narrative that emerged in the gap between the propaganda people were fed and what they believed to be true was seized on by the military regime that took its place and helped to sustain it in power.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37372252}, author = {Chloe La Verne Bordewich} } @book {1474296, title = {Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East}, year = {2021}, pages = {220}, publisher = {MIT Press}, organization = {MIT Press}, abstract = {

Based on ethnographic work in Israel and Qatar, two small Middle Eastern ethnonations with significant biomedical resources, Genomic Citizenship explores the relationship between science and identity. Ian McGonigle, originally trained as a biochemist, draws on anthropological theory, STS, intellectual history, critical theory, Middle Eastern studies, cultural studies, and critical legal studies. He connects biomedical research on ethnic populations to the political, economic, legal, and historical context of the state; to global trends in genetic medicine; and to the politics of identity in the context of global biomedical research.

Genomic Citizenship is more an anthropology of scientific objects than an anthropology of scientists or an ethnography of the laboratory. McGonigle bases his untraditional project on traditional anthropological methods, including participant observation. Some of the most persuasive data in the book are from public records, legal and historical sources, published scientific papers, institutional reports, websites, and brochures.

McGonigle discusses biological understandings of Jewishness, especially in relation to the intellectual history of Zionism and Jewish political thought, and considers the possibility of a novel application of genetics in assigning Israeli citizenship. He also describes developments in genetic medicine in Qatar and analyzes the Qatari Biobank in the context of Qatari nationalism and state-building projects. Considering possible consequences of findings on the diverse origins of the Qatari population for tribal identities, he argues that the nation cannot be defined as either a purely natural or biological entity. Rather, it is reified, reinscribed, and refracted through genomic research and discourse.

}, url = {https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542944/}, author = {Ian McGonigle} } @mastersthesis {1439407, title = {How Locals Became Settlers: Mizrahi Jews and Bodily Capital in Palestine, 1908-1948}, year = {2021}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation explores early twentieth-century Palestine through the lens of bodies and material culture. While histories of modern Palestine often treat {\textquotedblleft}Jews{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}Arabs{\textquotedblright} as naturally distinct categories, I examine how these categories were constructed as racialized, embodied, and opposing identities. At a time when Palestine witnessed major changes{\textemdash} including the transition from Ottoman to British rule, mass Zionist settlement, shifting labor patterns, and the rise of Palestinian nationalism{\textemdash}residents made sense of their identities by spreading ideas about whose bodies were like, or unlike, their own. This dissertation focuses on Sephardi and Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews, many of whom lived in Palestine prior to modern Zionist settlement, which offers a unique lens to explore the process of Arab-Jewish boundary-making. At the turn of the twentieth century, Mizrahi Jewish bodies were not always clearly marked as exclusively {\textquotedblleft}Jewish{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}Arab.{\textquotedblright} Their clothing, accents, and cultural tastes were often indistinguishable from those of their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Palestine. However, the growing colonial-national conflict in the 1920s and 1930s forced Mizrahi Jews to confront their position vis-{\`a}-vis Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. They adopted several strategies in light of this new reality. Many abandoned {\textquotedblleft}Arab{\textquotedblright} clothing and accents in order to assimilate into the Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish community (Yishuv). In doing so, they helped produce a visual and sonic Arab-Jewish division on the ground. Others challenged the emerging divide by refusing to change their bodies. They expressed pride in their cultural and linguistic heritage in the\ Islamic\ world. Yet others selectively employed their {\textquotedblleft}Oriental{\textquotedblright} bodies as a way to assert Zionist belonging and nativeness in Palestine.

This dissertation makes three broader contributions. First, using photographs, oral histories, material culture, and written sources, it illuminates how clothing, sounds, sexuality, and age become racialized in circumstances of colonial-national conflict. Second, while scholars often point to one {\textquotedblleft}year zero{\textquotedblright} of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the founding of a political movement, the outbreak of ethnic violence, or the publication of a specific document, I demonstrate that building a Jewish-Arab division demanded the constant policing of how individuals looked and sounded. Finally, the dissertation{\textquoteright}s focus on Mizrahi Jews pushes scholars of settler colonialism to think beyond a local-versus-settler paradigm. Many Mizrahi Jews in Palestine were locals who also became part of a settler movement; they were, as I term them, {\textquotedblleft}local settlers.{\textquotedblright} The story of this dissertation, then, is the story of how the locals became settlers.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37370235}, author = {Caroline Kahlenberg} } @mastersthesis {1439406, title = {Brave New Turkey: Contesting the Production and Valuation of Bodies, Urban Space, and Ecology}, year = {2021}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In this ethnography, I examine fragmented urban and social dynamics in Istanbul, Turkey. The issues of the country are mirrored and coalesced into these dynamics. Binaries of proper/valuable versus improper/abjected city and citizens emerge from a {\textquotedblleft}New Turkey{\textquotedblright} politics. This creates hierarchies of bodies, urban spaces, ecological practices, and types of knowledge. Rooted in historical de/valuation processes, Turkey{\textquoteright}s current technologies of power intensify and gain new momentum and scale. Lawfare, identity politics, urban planning, and technocratic ecological strategies are instrumental in implementing interdependent urban and social transformation. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, I analyze the contestation of governmental actors, local authorities, environmental activists, local residents, and garbage workers over the production and valuation of bodies, space, and ecology. From this, I address the broader picture of classist, gendered, ethnic, and racist discrimination as a process that most evidently manifests itself in urban space.

The socio-spatial impact of a {\textquotedblleft}New Turkey{\textquotedblright} is most starkly felt among the urban poor whose livelihood depends on environmental practices. Here, I focus on a specific group that is invisible for many: non-municipal garbage workers who are targets of intersectional devaluation. Through green(wash)ing strategies, their homes are displaced by {\textquotedblleft}healthy and sustainable{\textquotedblright} luxury housing projects and infrastructure. They are treated as second-class citizens and, therefore, socially and economically immobilized. At the same time, they contest the authorities over garbage as a commodity, and the law criminalizes their recycling practices. Conflict and resistance occur not only between actors but also within institutions, activist movements, and affected communities. As various players share risks, new{\textemdash}and sometimes unexpected{\textemdash}alliances are formed under the common goals of social and environmental justice and rights to the city. The ambiguity of all of this is reflected in the title: {\textquotedblleft}BRAVE NEW TURKEY.{\textquotedblright} On the one hand it speaks to the forging of the current hegemonic Turkishness and Turkish urban landscape under the banner of the {\textquotedblleft}New Turkey{\textquotedblright} politics. On the other hand a {\textquotedblleft}brave new Turkey{\textquotedblright} addresses the creative conflict and resistance against this dystopian moment of governing bodies, urban space, and ecology. Indeed, this research deals with the continuous efforts of various groups who claim their place in their {\textquotedblleft}new Turkey.{\textquotedblright} Under the current political and social circumstances, I consider this an act of bravery. After all, a new Turkey belongs not only to the hegemonically powerful but also to those who shape the country{\textquoteright}s future through their creative struggle for diversity and inclusion.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37370065}, author = {Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe} } @book {1421648, title = {Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian: Eulogist for a Falling Homeland}, year = {2021}, pages = {176}, publisher = {Oneworld Publications}, organization = {Oneworld Publications}, abstract = {

{\textquoteleft}Abd al-Jabbar ibn Hamdis (1055-1133) survives as the best-known figure from four centuries of Arab-Islamic civilisation on the island of Sicily. There he grew up in a society enriched by a century of cultural development but whose unity was threatened by competing warlords. After the Normans invaded, he followed many other Muslims in emigrating, first to North Africa and then to Seville, where he began his career as a court poet.

Although he achieved fame and success in his time, Ibn Hamdis was forced to bear witness to sectarian strife among the Muslims of both Sicily and Spain, and the gradual success of the Christian reconquest, including the decline of his beloved homeland. Through his verse, William Granara examines his life and times.

}, url = {https://oneworld-publications.com/ibn-hamdis-the-sicilian-hb.html}, author = {William Granara} } @book {1415411, title = {Those Infidel Greeks: The Greek War of Independence through Ottoman Archival Documents}, year = {2021}, pages = {1692}, publisher = {Brill}, organization = {Brill}, abstract = {

The documents edited by H. {\c S}{\"u}kr{\"u} Il{\i}cak in Those Indel Greeks comprise the English translations of select documents from the Ayniyat Registers on the Greek War of Independence preserved in the Ottoman State Archives. The primary importance of these documents is that they are a clear testimony of the larger imperial context in which the Greek War of Independence evolved and proved successful. The mass of information they contain is immense and allows the reader to follow on an almost day-to-day basis how an empire tried to suppress a national uprising{\textemdash}the rst of its kind in the early nineteenth century.

Contributors: {\c C}a{\u g}r{\i} Erdo{\u g}an, H. {\c S}{\"u}kr{\"u} Il{\i}cak, Nikola Rakovski, Mehmet Savan, Kahraman {\c S}akul, and Aysel Y{\i}ld{\i}z.

This is a co-publication with the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation.

}, url = {https://brill.com/view/title/60933}, editor = {H. {\c S}{\"u}kr{\"u} Il{\i}cak} } @mastersthesis {1409581, title = {Scattered Images: The Perpetual Destabilization of Family in Pursuit of Political Dominance (Palestine 1948{\textendash}Syria 1980)}, year = {2021}, note = {

CMES Thesis Prize

}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Mouhanad Al-Rifay} } @mastersthesis {1409580, title = {Earthquakes and Epidemics: The Impact of Natural Disasters on the ʿAbb{\={a}}sid Revolution}, year = {2021}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {John Paul (Jack) Murphy} } @book {1421649, title = {The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science}, year = {2020}, pages = {344}, publisher = {Brill}, organization = {Brill}, abstract = {

The Thousand and One Nights does not fall into a scholarly canon or into the category of popular literature. It takes its place within a middle literature that circulated widely in medieval times. The Nights gradually entered world literature through the great novels of the day and through music, cinema and other art forms. Material inspired by the Nights has continued to emerge from many different countries, periods, disciplines and languages, and the scope of the Nights has continued to widen, making the collection a universal work from every point of view. The essays in this volume scrutinize the expanse of sources for this monumental work of Arabic literature and follow the trajectory of the Nights{\textquoteright} texts, the creative, scholarly commentaries, artistic encounters and relations to science.

Contributors: Ibrahim Akel, Rasoul Aliakbari, Daniel Behar, Aboubakr Chra{\"\i}bi, Anne E. Duggan, William Granara, Rafika Hammoudi, Dominique Jullien, Abdelfattah Kilito, Magdalena Kubarek, Michael James Lundell, Ulrich Marzolph, Adam Mestyan, Ey{\"u}p {\"O}zveren, Marina Paino, Daniela Potenza, Arafat Abdur Razzaque, Ahmed Saidy, Johannes Thomann and Ilaria Vitali.

}, url = {https://brill.com/view/title/55386}, editor = {William Granara and Ibrahim Akel} } @mastersthesis {1409578, title = {The Image as Commodity: The Commercial Market for Single-Folio Paintings in Ottoman Istanbul, 17th{\textendash}18th C.}, year = {2020}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, for most of the sixteenth century, only royalty and close companions of the sultan enjoyed the experience of perusing an album, the premier form of preserving and viewing single-folio works on paper. Yet in the last few decades of the century, the first surviving cases of commercial albums reveal that the practice had moved beyond the palace, attracting both wealthy Ottoman urbanites and European travelers alike. This dissertation delves into the history of the art market from the production to the consumption of loose-leaf paintings in numerous compilation formats. Although scholarship on Istanbul{\textquoteright}s early modern art market and single-folio paintings has often centered on analyses of individual manuscripts, such as costume albums, this study aims to contextualize these single-folio paintings as part of a wider network of urban production. In this network, models and designs circulated between artists of numerous social groups and specialties, as well as through foreign import. The study further refocuses attention on codicology in order to illustrate how the trappings of a collection could profoundly impact the reception of the works within it and reveal precious detail about the backgrounds of the owners, many of whom remain anonymous today.
The dissertation begins by setting the stage for the emergence of the market for single-folio paintings by analyzing the antecedents to the commercial album through Ottoman court albums, portraits, and the works of unofficial court artists who lived in the city. It then turns to European genres such as costume books and alba amicorum (friendship albums), before turning to the first commercial album, which fuses features from the aforementioned areas. Chapter Two assesses production techniques, emphasizing the mobility of model forms, before turning to artists{\textquoteright} multi-professional backgrounds. The next two chapters delve into the collecting practices of the two main consumer groups. Chapter Three follows the development of costume albums primarily collected by European travelers over the seventeenth century as objects of novelty crafted from a commonplace corpus of models. It tracks the expansion of the model corpus, shifts in binding and mounting practices, and the relationships between albums (as well as their identified forgeries).

Chapter Four offers a history of compilation among urbanite Ottomans of a literati persuasion over the seventeenth century as a story of taste-making on the page. As the practice grew, artists began offering a wider range of works to suit multiple price points of paintings and bindings among their consumers. Chapter Five continues to follow Ottoman compilers into the eighteenth century after the court{\textquoteright}s return to Istanbul in 1703, which coincided with a significant increase in album-making. This period brought about the rise of specialized painting collections. The market also began to engage with its past as later commercial albums provided a wider chronological range of paintings from numerous traditions, which included refurbished and creatively over-painted works. Rather than Westernization, these albums indicate a global outlook that reflected mercantile networks of the time. The last two chapters delve into the case of an unstudied trilogy of albums at the Biblioth{\`e}que Nationale de France that exemplifies these later trends. Together, they offer a hypothesis for the background of the owner while situating the albums in the local and transregional contexts that created this cosmopolitan work.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365883}, author = {Gwendolyn Colla{\c c}o} } @mastersthesis {1409577, title = {The Sin of Ghiba in Early Islamic Thought: Disciplining the Tongue in the Zuhd Tradition and Its Late Antique Background}, year = {2020}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation explores the form, substance and social context of pious exhortations in medieval Islamic history, focusing on ideas about gossip and slander. It is a study on a single concept of enduring significance in Islamic ethics, the notion of ghiba or backbiting, defined as unwelcome statements of fact as opposed to false slander (buht{\={a}}n). Prohibited by the Qurʾ{\={a}}n, the mundane social vice of speaking ill about other people in their absence was a source of great moral concern, with ramifications in discourses of piety, religious ethics, ritual law, and eschatology. Early proponents of the isn{\={a}}d method for the authentication of ḥadith had to frequently address the ethical quandary that their criticism of transmitters might be tantamount to sinful gossip. I demonstrate that the discourse on ghiba stems from a broader ethics of {\textquotedblleft}disciplining the tongue{\textquotedblright} among the early Muslim renunciants of the so-called zuhd movement. A major work by the Baghdadi scholar Ibn Abi l-Duny{\={a}} (d. 281 AH/894 CE), the Kit{\={a}}b al-Ṣamt wa-{\={a}}d{\={a}}b al-lis{\={a}}n or {\textquotedblleft}Book of Silence and Etiquettes of the Tongue{\textquotedblright} serves as a key point of departure for this study. I examine the traditions, stories and wise maxims on ghiba in the context of zuhd, ḥadith, tafsir and fiqh sources, as well as their broader reception in pious ethics literature of the ninth and tenth centuries CE. Through close attention to motifs, I argue further that some early Muslim ideas about gossip and slander reflect older traditions of religious thought in late antiquity. The commonalities are evident especially in the Apophthegmata Patrum or Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Resonances can be traced as well through eschatological motifs common to Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian apocalyptic literature and Islamic imaginations of hell, in which the sin of backbiting is met with severe punishments. In contrast to conventional ancient punishment motifs for slander, Islamic eschatology introduces new types of scenes informed by the Qurʾ{\={a}}nic metaphor of ghiba as eating the flesh of another. Early Muslim ethical discourses thus interpreted a universal moral concern through a combination of inherited traditions and original elements.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365959}, author = {Arafat Abdur Razzaque} } @mastersthesis {1409575, title = {How Photography Changed Politics: The Case of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911)}, year = {2020}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

My dissertation reconceptualizes the Iranian Constitutional period (1905-1911) as an era of spectacle, in which photography played a central role in defining, mobilizing, and memorializing political movements and their leaders. The first chapter of my dissertation traces the role and impact of one specific photograph: a portrait of Joseph Naus, the Belgian head of the Iranian tax and customs systems, in the costume of an Iranian mullah. The circulation of the photograph, which had been reproduced as a postcard with a caption that purposefully misinterpreted the image, sparked a nationwide protest and turned the previously economic protest into a religiously legitimated one. The photograph became the basis for a fatwa and death threats to Naus. The second chapter discusses photographs of political protest. It focuses on a key event of the Constitutional Revolution, a several weeks-long sit-in during the summer of 1906 in the gardens of the British Legation in Tehran. In my research, I was able to prove that the so far unattributed series of photographs of this event was taken by the well-known photographer Antoin Sevruguin. The third chapter focuses on political portrait photographs from the second half of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, which was characterized by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence. I analyze portraits of Iranian assassins and their victims and show how these acts of violence were influenced by global political movements and international media coverage. The epilogue of my dissertation focuses on the events directly following the Constitutional Revolution, when the Russian army invaded Tabriz and executed the remaining revolutionaries. I discuss the photographic documentation of the events, the circulation of the images, and their changing interpretations.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365978}, author = {Mira Xenia Schwerda} } @mastersthesis {1439314, title = {Silks Withdrawn: A Re-Contextualization of the Medieval Fragments from Rayy}, year = {2020}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The corpus of silks recovered from the medieval tombs of Rayy, which lies to the South of modern-day Tehran in Iran, date from the late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries. Their span corresponds to a period of time referred to here as {\textquotedblleft}late Abbasid{\textquotedblright} (ca. 950-1250), in which the hegemony of the Abbasid dynasty (r. 750-1258) had faded, giving way to a soft power propped up by a series of vassal sovereigns{\textemdash}principally, the Buyids (r. 945-1030), the Ghaznavids (r.1030-1032, Iran), and the Seljuks (r. 1032-1250, Iran). While the tombs can be attributed to the early decades of Seljuk reign in the mid-eleventh century, the textiles included in the graves were woven both before and after the monuments{\textquoteright} construction. As a result, the finds at Rayy offer a unique opportunity to observe, within a fixed frame of context, how artistic forms were maintained, and their meanings slowly altered over this tumultuous period. By analyzing the textiles according to art historical and material culture methods, the dissertation argues that the Rayy textiles reveal the ambivalent identities and evolving ambitions of the successive dynasties that made use of them. They show, at once, a conscientious upholding of the caliphal norms and ceremonials required of dynastic elites, as well as a concerted manipulation of those rules aimed at projecting kingship amid the changing realities of the Abbasid empire. To highlight the fundamental cross-purposes these textiles served, the dissertation divides them into three, seemingly straightforward categories: textiles of the public sphere, the private sphere, and the funerary sphere. These spheres conform to the ideals of Abbasid ceremonial and decorum and serve as an opportunity to question how principles of proper conduct were enacted aesthetically. At the same time, the spheres reveal the limitations faced by dynastic rulers and their elite circles, as well as how they responded by pushing the boundaries of each category. The duality of each sphere demonstrates how the textiles from Rayy were integral in the self-fashioning that allowed the vassal kings to nominally uphold the Abbasid order, while simultaneously carving out a place for their own modes of sovereignty, worship, and commemoration. Although textile finds rumored to come from Rayy have been studied since their initial {\textquotedblleft}discovery{\textquotedblright} by dealers in early 1925, forgeries made in the 1930s and thereafter have forced scholarship to deal almost exclusively with modern questions of authenticity. The origins, debates, and outcomes of the so-called {\textquotedblleft}Buyid Silk Controversy{\textquotedblright} receive further elucidation here. It is, however, principally the question of medieval authenticity which lies at the center of this study. That is to say, textiles were often a medium of display and luxury; as such, they provide a means of understanding how authenticity{\textemdash}be it a marker of public position, self image, or faith{\textemdash}was enacted visually and materially in the late Abbasid period. The Rayy corpus offers a crucial glimpse of these processes, as late Abbasid artistic products rarely have clear dates or places of manufacture, let alone provenances. As such, the dissertation takes a hermeneutic look at this corpus, deriving evidence from their formal, technical, and material analysis, in order to elucidate the contrived continuity of self-fashioning in the late Abbasid period, as well as the nuanced variations compelled by each successive ruling dynasty as they adapted Abbasid ceremonial to their own aspirations.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37368947}, author = {Meredyth Lynn Winter} } @mastersthesis {1439310, title = {Paracelsus Goes East: Ottoman {\textquoteright}New Medicine{\textquoteright} and Its Afterlife}, year = {2020}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation investigates how early modern Ottoman medical scholars viewed the concept of novelty and how it manifested itself in the socio-political domain. Appearing in the mid-seventeenth century and maintaining its substantial impact throughout the eighteenth century, ṭ{\i}bb-{\i} cedid (new medicine) became a very significant concept and practice that almost all the prominent scholars of the era explored. This was the first time that discussions regarding the utilization of al/chemical ideas and practices in medical philosophy and pharmacology were introduced into the medical scholarship via a group of Ottoman scholars. In previous scholarship, this era has either been portrayed as a {\textquotedblleft}transitional{\textquotedblright} period, which represented the abandonment of the {\textquotedblleft}traditional medicine{\textquotedblright} for adoption of European medicine, or as a time when intriguing works were produced without yielding any substantial novelties in medical practice.

Primarily by undertaking a close reading of the representative texts of the ṭ{\i}bb-{\i} cedid corpus, this study demonstrates the complex interactions between the various epistemological approaches available to the Ottoman physicians as they produced the medical corpus of a new era. This study shows that the eighteenth-century scholars never disowned their Galenic heritage completely, while embracing new al/ chemical ideas. Moreover, they did not accomplish their intellectual endeavors as part of a state-sponsored Europeanization/Westernization project. This emerging corpus created fertile ground for lively discussions in Ottoman medical scholarship, which went hand in hand with the application of new curative substances, imported from various parts of the world, including, but not exclusive to the Americas. I approach these moments of critical translation and adaptation from lived aspects of medical practice, which are overlooked in current scholarship in the history of medicine that has restricted the material to the intertextual domain of books and ideas. Furthermore, this study, regards the physician as one among the artisans of the marketplace, which brings to light how their practice and profession were negotiated with the Ottoman State during the eighteenth century. Last but not least, I look at the nineteenth-century afterlife of ṭ{\i}bb-{\i} cedid, when western-influenced reforms were taking place in every aspect of life and a new discourse on medicine and medical education were being introduced. I show that the Imperial Medical School (Mekteb-i Ṭ{\i}bbiyye-i {\c S}{\={a}}h{\={a}}ne) had an immense impact on the physicians of the era on their evaluation of their medical past, including ṭ{\i}bb-{\i} cedid, and created a lineage of physician-historians who produced modernist-positivistic historiographies, which still influences medical history-writing today, especially in Turkish scholarship.

}, url = {https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37368912}, author = {Akif Ercihan Yerlio{\u g}lu} } @book {1364665, title = {Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings}, year = {2020}, pages = {330}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, organization = {Cambridge University Press}, abstract = {

Most observers of Iran viewed the Green Uprisings of 2009 as a {\textquoteright}failed revolution{\textquoteright}, with many Iranians and those in neighbouring Arab countries agreeing. In Contesting the Iranian Revolution, however, Pouya Alimagham re-examines this evaluation, deconstructing the conventional win-lose binary interpretations in a way which underscores the subtle but important victories on the ground, and reveals how Iran{\textquoteright}s modern history imbues those triumphs with consequential meaning. Focusing on the men and women who made this dynamic history, and who exist at the centre of these contentious politics, this {\textquoteright}history from below{\textquoteright} brings to the fore the post-Islamist discursive assault on the government{\textquoteright}s symbols of legitimation. From powerful symbols rooted in Shiʿite Islam, Palestinian liberation, and the Iranian Revolution, Alimagham harnesses the wider history of Iran and the Middle East to highlight how activists contested the Islamic Republic{\textquoteright}s legitimacy to its very core.

}, url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/contesting-the-iranian-revolution/90AEB77871D560D5AB482BC0FA43B447$\#$fndtn-information}, author = {Pouya Alimagham} } @mastersthesis {1328921, title = {The {\textquoteright}Houthification{\textquoteright} of Education in Yemen: A Revival of Pedagogical Battlegrounds?}, year = {2020}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Hannah M. Clager} } @mastersthesis {1328922, title = {The Afterlives of Aftershocks: Collective Memory and the 1992 Cairo Earthquake}, year = {2020}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Eleanor Takenaka Ellis} } @mastersthesis {1328923, title = {Ghosts and Parallel Times: The Haunting of Palestinian Citizens of Israel}, year = {2020}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Maria Khoury} } @book {1296448, title = {Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader}, year = {2020}, pages = {256}, publisher = {Yale University Press}, organization = {Yale University Press}, abstract = {

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a masterful new biography of Theodor Herzl by an eminent historian of Zionism.

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860{\textendash}1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a stern moralist yet possessed of deep, and at times dark, passions? And why did scores of thousands of Jews, many of them from traditional, observant backgrounds, embrace Herzl as their leader?

Drawing on a vast body of Herzl{\textquoteright}s personal, literary, and political writings, historian Derek Penslar shows that Herzl{\textquoteright}s path to Zionism had as much to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism. Once Herzl devoted himself to Zionism, Penslar shows, he distinguished himself as a consummate leader{\textemdash}possessed of indefatigable energy, organizational ability, and electrifying charisma. Herzl became a screen onto which Jews of his era could project their deepest needs and longings.

}, url = {https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300180404/theodor-herzl}, author = {Derek Penslar} } @book {1398746, title = {Lebanon: The Rise and Fall of a Secular State under Siege}, year = {2019}, pages = {326}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, organization = {Cambridge University Press}, abstract = {

Why has secularism faced such challenges in the Middle East and in Lebanon in particular? In light of dominating headlines about the spread of sectarianism and the so-called death of Arab secularism, Mark Farha addresses the need for a thorough examination of the history of secular thought and practice in the region. By offering a comprehensive, systematic account of the underlying ideological, socio-economic, and political factors involved, Farha provides a new understanding of the historical roots of secularism as well as the potential causes for the continued resistance a fully deconfessionalized state faces both in Lebanon and in the region at large. Drawing on a vast corpus of primary and secondary sources to examine the varying political parties and ideologies involved, this book provides a fresh approach to the study of religion and politics in the Arab world and beyond.

}, url = {https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/middle-east-government-politics-and-policy/lebanon-rise-and-fall-secular-state-under-siege?format=PB}, author = {Mark Farha} } @book {1302810, title = {The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics, and Community}, year = {2019}, pages = {400}, publisher = {Edinburgh University Press}, organization = {Edinburgh University Press}, abstract = {

Explores the transformation of the Kizilbash from a radical religio-political movement to a religious order of closed communities.

The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Yet several aspects of their history remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.

}, url = {https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-kizilbash-alevis-in-ottoman-anatolia.html}, author = {Ayfer Karakaya-Stump} } @book {1301335, title = {The Anthropology of Islamic Law: Education, Ethics, and Legal Interpretation at Egypt{\textquoteright}s Al-Azhar}, year = {2019}, pages = {328}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, organization = {Oxford University Press}, abstract = {

The Anthropology of Islamic Law shows how hermeneutic theory and practice theory can be brought together to analyze cultural, legal, and religious traditions. These ideas are developed through an analysis of the Islamic legal tradition, which examines both Islamic legal doctrine and religious education. The book combines anthropology and Islamist history, using ethnography and in-depth analysis of Arabic religious texts. The book focuses on higher religious learning in contemporary Egypt, examining its intellectual, ethical, and pedagogical dimensions. Data is drawn from fieldwork inside al-Azhar University, Cairo University{\textquoteright}s Dar al-Ulum, and the network of traditional study circles associated with the al-Azhar mosque. Together these sites constitute the most important venue for the transmission of religious learning in the contemporary Muslim world. The book gives special attention to contemporary Egypt, and also provides a broader analysis relevant to Islamic legal doctrine and religious education throughout history.

}, url = {https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-anthropology-of-islamic-law-9780190932886?cc=us\&lang=en\&}, author = {Aria Nakissa} } @book {1295052, title = {The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity}, year = {2019}, pages = {384}, publisher = {Stanford University Press}, organization = {Stanford University Press}, abstract = {

No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.

Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.

}, url = {https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24702}, author = {Darryl Li} } @mastersthesis {1293546, title = {A Coherence of Incoherences: Graeco-Arabic Philosophy and the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Synthesis of Philosophy with Sharia}, year = {2019}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The fifteenth-century Ottoman world was a dynamic seedbed of philosophical and theological debates and was particularly marked by numerous adjudications produced by certain celebrated scholars who synthesized different domains of knowledge{\textemdash}whether it was speculative theology, philosophy or Sufism. This dissertation focuses on two important adjudications written on the renowned twelfth-century theologian Abu Ḥamid al-Ghaz{\={a}}li{\textquoteright}s (d. 505/1111) Tah{\={a}}fut al-fal{\={a}}sifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), which arbitrates between Arabic philosophy and theology.

Sultan Meḥemmed II ordered two prominent Ottoman scholars of his time, Ḫocaz{\={a}}de Muṣliḥ al-Din (d. 893/1488) and cAl{\={a}}{\textquoteright} al-Din al-Ṭusi (d. 887/1482), to prepare an adjudication on al-Ghaz{\={a}}li{\textquoteright}s arguments. Sources indicate that the Sultan ultimately favored Ḫocaz{\={a}}de{\textquoteright}s text. This study focuses on Ḫocaz{\={a}}de{\textquoteright}s and al-Ṭusi{\textquoteright}s responses to the discussion of secondary causation and occasionalism in al-Ghaz{\={a}}li{\textquoteright}s Discussion Seventeen on how existent things interact with each other and come into being in nature in concomitance with God{\textquoteright}s all-encompassing power. Ḫocaz{\={a}}de particularly defended certain aspects of Graeco-Arabic philosophy (i.e. the Aristotelian-Avicennan philosophical tradition), whereas al-Ṭusi favored the more orthodox Ashcarite approach, in which he denied the agency and the causal contribution of any being other than God. This examination argues that Ḫocaz{\={a}}de{\textquoteright}s response to this discussion indicates why he was included among the seven select scholars who synthesized philosophy with Sharica according to the seventeenth-century encyclopedist and savant K{\={a}}tib {\c C}elebi (d. 1068/1657). Ḫocaz{\={a}}de{\textquoteright}s and al-Ṭusi{\textquoteright}s divergent approaches to the issues of secondary causation and occasionalism typify other formulations in the fifteenth-century Ottoman world that combined different aspects of Graeco-Arabic philosophy, speculative theology, and Sunni creed, constituting a synthesis.

This study assays the works of Ḫocaz{\={a}}de and al-Ṭusi in physics, metaphysics and speculative theology with regard to the common medrese handbooks studied during the fifteenth-century, as well as their responses to al-Ghaz{\={a}}li{\textquoteright}s aforementioned work{\textemdash}in comparative perspective with a third approach espoused by {\c S}emseddin Aḥmed bin Mus{\={a}}, also known as Ḫay{\={a}}li (d. 875/1470?). This study traces the formulations of Ḫocaz{\={a}}de, al-Ṭusi, and Ḫay{\={a}}li in common medrese handbooks of the time by documenting how their approaches were motivated by post-classical scholars such as Athir al-Din al-Abhari (d. 663/1255?), Naṣir al-Din Ṭusi (d. 672/1274) and al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-Jurj{\={a}}ni (d. 816/1413). This research highlights a new group of scholars emerging in the second half of the fifteenth century, hailed as {\textquotedblleft}verifiers{\textquotedblright} (al-muḥaqqiqun), who were able to synthesize various philosophical and theological formulations from differing textual traditions. Ḫocaz{\={a}}de epitomized this new scholar type, developing a coherent argument by incorporating elements from Graeco-Arabic philosophy and speculative theology.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42013152}, author = {Efe Balikcioglu} } @mastersthesis {1293901, title = {Sedimented Encounters: Dams, Conservation, and Politics in Turkey}, year = {2019}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is an ethnography of socio-natural encounters that shape, and are shaped by, the building of dam infrastructures within the {\c C}oruh River Watershed of Turkey. Known as one of the fastest-running rivers in the world, the {\c C}oruh River has been converted into a hydropower {\textquotedblleft}resource{\textquotedblright} over the last two decades, through the construction of fifteen large hydroelectric dams. In contrast to the imagery of dam reservoirs as giant infrastructures that simply conquer and erase the natural landscape, this dissertation traces the formulization of soil sedimentation in the reservoirs as a problem to be solved by watershed forestry, which has refashioned forests as protective infrastructures of {\textquotedblleft}water resources{\textquotedblright} and hydraulic infrastructures. This refashioning, I show, occurs through sedimented histories of nation-state building, developmentalism, and authoritarian populism taking shape in material infrastructures and environments. My ethnographic research among the implementers of the {\c C}oruh River Watershed Rehabilitation Project to prevent sedimentation in dams reveals the encounters between the foresters{\textquoteright} and upland villagers{\textquoteright} conceptualizations of abandoned mountainous farmlands as landscapes of natural recovery versus desolation. I then shift my focus to the valley floor and examine the making of the Yusufeli Dam reservoir as a process narrated and experienced by town inhabitants through the trope of (self-)sacrifice for the greater national interest. In response, local state officials intend to compensate for these sacrificed zones by relocating agricultural soil and local fruit trees. These practices of what I call salvage agriculture render the sedimented and laborious histories of working the land a resource to be tapped into for the reconstruction of a new town. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research along the {\c C}oruh Valley and its mountains, as well as five months of archival research in ministries and other institutions, Sedimented Encounters explores dam construction as a generative process that enacts and intertwines the making of {\textquotedblleft}natural resources,{\textquotedblright} the nation-state and its developmental and conservationist endeavors, and the politics of negotiation and sacrifice. Along this process, I argue, socio-natural landscapes are produced simultaneously as places of natural recovery, (self)-sacrifice, and salvage.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42013131}, author = {Ekin Kurtic} } @mastersthesis {1293505, title = {The Self-Flagellation of a Nation: Assad, Iran, and Regime Survival in Syria}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Oula Alrifai} } @mastersthesis {1293506, title = {Women{\textquoteright}s Head Covering in Islam and Judaism}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Amna Al-Thani} } @mastersthesis {1293575, title = {Minorities and the State: A Comparative Study of Variations in Levels of Internal Dissidence within Morocco and Jordan}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Sahar Amarir} } @mastersthesis {1293584, title = {From Oslo to Taba: Was a Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ever Truly within Reach?}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Joshua Dean} } @mastersthesis {1293585, title = {Javanmardi-e Fety{\={a}}n: Spiritual Chivalry in Early Modern Iran}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Tara Dhaliwal} } @mastersthesis {1293589, title = {The Americanization of European Foreign Policy vis-{\`a}-vis Iran: How the European Union Became Beholden to the United States{\textquoteright} Iran Policy}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Fridtjof Falk} } @mastersthesis {1293590, title = {So You Think You{\textquoteright}re Empowering Women? A Critique of NGOs through Ethnographies of Female Breadwinners in Urban Cairo}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Mariam Ghanem} } @mastersthesis {1293591, title = {Homosexuality and Same-Sex Union in Islam: An Analysis of Contemporary Debates}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Amber Glavine} } @mastersthesis {1293593, title = {Khomeini{\textquoteright}s Philosopher King: Examining the Philosophical Origins of Vil{\={a}}yat-i Faqih}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Suzie Lahoud} } @mastersthesis {1293594, title = {Institutional Change and Continuity in the Era of Mohammad bin Salman: A Case Study of the Solar Power Industry in Saudi Arabia}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Oliver McPherson-Smith} } @mastersthesis {1293481, title = {Constitutionalism in Modern Iraq, 1839-1958}, year = {2019}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Nicholas Norberg} } @book {1271090, title = {Ottoman Land Reform in the Province of Baghdad}, year = {2019}, pages = {323}, publisher = {Brill}, organization = {Brill}, abstract = {

In Ottoman Land Reform in the Province of Baghdad, Keiko Kiyotaki traces the Ottoman reforms of tax farming and land tenure and establishes that their effects were the key ingredients of agricultural progress. These modernizing reforms are shown to be effective because they were compatible with local customs and tribal traditions, which the Ottoman governors worked to preserve.

Ottoman rule in Iraq has previously been considered oppressive and blamed with failure to develop the country. Since the British mandate government{\textquoteright}s land and tax policies were little examined, the Ottoman legacy has been left unidentified. This book proves that Ottoman land reforms led to increases in agricultural production and tax revenue, while the hasty reforms enacted by the mandate government ignoring indigenous customs caused new agricultural and land problems.

}, url = {https://brill.com/view/title/14853}, author = {Keiko Kiyotaki} } @book {1230423, title = {Disciples of the State? Religion and State-Building in the Former Ottoman World}, year = {2019}, pages = {310}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, organization = {Cambridge University Press}, abstract = {

As the Ottoman Empire crumbled, the Middle East and Balkans became the site of contestation and cooperation between the traditional forces of religion and the emergent machine of the sovereign state. Yet such strategic interaction rarely yielded a decisive victory for either the secular state or for religion. By tracing how state-builders engaged religious institutions, elites, and attachments, this book problematizes the divergent religion-state power configurations that have developed. There are two central arguments. First, states carved out more sovereign space in places like Greece and Turkey, where religious elites were integral to early centralizing reform processes. Second, region-wide structural constraints on the types of linkages that states were able to build with religion have generated long-term repercussions. Fatefully, both state policies that seek to facilitate equality through the recognition of religious difference and state policies that seek to eradicate such difference have contributed to failures of liberal democratic consolidation.

}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108296878}, author = {Kristin Fabbe} } @book {1230038, title = {Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4) (2 vols)}, year = {2019}, pages = {Vol. I: xiv, 1080 pp.; Vol. II: viii, 242 pp., 188 pp. facs. pls.}, publisher = {Brill}, organization = {Brill}, abstract = {The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkap{\i} Palace in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502{\textendash}3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503{\textendash}4). This unicum inventory preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudom{\'a}nyos Akad{\'e}mia K{\"o}nyvt{\'a}ra Keleti Gy{\H u}jtem{\'e}ny, MS T{\"o}r{\"o}k F. 59) records over 5,000 volumes, and more than 7,000 titles, on virtually every branch of human erudition at the time. The Ottoman palace library housed an unmatched encyclopedic collection of learning and literature; hence, the publication of this unique inventory opens a larger conversation about Ottoman and Islamic intellectual/cultural history. The very creation of such a systematically ordered inventory of books raises broad questions about knowledge production and practices of collecting, readership, librarianship, and the arts of the book at the dawn of the sixteenth century. The first volume contains twenty-eight interpretative essays on this fascinating document, authored by a team of scholars from diverse disciplines, including Islamic and Ottoman history, history of science, arts of the book and codicology, agriculture, medicine, astrology, astronomy, occultism, mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, mysticism, political thought, ethics, literature (Arabic, Persian, Turkish/Turkic), philology, and epistolary. Following the first three essays by the editors on implications of the library inventory as a whole, the other essays focus on particular fields of knowledge under which books are catalogued in MS T{\"o}r{\"o}k F. 59, each accompanied by annotated lists of entries. The second volume presents a transliteration of the Arabic manuscript, which also features an Ottoman Turkish preface on method, together with a reduced-scale facsimile.}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004402508}, editor = {G{\"u}lru Necipo{\u g}lu and Cemal Kafadar and Cornell H. Fleischer} } @book {1230227, title = {Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World}, year = {2019}, pages = {240}, publisher = {I.B. Tauris}, organization = {I.B. Tauris}, abstract = {

In 902 the last Byzantine stronghold in Sicily fell, and the island would remain under Muslim control until the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century. Drawing on a lifetime of translating and linguistic experience, William Granara here focuses on the various ways in which medieval Arab historians, geographers, jurists and philologists imagined and articulated their ever-changing identities in this turbulent period. All of these authors sought to make sense of the island{\textquoteright}s dramatic twists, including conquest and struggles over political sovereignty, and the painful decline of social and cultural life. Writing about Siqilliya involved drawing from memory, conjecture and then-current theories of why nations and people rose and fell. In so doing, Granara considers and translates, often for the first time, a vast range of primary sources - from the master chronicles of Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khadun to biographical dictionaries, geographical works, legal treatises and poetry - and modern scholarship not available in English. He charts the shift from Sicily as {\textquoteright}warrior outpost{\textquoteright} to vital and productive hub that would transform the medieval Islamic world, and indeed the entire Mediterranean.

}, url = {https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/narrating-muslim-sicily-9781788313063/}, author = {William Granara} } @book {1230285, title = {A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East}, year = {2019}, pages = {256}, publisher = {I.B. Tauris}, organization = {I.B. Tauris}, abstract = {

In this comprehensive and up to date history, from prehistoric proto-Indo-Iranian times to the post-Soviet period, Richard Foltz traces the complex linguistic, cultural and political history of the Tajiks, a Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic group from the modern-day Central Asian states of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. In eight chapters, the author explores the revitalisation of Persian culture under the Samanid Empire in the Tajik heartlands of historical Khorasan and Transoxiana; analyses the evolution of the politics of Tajik identity; and traces the history of the ethnic Tajik diaspora today.

}, url = {https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-history-of-the-tajiks-9781784539559/}, author = {Richard Foltz} } @book {1230283, title = {Enlightening Europe on Islam and the Ottomans: Mouradgea d{\textquoteright}Ohsson and His Masterpiece}, year = {2019}, pages = {398 pp., 134 ill.}, publisher = {Brill}, organization = {Brill}, abstract = {

Mouradgea d{\textquoteright}Ohsson{\textquoteright}s Tableau g{\'e}n{\'e}ral de l{\textquoteright}Empire othoman offered the Enlightenment Republic of Letters its most authoritative work on Islam and the Ottomans, also a practical reference work for kings and statesmen. Profusely illustrated and opening deep insights into illustrated book production in this period, this is also the richest collection of visual documentation on the Ottomans in a hundred years. Shaped by the author{\textquoteright}s personal struggles, the work yet commands recognition in its own totality as a monument to inter-cultural understanding. In form one of the great taxonomic works of Enlightenment thought, this is a work of advocacy in the cause of reform and amity among France, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire.

}, url = {https://brill.com/view/title/36104}, author = {Carter V. Findley} } @book {1230255, title = {City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk}, year = {2019}, pages = {296}, publisher = {Stanford University Press}, organization = {Stanford University Press}, abstract = {

Kirkuk is Iraq{\textquoteright}s most multilingual city, for millennia home to a diverse population. It was also where, in 1927, a foreign company first struck oil in Iraq. Over the following decades, Kirkuk became the heart of Iraq{\textquoteright}s booming petroleum industry. City of Black Gold tells a story of oil, urbanization, and colonialism in Kirkuk{\textemdash}and how these factors shaped the identities of Kirkuk{\textquoteright}s citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict.

Arbella Bet-Shlimon reconstructs the twentieth-century history of Kirkuk to question the assumptions about the past underpinning today{\textquoteright}s ethnic divisions. In the early 1920s, when the Iraqi state was formed under British administration, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid. But as the oil industry fostered colonial power and Baghdad{\textquoteright}s influence over Kirkuk, intercommunal violence and competing claims to the city{\textquoteright}s history took hold. The ethnicities of Kurds, Turkmens, and Arabs in Kirkuk were formed throughout a century of urban development, interactions between communities, and political mobilization. Ultimately, this book shows how contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.

}, url = {https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27108}, author = {Arbella Bet-Shlimon} } @book {1230247, title = {The Responsible Globalist: What Citizens of the World Can Learn from Nationalism}, year = {2019}, pages = {208}, publisher = {Penguin}, organization = {Penguin}, abstract = {

Today, globalism has a bad reputation. {\textquoteright}Citizens of the world{\textquoteright} are depicted as recklessly uninterested in how international economic networks can affect local communities. Meanwhile, nationalists are often derided as racists and bigots. But what if the two were not so far apart? What could globalists learn from the powerful sense of belonging that nationalism has created? Faced with the injustices of the world{\textquoteright}s economic and political system, what should a responsible globalist do?

British-Iraqi development expert Hassan Damluji proposes six principles - from changing how we think about mobility to shutting down tax havens - which can help build consensus for a stronger globalist identity. He demonstrates that globalism is not limited to {\textquoteright}Davos man{\textquoteright} but is a truly mass phenomenon that is growing fastest in emerging countries. Rather than a {\textquoteright}nowhere{\textquoteright} identity, it is a new group solidarity that sits alongside other allegiances.

With a wealth of examples from the United States to India, China and the Middle East, The Responsible Globalist offers a boldly optimistic and pragmatic blueprint for building an inclusive, global nation. This will be a century-long project, where success is not guaranteed. But unless we can reimagine humanity as a single national community, Damluji warns, the gravest threats we face will not be defeated.

}, url = {https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/309642/the-responsible-globalist/9780241355091.html}, author = {Hassan Damluji} } @book {1230291, title = {Syria: A Modern History}, year = {2019}, pages = {160}, publisher = {Polity}, organization = {Polity}, abstract = {

Today Syria is a country known for all the wrong reasons: civil war, vicious sectarianism, and major humanitarian crisis. But how did this once rich, multi-cultural society end up as the site of one of the twenty-first century{\textquoteright}s most devastating and brutal conflicts?

In this incisive book, internationally renowned Syria expert David Lesch takes the reader on an illuminating journey through the last hundred years of Syrian history {\textendash} from the end of the Ottoman empire through to the current civil war. The Syria he reveals is a fractured mosaic, whose identity (or lack thereof) has played a crucial part in its trajectory over the past century. Only once the complexities and challenges of Syria{\textquoteright}s history are understood can this pivotal country in the Middle East begin to rebuild and heal.

}, url = {http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509527519\&subject_id=5}, author = {David W. Lesch} } @book {1420480, title = {Diaspora of the City: Stories of Cosmopolitanism from Istanbul and Athens}, year = {2018}, pages = {264}, publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan}, organization = {Palgrave Macmillan}, edition = {1}, abstract = {

As the former capital of two great empires{\textemdash}Eastern Roman and Ottoman{\textemdash}Istanbul has been home to many diverse populations, a condition often glossed as cosmopolitanism. The Greek-speaking Christian Orthodox community (Rum Polites) is among the oldest in the urban society, yet their leading status during the centuries of imperial cosmopolitanism has faded. They have even been brought to the brink of disappearance in their home city. Scattered around the world as a result of the homogenizing tendencies of nationalism, the Rum Polites in the diaspora of Istanbul ({\textquotedblleft}the City{\textquotedblright} or Poli) continue to identify with its cosmopolitan legacy, as vividly shown through their everyday practices of distinction and cultural memory. By exploring the shifting meaning of cosmopolitanism in spatial and temporal contexts, Diaspora of the City examines how experiences of forced displacement can highlight changing conceptualizations of what constitutes a local, diasporic, minority, or migrant community in different multicultural urban settings, past and present.

}, url = {https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-55486-4}, author = {{\.I}lay Romain {\"O}rs} } @mastersthesis {1293692, title = {{\textquoteright}The Boundaries of the Tunisian{\textquoteright}: Migration and Race in post-Revolution Tunisia}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Anna Boots} } @mastersthesis {1293696, title = {Changing Nature, Shifting People: Point Four, Water Development, and U.S. Refugee Policy in the Jordan River Valley, 1949-1955}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Blaire Byg} } @mastersthesis {1293698, title = {The Date Palm and the Da{\textquoteright}wa: Non-Religious Factors Favoring the Rise and Resiliency of the Saudi States}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Daniel Cord} } @mastersthesis {1293700, title = {Escapism by Design: An Ethnography of Leisure-Consumption Architecture in Beirut }, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Mohamad Khalil Harb} } @mastersthesis {1293703, title = {United Nations Security Council Resolution 242: The Role of Ambiguity}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Stephen Hurwitz} } @mastersthesis {1293651, title = {Genomic Citizenship: Peoplehood and State in Israel and Qatar}, year = {2018}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation describes basic genetic research and biobanking of ethnic populations in Israel and Qatar. I track how biomedical research on ethnic populations relates to the political, economic, legal, and historical context of the states; to global trends in genetic medicine; and to the politics of identity in the context of global biomedical research. I describe the ways biology is becoming a site for negotiating identity in ethnic genetics, in discourse over rights to citizenship, in rare disease genetics, and in personalized medicine. The core focus of this work is the way the molecular realm is an emergent site for articulations of ethnonational identities in the contemporary Middle East. This is thus a study of Middle Eastern ethnonationalism and state building through the lens of biology, specifically genetics and biobanking. In revealing the complex interdigitations of genomic technologies and articulations of ethnonational identity, this scholarship informs the biopolitics of the contemporary Middle East. I find that societal conditions (emerging national identities, immigration, demographic pressures, enskillment of citizens, biomedical capacity building, and globalization of the economy), and technological affordances (such advances in the speed and power of genomic sequencing technologies, and the entailed promises of biomedical progress), collide to overdetermine biological iterations of ethnic identity, and I show that biobanking projects serve, to varying degrees, to inculcate an imagination of shared history; a collective community; and a healthy utopian future. I argue that the Israeli and Qatari national biobanks imagine participation in {\textquoteleft}global science{\textquoteright} while at the same time they reinforce local ethnic identities. The Israeli biobank reflects pre-existing ethnic identities in Israeli society, while the Qatari biobank preferentially emphasizes the emergent national character of the Qatari population. As a comparative study of genetics and ethnic identity in the contemporary Middle East, this research, therefore, speaks both to the social theory of the co-production of science and society and to the anthropology of nation and state building.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40049986}, author = {Ian McGonigle} } @mastersthesis {1293654, title = {Sufis, Saints, and Shrines: Piety in the Timurid Period, 1370-1507}, year = {2018}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is a study on piety and religious practice as shaped by the experience of pilgrimage to these numerous saintly shrines in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Timurid Iran and Central Asia. Shrine visitation, or ziy{\={a}}rat, was one of the most ubiquitous Islamic devotional practices across medieval Iran and Central Asia, at times eliciting more zeal than obligatory rituals such as the Friday congregational prayer. This dissertation makes use of a broad source base including city histories, shrine visitation guides, compendiums of religious sciences, court histories, biographies of Sufis, endowment deeds, ethical or moral (akhl{\={a}}q) treatises, and material culture in the form of architecture and epigraphical data. This work contributes to a better understanding of how Islam as a discursive tradition informed and was informed by the piety and religious practice of medieval Muslims of all classes. It challenges a vision of a monolithic Islamic orthopraxy by showing how the very fabric of Islam in medieval Iran and Central Asia represented both continuity with an Islamic past and a catering to local and contemporary needs.

The aim of this study is three-fold. First, it argues that the forms of ritual prescribed in the Timurid shrine manuals largely coalesced into a coherent program in this period and reflect a vernacular understanding of shrine visitation found in the more scholarly Islamic literature. It also demonstrates how the performance of the physical practices and oral litanies of the ziy{\={a}}rat formed part of the habitus of a pilgrim. Second, the hagiographic stories of the holy dead revered at these shrines represent tangible ideals of pious living for society to imitate. They point to the centrality of esotericism, miracle-working and a rigorous adherence to the Sharia in constructing this template. For example, a major part of the saintliness of Abu Yusuf Hamad{\={a}}ni, an important saint buried in Samarkand, stems from his extreme religious observance. He is said to have made the Hajj thirty-three times, finished the Qur{\textquoteright}an over a thousand times, memorized over seven hundred books on the religious sciences, received over two hundred and sixteen scholars and spent most of his life fasting. On the other hand, the patron saint of this same city, Sh{\={a}}h-i Zinda, is revered for his supernatural powers and his relation to the Prophet Muḥammad. This amplified reverence for the Prophet Muḥammad and his family demonstrates the increasing precedence of shrines of people genealogically linked to the Prophet Muḥammad as objects of veneration by the largely Sunni populations in the Timurid period.

The third and final aim of this dissertation is to provide a map of the actual places of pilgrimage and establish the importance of the {\textquotedblleft}locality{\textquotedblright} of saints in creating a shared identity and history using the methods of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). It traces the ways that pilgrims would move through their cities to visit the various shrines scattered across the landscape. The journey to some shrines fell well within the normal daily movements of an inhabitant of a particular city, while other journeys proved more arduous, pointing to the possibility of a varied ziy{\={a}}rat experience. While many shrines were presented as single locations, there are instances when a pilgrim is advised to make a circuit of many important shrines in a certain area or of a certain type of holy person (e.g. prophets). The routes and spaces, along with mosques and madrasas, are embedded in a sacred geography of the city.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41129127}, author = {Rubina Salikuddin} } @mastersthesis {1293572, title = {Piety, Knowledge, and Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi{\textquoteright}s Ameliorative Politics}, year = {2018}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation examines the political thought of Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201), a Sunni Muslim religious scholar who flourished as a preacher in twelfth-century Baghdad. During this period, Baghdad was the main arena of conflict between the Abbasid caliphs and the Seljuq sultans as both sides competed to exert control over the city. The militarized rule of the Seljuqs also entailed heavy taxation and harsh punitive measures on the populace. Through an intertextual reading of various genres in the Islamic intellectual tradition, this study reconstructs Ibn al-Jawzi{\textquoteright}s intellectual response to the shifting political dynamics of the twelfth-century Islamic world.

This dissertation argues that Ibn al-Jawzi adopted an ameliorative approach to politics and emphasized the values of piety and religious knowledge as the hallmarks of ideal Islamic rulership. To ensure that the ruling authorities govern based on piety and the shariʿa, Ibn al-Jawzi envisions a greater role for religious scholars in the political sphere. His ideal ruler is one who devotes himself to the Qurʾ{\={a}}n and ḥadith, adheres to Islamic legal and ritualistic precepts, and consults with scholars. These ideals depart from the dominant political discourses of his time that prioritize the ruler{\textquoteright}s ability to maintain societal order, regardless of his moral and religious qualities. Yet Ibn al-Jawzi{\textquoteright}s emphasis on piety and knowledge did not steer his political thought towards the radical ideologies upheld by certain fringe groups such as the Kh{\={a}}rijites. Instead, he pursues an ameliorative approach to politics that aims at mediatory, moderate, and pragmatic reform. This approach is best represented by the preacher who uses his rhetorical skills to tame the arbitrary nature of power and guide the ruler towards righteous rule. It also comes across in Ibn al-Jawzi{\textquoteright}s juristically prudent effort to protest against dismal political situations without overtly sanctioning the act of rebellion against a ruler who rules unjustly and impiously.

A study of Ibn al-Jawzi{\textquoteright}s political discourses points towards a new reading of the history of Islamic political thought that, rather than focusing solely on Muslim thinkers who promulgated the principle of {\textquotedblleft}might is right,{\textquotedblright} takes into account as well diverse and competing approaches to power. It sheds light on the various creative ways in which Muslim intellectuals utilized writings to effect social and political reform.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41121258}, author = {Han Hsien Liew} } @mastersthesis {1293704, title = {UNIFL and the Changing Nature of Peacekeeping}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Andrew McIndoe} } @mastersthesis {1293708, title = {Middle East Refugees in Lowell: A Case Study on Refugee Resettlement{\textemdash}{\textquoteright}American foreign policy f***** up my country, but the United States gave me a new life{\textquoteright}}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Kim Quarantello} } @mastersthesis {1293707, title = {Evangelizing in Eastern Anatolia: Historicizing the Rise and Early Work of the ABCFM{\textquoteright}s Harput Station}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Mano Sakayan} } @mastersthesis {1293706, title = {Estrangement: Transience and Being in Modern Arabic Literature}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Mohamad Saleh} } @mastersthesis {1293705, title = {{\textquoteright}Lubricating the Machines of the Western World{\textquoteright}: Knowledge and Subjectivity in Aramco{\textquoteright}s American Employee Handbooks (1950)}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Jamil Sbitan} } @mastersthesis {1293493, title = {Islamic State Prisons: Structural Violence and Connections to an Authoritarian Past}, year = {2018}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Theodore Wye} } @book {1230542, title = {Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism}, year = {2018}, pages = {288}, publisher = {Lars M{\"u}ller Publishers}, organization = {Lars M{\"u}ller Publishers}, abstract = {

Roberto Burle Marx (1909{\textendash}1994) remains one of the most important landscape architects in the history of the field. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx{\textquoteright}s own words have been published.

This collection of a dozen of Burle Marx{\textquoteright}s lectures, most of which have never before been available in English, fills that void. Delivered on international speaking tours, they address topics such as Concepts in Landscape Composition, Gardens and Ecology and The Problem of Garden Lighting. Their publication sheds light on Burle Marx{\textquoteright}s distinctive ethic and aesthetic of landscape, as {\textquotedblleft}the real art of living.{\textquotedblright}

The lectures paint a picture of Burle Marx not just as a gardener, artist and botanist, but as a landscape architect whose ambition was to bring radical change to cities and society. The lectures are framed by photographs, by Leonardo Finotti, of a selection of Burle Marx{\textquoteright}s realized projects.

}, url = {https://www.lars-mueller-publishers.com/roberto-burle-marx-lectures-0}, editor = {Gareth Doherty} } @book {1230290, title = {The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History}, year = {2018}, pages = {592}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, organization = {Oxford University Press}, edition = {2d}, abstract = {

Whether filtered through the media or through the classroom, the Arab-Israeli conflict has become a pervasive--and often misunderstood--subject of our contemporary cultural landscape. In this compelling new edition of The Arab-Israeli Conflict, widely respected scholar David W. Lesch presents the most balanced and accessible account of the conflict. Combining narrative history, primary sources, and informative analyses, The Arab-Israeli Conflict enables students to form their own educated opinions about complex and controversial issues.

New to this Edition:

}, url = {https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-arab-israeli-conflict-9780190924959?q=lesch\&lang=en\&cc=us}, author = {David W. Lesch} } @book {1230279, title = {The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny}, year = {2018}, pages = {312}, publisher = {Princeton University Press}, organization = {Princeton University Press}, abstract = {

What do the occult sciences, s{\'e}ances with the souls of the dead, and appeals to saintly powers have to do with rationality? Since the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals, religious leaders, and statesmen in Iran have attempted to curtail many such practices as {\textquotedblleft}superstitious,{\textquotedblright} instead encouraging the development of rational religious sensibilities and dispositions. However, far from diminishing the diverse methods through which Iranians engage with the immaterial realm, these rationalizing processes have multiplied the possibilities for metaphysical experimentation.

The Iranian Metaphysicals examines these experiments and their transformations over the past century. Drawing on years of ethnographic and archival research, Alireza Doostdar shows that metaphysical experimentation lies at the center of some of the most influential intellectual and religious movements in modern Iran. These forms of exploration have not only produced a plurality of rational orientations toward metaphysical phenomena but have also fundamentally shaped what is understood as orthodox Shi{\textquoteleft}i Islam, including the forms of Islamic rationality at the heart of projects for building and sustaining an Islamic Republic.

Delving into frequently neglected aspects of Iranian spirituality, politics, and intellectual inquiry, The Iranian Metaphysicals challenges widely held assumptions about Islam, rationality, and the relationship between science and religion.

Winner of the 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Middle East Studies Association

}, url = {https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691163789/the-iranian-metaphysicals}, author = {Alireza Doostdar} } @book {1230364, title = {Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial: The Yildiz Case}, year = {2018}, pages = {264}, publisher = {Syracuse University Press}, organization = {Syracuse University Press}, abstract = {

In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abd{\"u}laziz, was found dead in his chambers, the veins in his arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Pasa, a political foe of the autocratic sultan Abd{\"u}lhamit II, who succeeded Abd{\"u}laziz and ruled the empire for thirty-three years.

The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed suicide remains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.

}, url = {https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/152/ottoman-rule-of-law-and-the-modern-political-trial/}, author = {Avi Rubin} } @mastersthesis {1293720, title = {The Judaization of Space: A Critical Analysis of Spatial Practices in Palestine{\textendash}Israel}, year = {2017}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Zena Agha} } @mastersthesis {1293719, title = {The War of Words: How Islamic State Tailors its Messaging to English and Turkish Readers}, year = {2017}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Joseph Ataman} } @mastersthesis {1293718, title = {Sati al-Husri as an Ottoman Intellectual: The Idea of Homeland and Nation}, year = {2017}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Hamdullah Baycar} } @mastersthesis {1293717, title = {Achieving Women{\textquoteright}s Rights through Arab Nationalism: Thuraya al-Hafiz{\textquoteright}s Vision for Arab Women and a United Arab Nation}, year = {2017}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Alice Duesdieker} } @mastersthesis {1293715, title = {{\textquoteright}A Berber Dahir in Reverse{\textquoteright}: Muhammad V{\textquoteright}s 1946 Campaign to Bureaucratize Charismatic Authority in Morocco}, year = {2017}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Ethan Mefford} } @mastersthesis {1293714, title = {The Issues of the Colonial Caretaker: Dual Loyalty, Palestinian Prisoners, and Israeli Medical Professionals}, year = {2017}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Hannah Rigg} } @mastersthesis {1293712, title = {Genetic Nationalism: Scientific Communities and Ethnic Mythmaking in the Middle East}, year = {2017}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

{\textquotedblleft}Genetic Nationalism{\textquotedblright} is a comparative history of human genetics research in Iran, Turkey, and Israel. Covering the century between the First World War and the present, I show how the technologies and discourses of racial anthropology and medical genetics have been locally adapted to construct national identities and control ethnic minorities in the Middle East. Furthermore, I investigate how the global biomedical infrastructure of the Cold War era reinscribed colonial patterns of scientific collaboration and technological development.

Intervening in existing postcolonial critiques of science, I argue that even as Middle Eastern researchers have been marginalized in the Western-dominated international scientific community, they have simultaneously acted as technocratic elites to reinforce nationalist hegemonies within their own countries. I base this argument on an original analysis of over 350 scientific publications on inherited physiological traits, blood group frequencies, and DNA variations among Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli populations. My analysis juxtaposes these scientific texts with the archived correspondence and oral history records of Middle Eastern scientists and their Western colleagues, examining how the two groups interacted with each other and with their research subjects to produce a set of {\textquotedblleft}ethnic myths{\textquotedblright} merging scientific inquiry with local understandings of heredity, identity, and nation. My comparative work shows that despite the massive advancements in technological sophistication between anthropometry and whole-genome sequencing, geneticists have continuously relied on nationalist narratives of population origins to select research subjects and interpret their genetic data. Ultimately, these globally standardized research practices have reified sociopolitical categories into biological entities.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41142077}, author = {Elise K. Burton} } @mastersthesis {1293711, title = {The Ragusa Road: Mobility and Encounter in the Ottoman Balkans (1430{\textendash}1700)}, year = {2017}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is a study of human mobility in the western provinces of the Ottoman empire in the early modern era. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Ottomans had absorbed nearly the entire Balkan Peninsula. Dubrovnik (also known as Ragusa), a small mercantile republic on the Adriatic Sea, found itself surrounded by Ottoman territory. Dubrovnik managed to maintain its autonomy and preserve its coastal territories by accepting the position of tribute-paying vassal to the Ottoman state. In this context, the Ragusa Road, which stretched across Ottoman Rumelia (the Balkan Peninsula) to Istanbul, developed into a major axis of trade, diplomacy, and exchange. Unlike other pathways in the region, such as the Via Egnatia to the south, the Ragusa Road did not play a prominent role in earlier Roman transportation networks. Furthermore, the route was longer and more mountainous than alternatives. Yet, by the early sixteenth century, the Ragusa Road had become established as the most important East-West highway across the Balkan Peninsula, a corridor of communications linking the Ottoman capital to western Europe.

I explore the forces that conditioned and propelled overland travel on the Ragusa Road. Ottoman and Ragusan actors used complementary policies and practices to reduce obstacles and encourage overland travel. The results were mutually beneficial, and led to the route{\textquoteright}s increasing prominence in long-distance patterns of movement. Merchants, diplomats, pilgrims and spies increasingly elected to travel in Ragusan caravans, avoiding the vicissitudes of the maritime route. The cultural ramifications of the Ragusa Road{\textquoteright}s development are thus significant, as caravan travel brought together members of multiple religious, ethnic and linguistic communities, all of whom traveled together across a topographically challenging and culturally complex region. The records of these travelers reveal the unique cultural space of the road {\textendash} and that of Ottoman Rumelia {\textendash} in the early modern Mediterranean.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41141529}, author = {Jesse C. Howell} } @book {1230974, title = {Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68}, year = {2017}, pages = {312}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, organization = {Oxford University Press}, abstract = {

Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68, to the forefront of modern Middle East History. During the 1960s, in the wake of a coup against Imam Muhammad al-Badr and the formation of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict. Believing al-Badr to be dead, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and most countries recognized the YAR. But when al-Badr unexpectedly turned up alive, Saudi Arabia and Britain offered support to the deposed Imam, drawing Yemen into an internationally-sponsored civil war. Throughout six years of major conflict, Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war.

Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egyptian counterinsurgency, and one of the first largescale uses of poison gas since WWI. Events in Yemen were not dominated by a single power, nor were they sole products of US-Soviet or Saudi-Egyptian Arab Cold War rivalry. Britain, Canada, Israel, the UN, the US, and the USSR joined Egypt and Saudi Arabia in assuming varying roles in fighting, mediating, and supplying the belligerent forces. Despite Cold War tensions, Americans and Soviets appeared on the same side of the Yemeni conflict and acted mutually to confine Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the borders of South Arabia. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Nasser{\textquoteright}s Arab Nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces.

This internationalized conflict was a pivotal event in Middle East history, overseeing the formation of a modern Yemeni state, the fall of Egyptian and British regional influence, another Arab-Israeli war, Saudi dominance of the Arabian Peninsula, and shifting power alliances in the Middle East that continue to lie at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.

}, url = {https://global.oup.com/academic/product/beyond-the-arab-cold-war-9780190618445?cc=us\&lang=en\&}, author = {Asher Orkaby} } @book {1230541, title = {Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State}, year = {2017}, pages = {216}, publisher = {University of California Press}, organization = {University of California Press}, abstract = {

This innovative multidisciplinary study considers the concept of green from multiple perspectives{\textemdash}aesthetic, architectural, environmental, political, and social{\textemdash}in the Kingdom of Bahrain, where green has a long and deep history of appearing cooling, productive, and prosperous{\textemdash}a radical contrast to the hot and hostile desert. Although green is often celebrated in cities as a counter to gray urban environments, green has not always been good for cities. Similarly, manifestation of the color green in arid urban environments is often in direct conflict with the practice of green from an environmental point of view. This paradox is at the heart of the book. In arid environments such as Bahrain, the contradiction becomes extreme and even unsustainable.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Gareth Doherty explores the landscapes of Bahrain, where green represents a plethora of implicit human values and exists in dialectical tension with other culturally and environmentally significant colors and hues. Explicit in his book is the argument that concepts of color and object are mutually defining and thus a discussion about green becomes a discussion about the creation of space and place.

}, url = {https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520285026/paradoxes-of-green}, author = {Gareth Doherty} } @book {1297686, title = {Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions}, year = {2016}, pages = {368}, publisher = {Stanford University Press}, organization = {Stanford University Press}, abstract = {

Partners of the Empire offers a radical rethinking of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over this unstable period, the Ottoman Empire faced political crises, institutional shakeups, and popular insurrections. It responded through various reform options and settlements. New institutional configurations emerged; constitutional texts were codified{\textemdash}and annulled. The empire became a political theater where different actors struggled, collaborated, and competed on conflicting agendas and opposing interests.

This book takes a holistic look at the era, interested not simply in central reforms or in regional developments, but in their interactions. Drawing on original archival sources, Ali Yaycioglu uncovers the patterns of political action{\textemdash}the making and unmaking of coalitions, forms of building and losing power, and expressions of public opinion. Countering common assumptions, he shows that the Ottoman transformation in the Age of Revolutions was not a linear transition from the old order to the new, from decentralized state to centralized, from Eastern to Western institutions, or from pre-modern to modern. Rather, it was a condensed period of transformation that counted many crossing paths, as well as dead-ends, all of which offered a rich repertoire of governing possibilities to be followed, reinterpreted, or ultimately forgotten.

}, url = {https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25742}, author = {Ali Yaycioglu} } @mastersthesis {1293905, title = {Omar ibn Said, Son of Adam, and the People of Abraham}, year = {2016}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {David Babaian} } @mastersthesis {1293906, title = {Assessing the Impact of Gender on Frontline Humanitarian Negotiations}, year = {2016}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Federica du Pasquier} } @mastersthesis {1293904, title = {The Race for the Money: The Rivalry between Doha, Dubai, and Manama to Become the Region{\textquoteright}s Financial Center}, year = {2016}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Wadah Al Shugaa} } @mastersthesis {1293907, title = {The Rise of Romanian National Consciousness and Identity}, year = {2016}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Elad Vaida} } @mastersthesis {1293897, title = {Teachers of the Public, Advisors to the Sultan: Preachers and the Rise of a Political Public Sphere in Early Modern Istanbul (1600-1675)}, year = {2016}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation focuses on preachers as key actors in the rise of a political public sphere in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Recently, literature on the political importance of corporate bodies and voluntary associations has transformed the understanding of the early modern Ottoman polity. Emphasis has shifted from the valorization of centralized institutions to understanding power as negotiated between the court and other stakeholders. My dissertation joins in this collective effort by way of studying preachers, and through them examining the negotiation of religious authority between the central administration and civic groups. I depict preachers as {\textquotedblleft}mediating{\textquotedblright} religious power between the elite and the non-elite, and between the written and the oral cultures. I argue that the production of religious doctrine and authority took place at this intermediary space of encounter.

This study of early modern Islam with reference to the frame of public sphere has two main implications. Firstly, I present a {\textquotedblleft}preacher-political advisor{\textquotedblright} type in order to demonstrate that the critical potential of religion was preserved in a new guise. Secondly, I show that informal circles of education gained primacy in the seventeenth century, giving rise to the vernacularization of formal sciences. The close reading of the manuscript sources left by preachers and their pupils also constitutes the first systematic exploration of the intersection between orality and literacy, and an important contribution to the study of Ottoman popular culture.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493572}, author = {Asl{\i}han G{\"u}rb{\"u}zel} } @mastersthesis {1293887, title = {Between the Pen and the Fields: Books on Farming, Changing Land Regimes, and Urban Agriculture in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean Ca. 1500-1700}, year = {2016}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation goes {\textquotedblleft}between the pen and the fields{\textquotedblright} in that it explores the relationship between the Ottoman discourse on farming as reflected in manuscripts, and the material and economic realities of farming shown in archival documents. Though a major focus is Istanbul and its surroundings, I also examine texts and documents related to agriculture in other regions across the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. By studying farming treatises and manuals that were written, translated, copied, abridged, collected, and circulated in this region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as works in more well known genres in which agricultural knowledge was also shaped, I examine an Ottoman scholarly discourse on farming not previously acknowledged. Over time, I argue, this discourse became more spatialized, vernacularized, and practically oriented, emphasizing firsthand experience and observation over the classical Arabic agricultural canon.

Agriculture in the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean before the nineteenth century has been characterized as stagnant or {\textquotedblleft}traditional,{\textquotedblright} occurring in countrysides at a remove from mainstream commercial and intellectual concerns; yet the archival materials I discuss (study of court records, endowment deeds, tax surveys, surveys of agricultural laborers in the city, market price lists, etc.) show a more complex picture. They show that beginning around 1500, in certain regions{\textemdash}my study focuses mainly on Ottoman Thrace and the Balkans, but also other regions including Egypt{\textemdash}legal shifts concerning the status of land were connected with increased investment in farming by urbanites and members of the military class, including bureaucrats, scholars, and merchants. A new readership for scholarly works on farming thus emerged as well. On both state land, where urbanites were taking over the usufruct, and land belonging to charitable foundations, which was increasingly leased to urbanites with long-term contracts (even within the walled city of Istanbul), market-oriented farm estates, vineyards, orchards, and produce gardens were established. I show the ramifications of this in trade, consumption, environmental change (e.g. water usage), migration, labor, and agricultural discourse and knowledge. Spaces whose history this dissertation illuminates to a completely new degree are the urban market gardens of Istanbul, a few of which still exist today.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33840697}, author = {Aleksandar Sopov} } @mastersthesis {1293710, title = {Ottoman Victoriana: Nineteenth-Century Sultans and the Making of a Palace, 1836{\textendash}1909}, year = {2016}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is a historical reconstruction of the last Ottoman palace in Istanbul known as Y{\i}ld{\i}z. Using a diverse and largely untouched collection of archival sources (including maps, architectural drawings, pattern-books, newspapers, photographs, and countless expense records), the five subsequent chapters chronologically examine the building and growth of the now fragmented site, situating it in the international circulation of ideas and forms that characterized the accelerated and porous world of the nineteenth century. This understudied palace may belong, nominally, to the rarefied realm of the Ottoman elite; the history of the site, however, is profoundly connected to Istanbul{\textquoteright}s urban history and to changing conceptions of empire, absolutism, diplomacy, reform, and the public. The dissertation explores these connections, framing the palace and its grounds not only as a hermetic expression of imperial identity, but also as a product of an expanding consumer culture.

The first chapter tackles the site{\textquoteright}s static historiography that has overlooked its extremely dynamic architectural evolution. The literature overview contextualizes the reasons for such scholarly lacuna: Sultan Abd{\"u}lhamid II{\textquoteright}s contested presence in nationalistic narratives factor into the discussion. Y{\i}ld{\i}z{\textquoteright}s neglect is part of an endemic dispossession in scholarship of Ottoman art and architectural output from the eighteenth century onwards, because its forms are believed to be foreign and threatening to local craft traditions. The chapter argues instead that Y{\i}ld{\i}z{\textquoteright}s patrons and artists approached their commissions with historical rigor and with an eye for artisanship and the vernacular.

The second chapter follows Y{\i}ld{\i}z{\textquoteright}s eighteenth-and nineteenth-century histories through the eyes of the Ottoman court chroniclers. Their meticulous day-to-day descriptions of the lives of sultans and how they used their capital{\textquoteright}s royal grounds show us that for a long time before Y{\i}ld{\i}z became Abd{\"u}lhamid II{\textquoteright}s royal residence, it belonged to the sultans{\textquoteright} powerful mothers and wives. The collective efforts of these entrepreneurial women converted Y{\i}ld{\i}z from a minor imperial retreat to an income-generating estate. The site started its life, then, as an exemplary gendered space that uproots conventional notions of the Oriental harem.

The third chapter traces the grand landscaping project undertaken at Y{\i}ld{\i}z by Christian Sester, the court{\textquoteright}s Bavarian head-gardener. Not only does this chapter outline the site{\textquoteright}s dramatic physical transformations under Sester{\textquoteright}s tutelage from the 1830s to the 1860s, but it also tracks his establishment of a cosmopolitan gardeners{\textquoteright} corps. The diverse members of this corps, the chapter shows, deeply impacted the urban landscapes and marketplaces of Istanbul well into the 1910s.

The fourth chapter examines Y{\i}ld{\i}z{\textquoteright}s light, pavilion-like structures in the context of the century{\textquoteright}s Alpine appeal as well as the world expositions that commodified the use of these small-scale typologies. While exploring the functions of these structures in the courtly context, the chapter also highlights the mass-appeal of catalogue-order chalets among the Ottoman bureaucrat classes and the competition these buildings engendered in Istanbul{\textquoteright}s domestic spaces. This chapter also speaks more broadly about the nature of architectural styles, designs and taste in the Ottoman world of the late-nineteenth century.

Y{\i}ld{\i}z{\textquoteright}s history cannot be written without photograph albums, central to Abd{\"u}lhamid II and his reign. The fifth and final chapter does precisely that by focusing on the previously unknown, last and most intimate photograph album that the sultan commissioned of the site. The album exhibits Y{\i}ld{\i}z in its most up-to-date incarnation and in the way that Abd{\"u}lhamid II wanted it to be seen: grounds that required active engagement, that were simultaneously intimate and sublime, and that incorporated both untouched and cultivated landscapes. The chapter draws formal comparisons with earlier, better-known photograph albums of the palace that were prepared for an international audience. Unlike any other, this album gets us closest to Abd{\"u}lhamid{\textquoteright}s own biography of imperial spaces, the precedents that he inhabited during his princely years. These sites, in turn, influenced his architectural patronage in Y{\i}ld{\i}z. Therefore, the album is conceptualized here as a revealing visual biography of the most elusive of sultans and his similarly elusive palace.

Lastly, I take victoriana in the title to imply a global designation, a trigger that to my mind best describes the push and pull of tradition at the onset of modernity. At no other site than Y{\i}ld{\i}z is this tension played out so clearly in the Ottoman lands. I mean to draw thematic connection between Victorian England and the Ottoman Empire at specific moments in which the latter found itself negotiating between local craft and global industry, between its imperial image and its newly emerging social classes, between royalty{\textquoteright}s austerity and its requisite international presence, and between tradition and invention.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33840715}, author = {Deniz Turker} } @mastersthesis {1293900, title = {The Ways of Zainab: Visitations and Valuations between Iran and Syria via Turkey}, year = {2016}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The Ways of Zainab: Visitations and Valuations between Iran and Syria via Turkey follows the pathways of a ziyarat (visitation) route, also known as Hajj-e Fuqara{\textquoteright} (pilgrimage of the poor) from bus stations in Tabriz, Iran through informal bazaars in Gaziantep, Turkey to shrines in Damascus, Syria. I propose that Sayyida Zainab{\textquoteright}s ziyarat can be productively understood as a region- and subject-making route. By accounting for the spatial and historical production of these territories and the subject formations of their inhabitants, this dissertation charts out two broad avenues of inquiry. First, it analyzes how pilgrims, merchants and other border-crossers of various socio-economic and political backgrounds have interacted with one another on a trans-regional scale and encountered doctrinal difference, economic opportunity and political possibility. Second, it traces the inter-articulations of pilgrimage and Islamic ritual with contraband commerce as differentially regulated forms of cross-border mobility. Through these two avenues of inquiry, and developing a historical anthropological approach, The Ways of Zainab turns transnational religious mobility from a predetermined stage for the unfolding of sectarian violence into an autonomous and generative dimension of social action on a regional scale. In doing so, this dissertation aims to reinvigorate the analytical and political debates around ritual and religious practice in anthropology of Islam through studies of mobility and borders as well as economy and markets.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33840752}, author = {Emrah Yildiz} } @mastersthesis {1293912, title = {First Do No Harm: A Critique of the International Counternarcotics Regime in North Africa and the Sahel}, year = {2015}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {George Kraehe} } @mastersthesis {1293913, title = {Armenian Self and Ottoman Society: Christopher Oscanyan{\textquoteright}s Oriental and Turkish Museum in London (1853-54)}, year = {2015}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Nora Lessersohn} } @mastersthesis {1293914, title = {Financing Jihad: ISIL, Al-Qaeda and the Money Behind Mass Casualty Terrorism}, year = {2015}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Jonathan Mautner} } @mastersthesis {1293915, title = {Syrian Refugee Adolescents and Parental Involvement in Livelihood Programs in Lebanon}, year = {2015}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Jennifer Quigley-Jones} } @mastersthesis {1293916, title = { Gender, Parody, and Activism: Rethinking Conceptual Tools through Drag Performances in Lebanon}, year = {2015}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Elsien van Pinxteren} } @mastersthesis {1293917, title = {To Coin a Phrase: Counterinsurgency, Innovation, and the U.S. Military{\textquoteright}s Enlistment of {\textquoteright}Enablers{\textquoteright} in Iraq and Afghanistan}, year = {2015}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Andrew Watkins} } @mastersthesis {1293880, title = {Meaningful Mediums: A Material and Intellectual History of Manuscript and Print Production in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Cairo}, year = {2015}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

Meaningful mediums is a study of the political economy of writing in the first Ottoman city to develop a sustained urban print culture. Cairo{\textquoteright}s writing economy comprised the longstanding manuscript industry, the governmental printing industry from the 1820s, and the for-profit private press printing industry from the 1850s. I investigate these industries{\textquoteright} functions, interactions, and reputations to explore why Cairene printing developed and how contemporaries ascribed meaning to textual production during this period of flux.

This study relies on the texts themselves to generate the history of their production. I aggregate the names, dates, and other information contained within their openings, contents, and colophons to chart the work of their producers and vendors for the first time. I then contextualize this information through contemporary iconographic and descriptive depictions of Cairene texts. My sources are drawn from libraries and private collections in America, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France. They include formal and ephemeral manuscripts and printings.

Against narratives that invoke printing as a catalyst for modernity, I argue that printing was simply a tool. Its adoption increased because it was useful for different actors like the state, private entrepreneurs, and scholars who employed it to respond to specific political, economic, and intellectual needs. My argument reverses the causality of modernization narratives, in that I establish that printing was the result of practical demands instead of the origin of new demands. As a tool, printing was deployed by Cairenes flexibly. Some used it to appropriate western norms, including the idea that printing is a civilizing force. Others used it to enact manuscript tradition.

The history of this process is important to social practices, like the creation of new professions. But it is also important to historical legacy. Nationalism, Enlightenment, and civil society are assigned their origins and proof in Cairene printings from the 1870s and 1880s. Yet this narrative of the Middle East{\textquoteright}s generic print modernity draws from the expectation for printings to engender public discourse and galvanize society, instead of from the words that these texts actually contain or an understanding of who made and consumed them and why. To counter the prevailing idea that printing is fixed and universal in its value and effects, Meaningful mediums examines printing as both a social and economic practice, and itself a space for ideas. It therefore emphasizes the significance of human agency, local context, constraints, and continuity during a period of momentous technological, textual, and cultural change.

In conclusion, this study documents Cairenes{\textquoteright} incorporation of printing into their political economy of writing and revises the widely held notion that this process was an agent of social change, a marker of modernity and colonial restructuring, and a foreign disruptor of local textual tradition.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845476}, author = {Kathryn Schwartz} } @mastersthesis {1295019, title = {The Political Rise of Ennahdha{\textquoteright}s women in Tunisia}, year = {2014}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Youssef Ben Ismail} } @mastersthesis {1295018, title = {{\textquoteright}Licit Magic{\textquoteright}: The Touch and Sight of Islamic Talismanic Scrolls}, year = {2014}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The following study traces the production and history of the talismanic scroll as a medium through a Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk historical periods. My dissertation understands the protocol of manufacturing and utilizing talismanic scrolls. The dissertation is a study of the Qur{\textquoteright}an, prayers and illustrations of these talismanic works. I begin by investigating a theory of the occult the medieval primary sources of the Neo-platonic tenth century Ikhw{\={a}}n al-Safa and al-Buni (d.1225). I establish that talismans are generally categorized as science ({\textquoteleft}ilm). Next, a dynastic spotlight of talismanic scrolls creates a chronological framework for the dissertation. The Fatimid talismanic scrolls and the Ayyubid pilgrimage scrolls are both block-printed and are placed within the larger conceptual framework of pilgrimage and devotion. The two unpublished Mamluk scrolls from Dar Al-Athar Al-Islamiyyah are long beautiful handwritten scrolls that provide a perspective on how the occult is part of the daily life of the practitioner in the medieval Islamic culture. Through an in depth analysis of the written word and images, I establish that textually and visually there is a template for the creation of these sophisticated scrolls. Lastly, I discuss the efficacy of these scrolls, I use theories of linguistic anthropology and return to the Islamic primary sources to establish that there is a language of the occult and there are people that practiced the occult. The word of God and the Qur{\textquoteright}{\={a}}n empower the scrolls I studied. As for the people who practiced the occult, I turn to the tenth century Ibn al-Nadim and Ibn al-Khaldun (d.1406), the people of the occult are understood. Yet, keeping in mind, that there is always a tension with the theologians that condoned practices of Islamic magic.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274637}, author = {Yasmine F Alsaleh} } @mastersthesis {1295015, title = {Obeying Those in Authority: The Hidden Political Message in Twelver Exegesis}, year = {2014}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In the tenth century, a confluence of two unrelated events shaped the Twelver Shia community in Baghdad: the Occultation of the Twelfth Imam in 939/329 and the takeover of Baghdad in 945 by the Buyid princes, who were largely tolerant towards their Shia subjects. Twelver intellectual life flourished during this era, led by the exegetes who are the subject of this dissertation. Chief among them were al-Shaykh al-Tusi and al-Sharif al-Murtada, who - along with many of their contemporaries - comprised a "Baghdad school" of Twelver intellectuals. This dissertation analyzes the Qur{\textquoteright}anic commentaries (tafsir) written by this core group of medieval Twelver exegetes, most of whom lived and wrote in Baghdad, although others - such as al-Ayyashi - remained on the margins.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274278}, author = {Jennifer Thea Gordon} } @mastersthesis {1295063, title = {A History of Money in Palestine: From the 1900s to the Present}, year = {2014}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

How does the condition of statelessness, which is usually thought of as a political problem, affect the economic and monetary lives of ordinary people?

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12269876}, author = {Sreemati Mitter} } @mastersthesis {1295007, title = {The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68}, year = {2014}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The deposition of Imam Muhammad al-Badr in September 1962 was the culmination of a Yemeni nationalist movement that began in the 1940s with numerous failed attempts to overthrow the traditional religious legal order. Prior to 1962, both the USSR and Egypt had been cultivating alliances with al-Badr in an effort to secure their strategic interests in South Arabia. In the days following the 1962 coup d{\textquoteright}{\'e}tat, Abdullah Sallal and his cohort of Yemeni officers established a republic and concealed the fate of al-Badr who had survived an assault on his Sana{\textquoteright}a palace and whose supporters had already begun organizing a tribal coalition against the republic. A desperate appeal by Yemeni republicans brought the first Egyptian troops to Yemen. Saudi Arabia, pressured by Egyptian troops, border tribal considerations and earlier treaties with the Yemeni Imamate, supported the Imam{\textquoteright}s royalist opposition. The battleground between Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and al-Badr was transformed into an arena for international conflict and diplomacy. The UN mission to Yemen, while portrayed as a symbol of failed and underfunded global peacekeeping at the time, was in fact instrumental in establishing the basis for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Bruce Cond{\'e}, an American philatelist, brought global attention to the royalist-republican struggle to control the Yemeni postal system. The last remnants of the British Middle East Empire fought with Nasser to maintain a mutually declining level of influence in the region. Israeli intelligence and air force aided royalist forces and served witness to the Egyptian use of chemical weapons, a factor that would impact decision-making prior to the 1967 War. Despite concurrent Cold War tensions, Americans and Soviets appeared on the same side of the Yemeni conflict and acted mutually to confine Nasser to the borders of South Arabia. This internationalized conflict was a pivotal event in Middle East history as it oversaw the formation of a modern Yemeni state, the fall of Egyptian and British regional influence, another Arab-Israeli war, Saudi dominance of the Arabian Peninsula, and shifting power alliances in the Middle East.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12269828}, author = {Asher Orkaby} } @mastersthesis {1295006, title = {Political Literacy and the Politics of Eloquence: Ottoman Scribal Community in the Seventeenth Century}, year = {2014}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In 1703, the chief scribe (reis{\"u}{\textquoteright}l-k{\"u}ttab) Rami Mehmed Efendi (d. 1708) was appointed as the grand vizier in the Ottoman Empire. In scholarship, Rami Mehmed epitomizes the transition in the political cadres from the people of the sword/seyfiye to the people of the pen/kalemiye as the first chief scribe to be appointed as the grand vizier. While this transition has long been accepted as a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century Ottoman history, the cultural and intellectual formation of "the people of the pen" as a distinct community before this period has not been adequately examined.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11745703}, author = {Ekin Emine Tusalp} } @mastersthesis {1295062, title = {Self and Other in the Renaissance: Laonikos Chalkokondyles and Late Byzantine Intellectuals}, year = {2013}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II in 1453 was a cataclysmic event that reverberated throughout Renaissance Europe. This event intensified the exodus of Byzantines to Italy and beyond and they brought along with them the heritage of Greek antiquity. Laonikos Chalkokondyles contributed to the Renaissance with his detailed application of Herodotos to the fifteenth century, Apodeixis Historion, and made sense of the rise of the Ottomans with the lens of ancient history. The Apodeixis was printed in Latin, French, and Greek and was widely successful. The historian restored Herodotean categories of ethnicity, political rule, language, and geography to make sense of contemporary events and peoples. This was a thorough study of ancient historiography and Laonikos thus parted ways with previous Byzantine historians. I refer to Laonikos{\textquoteright} method as "revolutionary classicizing", to describe the ways in which he abandoned the ideal of lawful imperium and restored the model of oriental tyranny when he described the nascent Ottoman state. What appears to be emulation of the ancient classics was radical revival of political concepts such as city-states as ethnic units, freedom defined as independence from foreign rule, law-giving as fundamental aspect of Hellenic tradition which did not encompass the Christian period. Laonikos has often been studied in the context of proto-nationalist historiography as he had composed a universal history, wherein he had related extensive information on various ethnic and political units in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, such proto-nationalist application does not fully capture Laonikos{\textquoteright} classicizing interests. Laonikos referred to his contemporaries as Hellenes, not because he was a nationalist who defined political identity only by recourse to language and common history. Rather, Laonikos believed that Hellenic identity, both referring to paganism as well as ethnicity, was relevant and not bankrupt. Importantly, we introduce manuscripts that have not yet been utilized to argue that Hellenism as paganism was living reality for Laonikos, his Platonist teacher Plethon, and their circle of intellectuals in the fifteenth century.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11125006}, author = {Aslihan Akisik} } @mastersthesis {1295060, title = {In the City, Out of Place: Dispossession and the Economics of Belonging in Southeastern Turkey}, year = {2013}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation analyzes everyday talk about livelihoods, or about the challenges of work and getting by, among displaced Kurds in the city of Diyarbak{\i}r in southeastern Turkey. Over the past two decades, Diyarbak{\i}r has grown dramatically with the influx of tens of thousands of displaced and dispossessed rural Kurds uprooted by state policies of forced migration. These policies were designed with two strategic aims in mind: eliminating rural support networks for the Kurdish armed rebellion (the PKK), and concentrating populations in less dispersed and thus theoretically more easily policed spaces. However, it is argued here that while the former ambition has perhaps succeeded, the displacement and dispossession of rural Kurds throughout the 1990s, rather than suppressing dissent, has generated new fields and new forms of political struggle. Based on two years of fieldwork in Diyarbak{\i}r, this study explores the ways in which ordinary talk about livelihoods, about how to make a living and pay the bills, is, in this context, about more than {\textquoteleft}the economy{\textquoteright} alone. The interplay of people{\textquoteright}s efforts to rebuild life and livelihood and the semiotic interpretation of these efforts is analyzed as a rich and under-appreciated site for the everyday practical generation of the political in Kurdish Turkey. This study contributes to the anthropology of Kurdish Turkey and of the Middle East, as well as to theories of displacement and dispossession, evaluative discourse, and the pragmatics of political stance.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10973942}, author = {Will Day} } @mastersthesis {1295058, title = {Pleasure, Leisure, or Vice? Public Morality in Imperial Cairo, 1882{\textendash}1949}, year = {2013}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

I investigate the social history of Egypt under British imperial occupation through the lens of morality in order to understand the contestation of cultural change and authority under empire. Points of cultural cleavage between European and local inhabitants in British-occupied Cairo included two customs, gambling and the consumption of intoxicants, which elicited sustained and dynamic reactions from observers of Egyptian society on the local and international level. I show that the presence of alcohol and gambling in public spaces in Cairo contributed directly to the politicization and selective criminalization of public morality. However, the meanings attributed to social practices relating to leisure were continually under negotiation and challenge as state authorities, British liberals, Egyptian reformers and religious leaders, foreign missionaries, and representatives of international temperance movements vied to impose their visions of morality upon Egyptian society.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11151531}, author = {Nathan Fonder} } @mastersthesis {1295057, title = {Negotiating Matrimony: Marriage, Divorce, and Property Allocation Practices in Istanbul, 1755{\textendash}1840}, year = {2013}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation studies the construction of the marital bond and its dissolution with respect to the normative stipulations of the shari{\textquoteright}a, social and moral constructions, and the cultural formations during late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Istanbul. Through the examination of court cases, estate inventories, and contemporary chronicles, I demonstrate the strategies and practices that perpetrated possible patterns in the matrimonial union. Although Islamic law allowed for and encouraged the spouses to reconcile marriage-related negotiations outside of court, the amount of registered marital disputes indicates the central role of the court for spouses in establishing conciliatory grounds. This study explores in particular the consensual and purposeful use of the shari{\textquoteright}a courts by women. The examination of the sicils from three different courts in intra muros Istanbul has shown that women were adamant about formalizing the consequence of marriage, divorce and property related discordances hoping to secure their future interests. The dissertation essentially introduces the largely overlooked issue of the specialization of courts in this period and presents specifically the D{\={a}}vud Pasha court{\textquoteright}s concentration on marriage and family-related disputes. By focusing on local practices and particularities through a case-by-case methodology, the study delivers a portrayal of Ottoman urban marriage structure within the context of the socio-legal and economic dynamics of the period. Given that the formal registry of marriage contracts and divorce settlements was not legally enforced until the early twentieth century, the extensive practice of registration in court could be interpreted as the preliminary steps to the formalization and codification of the marital union. I offer a likely reading of women{\textquoteright}s experiences with respect to marriage and property ownership suggesting that the predominant marriage pattern observed in the segment of the population that used the court was companionate. By analyzing quantitative data and archival material, I demonstrate women{\textquoteright}s visibility in the public sphere through their significantly increased use of courts, proactive utilization of social networks, and strategic activities vis-a-vis marriage and divorce to depict a portrayal of the late eighteenth-century Istanbul family.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11125998}, author = {Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik} } @mastersthesis {1295056, title = {Dangerous Encounters: Riots, Railways, and the Politics of Difference in French Public Space (1860{\textendash}2012)}, year = {2013}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation builds a socio-cultural biography of Paris{\textquoteright}s Gare du Nord, Europe{\textquoteright}s largest railway station, from its transnational aims to connect Europe in the nineteenth century, to early twentieth century strikes, to twenty-first century immigration and riots. It shows how the formation of subjects, boundaries, and the "dangerous classes" in France were linked to infrastructural development. Through this examination, I argue that official French rhetoric and policies around the so-called "dangerous classes" created ideologies of contact that played out in concrete public space and came to be challenged by subjects and groups represented as dangerously different. Through encounter, overlapping boundaries--beyond the foreigner/citizen divide--became significant in the Gare du Nord, as marginalized subjects created new ways of relating spaces and bodies in this heterogeneous arena. My dissertation examines the connection between four processes that govern the station{\textquoteright}s socio-political trajectory: 1) the government{\textquoteright}s elaboration of the "dangerous classes" paradigm that led to expanding technologies of policing and surveillance; 2) the development of transportation infrastructure that brought migrants and goods to the capital; 3) the emergence of a railroad labor economy that created a new class of workers; and 4) the arrival and settling of immigrant groups from former colonies. I show how "dangerous" social archetypes, from the nineteenth century provincial migrant, to the early twentieth century railway worker on strike, to the African-Muslim immigrant, were summoned and reconfigured in events at the Gare du Nord and shaped the future configuration of political subjects and their struggles. I focus ethnographically on the trajectories of African immigrants at the station, the contemporary "dangerous classes." I argue that through their trans-regional networks and practices, the Gare du Nord has become a unique site of political contestation as it transforms into a node that connects the station to immigration pathways through sub-Saharan and North Africa. By offering an ethnographic approach to multidisciplinary conversations on transnational cities and postcolonial history, my dissertation builds a framework and methodology to analyze proliferating "theaters of encounter:" sites suffused with conflicting idioms, grounded in structures of human and capital circulation, and traversed by histories of struggle.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11110431}, author = {Julie Kleinman} } @mastersthesis {1295031, title = {The Limits of International Human Rights Law: Ratification Politics in Selective Signatory States in MENA}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Rachel George} } @mastersthesis {1295030, title = {Hasidic Geopolitics and the Greater Land of Israel: Israeli Hasidic Rebbes Encounter the West Bank, Gaza and Territorial Withdrawal, 1982-2013}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Brett Levi} } @mastersthesis {1295029, title = {The Gospel of Business Education}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Salmaan Mirza} } @mastersthesis {1295028, title = {How Terrorism Endures: Factors that Affected the Longevity of the Kurdistan Worker{\textquoteright}s Party (PKK)}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Reina Saiki} } @mastersthesis {1295026, title = {Daughters of the Iranian Revolution: Women{\textquoteright}s Experiences of Increased Access to Higher Education in the Islamic Republic, 1987-1997}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Alexander Shams} } @mastersthesis {1295023, title = {Redefining Syrian Identity in the Diaspora: A Glimpse into the Lives of Syrian Refugees in Jordan June-July, 2012}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Hassan Shiban} } @mastersthesis {1295022, title = {Building an Insurgent Consciousness: Political Posters of the Fada{\textquoteright}I Khalq (1978-80)}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Rustin Zarkar} } @mastersthesis {1295020, title = {More Than Just Sunnis, Shi{\textquoteright}ites and Kurds: A Flawed Constitution, the Failure of Parliamentary Oversight and the Rise of Nuri Al-Maliki in Iraq}, year = {2013}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {John Zavage} } @mastersthesis {1295017, title = { Prolonged Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories}, year = {2013}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), defined by international law as constituting the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (the latter includes East Jerusalem), are among the highest recipients of international humanitarian aid per capita in the world. In Prolonged Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories, I examine the impact of primarily Western aid on Palestinian society in the present phase of de-development in the OPT (2010-2013). I examine four domains in particular: medical relief, psychosocial humanitarianism, gender-based interventions, and security-sector support. My research reveals the interlinked nature of these domains as well as the blurring of development and humanitarian assistance in the OPT. A central purpose of this research is to provide an ethnographic account of contemporary Palestinian subjectivity under prolonged humanitarian governance, thereby contributing to scholarship on conflict and violence, modern Middle Eastern studies, the anthropology of policy and humanitarianism, and critical development studies.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11169795}, author = {Sa{\textquoteright}ed Adel Atshan} } @book {1323036, title = {Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire}, year = {2012}, pages = {264}, publisher = {Stanford University Press}, organization = {Stanford University Press}, abstract = {

In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia.

Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted{\textemdash}or not{\textemdash}the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.

}, url = {https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21519}, author = {Eve Marie Troutt Powell} } @mastersthesis {1296467, title = {Fantasies of Reason: Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural in Iran}, year = {2012}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation examines uncertainties about the supernatural among members of the urban middle class in Tehran, Iran. In particular, I attend to the ways in which the category of the supernatural (mavara) has become, for some people, an object of potential scientific ({\textquoteright}elmi ) inquiry that must be distinguished from approaches usually ascribed to the rural, the uneducated, and the poor, often deemed as either superstitions (khorafat) or parochically religious (dini). By examining a range of encounters with the supernatural {\textendash} such as attempts to explain communications with the souls of the dead, make sense of spirit possession, and differentiate real magic from charlatanism {\textendash} I highlight the varied modalities through which perspectives and forms of reasoning imagined to be rational and scientific are brought to bear on matters that are understood to lie, at least partially, within the purview of religious knowledge. I situate such supernatural encounters against a backdrop of state disciplinary and coercive measures, thereby illuminating important shifts in Iran{\textquoteright}s politico-religious landscape in the past two decades, such as the waning of the religious authority of the Shi{\textquoteright}i ulama among certain sections of society. This declining authority does not necessarily imply a weakened interest in Islam (although this is sometimes the case). Rather, it has opened up a space for reception and deliberation of a multiplicity of sources of religious knowledge, both Islamic and non-Islamic. These include forms of Western-imported spirituality and occultism that have been entering Iran for over a century, with their most recent wave consisting of translated texts of New Age spirituality, self-help success literature, and popular psychology that have gained popularity since the end of the war with Iraq. The metaphysical models on offer through these spiritual systems are usually promoted and understood as scientific rather than religious. That is, rather than being seen as contradicting Islamic notions, these formulations are often viewed as parallel to them. By attending to such notions and their everyday manifestations, my project brings into focus various hybrid forms of religious-scientific knowledge, experience, and discourse that have largely been ignored in the study of modern Muslim societies.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/1027444386?accountid=11311}, author = {Alireza Doostdar} } @mastersthesis {1295061, title = {Kirkuk, 1918{\textendash}1968: Oil and the Politics of Identity in an Iraqi City}, year = {2012}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In this dissertation, I use methodological approaches from studies of urbanism, oil modernity, nation building, and identity formation to analyze the relationships between urban change, oil, state integration, and the politicization of group identities in the multiethnic Iraqi city of Kirkuk from 1918 to 1968. I argue that, in early to mid-twentieth-century Kirkuk, the oil industry, Baghdad{\textquoteright}s policies, and the British neocolonial presence interacted with local conditions to produce the crystallization of ethnic group identities within a nascent domain of local politics. I find that at the time of the formation of the Iraqi state in the early 1920s, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid and local politics did not align clearly with ethnicities or other self-identities. Instead, they were largely subsumed under relations between more powerful external entities. Kirkukis{\textquoteright} political loyalties were based on which entity best served their interests{\textemdash}or, as was often the case, were positioned against a side based on its perceived hostility to their concerns. These political dynamics began to shift with Kirkuk{\textquoteright}s incorporation into Baghdad{\textquoteright}s domain, the beginnings of the Iraq Petroleum Company{\textquoteright}s exploration just northwest of urban Kirkuk, and the end of British mandate rule. The Iraqi central government{\textquoteright}s integration efforts exacerbated fault lines between emergent Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab ethnic communities at a time when the city{\textquoteright}s population and its urban fabric were growing rapidly. The oil industry, which provided the livelihood for a substantial percentage of Kirkuk{\textquoteright}s population, became the focus of Communist-led labor organization. Consequently, the Iraqi government, the British government, and the oil company attempted to counter Communist influence through urban development schemes. The combination of urban growth and the expansion of discursive activities stimulated the emergence of a distinct civic identity and an accompanying arena of local politics in which Kirkuk{\textquoteright}s ethnic communities were deeply invested. After the destabilizing effects of the Iraqi revolution in 1958, a cycle of intercommunal violence began in Kirkuk along increasingly apparent ethnic lines. Escalating conflict between Baghdad and the Kurdish movement for control of Kirkuk after 1958 fueled these tensions further. The reverberations of the revolution{\textquoteright}s aftermath are still evident today.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9876087}, author = {Arbella Bet-Shlimon} } @mastersthesis {1295055, title = {Between Caliphs and Kings: Religion and Authority in Sharq al-Andalus, 1145{\textendash}1243}, year = {2012}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation focuses on how the Marrakech-based Almohads and their independent Muslim rivals in eastern al-Andalus contested spiritual and temporal power. The rulers of Sharq al-Andalus opposed Almohad claims to a divinely granted authority rooted in a new messianic interpretation of the caliphate. Instead, they articulated a vision of legitimacy linked to earlier Sunni forms, and connected their rule more closely to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad than any previous Andalusi dynasty had done. One minted coins that included the name of the Abbasid caliph, and another received official permission from the Abbasids to rule as governor of al-Andalus. This dissertation examines the written sources, coins and architecture produced in the courts of Andalusi and Almohad rulers to explore how they legitimated their authority. It argues that the conflict among these Muslim rivals in many ways superseded their battles against Christians. The Almohads saw anyone{\textemdash}Muslim, Christian or Jewish{\textemdash}who did not submit to their rule and their conception of Islam as infidels, and said that jihad against non-Almohad Muslims was more important than jihad against Christians. Nevertheless, later Arabic sources attempted to cast the conflict between the independent rulers of al-Andalus and the Almohads as part of a broader Christian-Muslim clash. The alliances Andalusi rulers made with Christian kings, and, in some cases, their Christian roots, made their religious allegiance to Islam suspect. This attitude has continued in modern scholarship as well. This dissertation instead argues that the independent rulers of al-Andalus and their Almohad counterparts were engaged in a broader debate, common to the wider Islamic world, about what constituted righteous Islamic authority. As the population of the territories ruled by Muslims became majority Muslim, new groups began to gain power, eroding the primacy of the Arab caliphate. Like their Persian and Turkic contemporaries to the east, the Berber and Andalusi rulers of the Islamic west struggled to negotiate between the caliphal ideal of Islamic unity and the increasingly decentralized political world they encountered. Analyzing the conflicts among these rivals illuminates the questions that animated the Islamic world as new spiritual and political forms were emerging.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10381398}, author = {Abigail Krasner Balbale} } @mastersthesis {1295051, title = {Jihad and Other Universalisms: Arab-Bosnian Encounters in the U.S. World Order}, year = {2012}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation uses the experiences of Arab Islamist fighters in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) to rethink prevailing notions of world order. These actors are frequently glossed as {\textquotedblleft}foreign fighters{\textquotedblright}: rootless, unaccountable extremists attempting to impose rigid forms of Islam on local {\textquotedblleft}moderate{\textquotedblright} Muslim populations, be it in BiH, Afghanistan, Chechnya, or other sites of conflict with non-Muslim powers. By illuminating some of the many diasporic and imperial circuits linking BiH with other parts of the world, this dissertation provides a richer historical and sociological context in which transnational activist movements no longer seem so aberrational. This study argues that the mobilization to join the {\textquotedblleft}jihad{\textquotedblright} alongside Bosnian Muslims can be usefully understood as a universalist project: an attempt to incarnate a worldwide Muslim community (umma) theoretically open to all of humanity, in which activists struggle through the experience of racial, cultural, and doctrinal difference vis-{\`a}-vis Bosnian and other Muslims. This approach opens up two broad avenues of inquiry. First, it allows an analysis of how Muslims of different backgrounds interacted in contexts of fighting, intermarriage, and doctrinal disputation. Second, it helps analytically situate the jihad in relation to other forms of armed intervention also acting in the name of humanity, most importantly UN peacekeeping and the U.S.-led {\textquotedblleft}Global War on Terror.{\textquotedblright} This study is based on approximately 12 months of fieldwork in BiH between 2006 and 2012, mostly in Sarajevo, Zenica, Tuzla, and Bugojno. Open-ended life-history interviews were conducted in Arabic and English with Arab residents of BiH and their Bosnian comrades, kin, and critics. Additional interviews took place in Yemen, France, and Egypt. The study also draws extensively on archival materials culled from various sources, including Bosnian army and intelligence documents gathered by the UN war crimes tribunal, U.S. State Department cables disclosed by Wikileaks, and extensive printed and online materials by participants in and supporters of the jihad written in Arabic, the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, and Urdu.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10381397}, author = {Darryl Li} } @mastersthesis {1295047, title = {Islamic Law and Legal Education in Modern Egypt}, year = {2012}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation examines the transmission of Islamic legal knowledge in modern Egypt. It is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo among formally trained Islamic scholars. With governmental permission, I was able to attend classes at both al-Azhar{\textquoteright}s Faculty of Shariʿah and Cairo University{\textquoteright}s D{\={a}}r al-ʿUlum. I also participated in the network of traditional study circles operating in and around al-Azhar mosque. Combining ethnographic data with extensive archival research, I trace the effects of government-led initiatives over the past century and a half to reform traditional religious learning. Such have revolved around increased incorporation of Western educational methods. There are two themes on which I focus. The first centers on ethics and subjectivity. Talal Asad has suggested that for pre-modern Muslim jurists, accurate understanding of sacred texts presupposed an appropriate "habitus". Drawing on Wittgenstein and Bourdieu, I elaborate Asad{\textquoteright}s brief remarks along the following lines. Given that how a text is read depends upon the attributes of the reader, religious authorities insisted that proper interpretations could only be generated by proper character. The way in which to produce proper character was to mold it through a suitable program of ethical discipline. I demonstrate that pre-modern Islamic educational techniques were structured with the aim of imparting a particular habitus (modeled on that of the Prophet) by enjoining meticulous and constant imitation of the Prophet{\textquoteright}s personal habits (Sunnah). By transforming themselves into living replicas of the Prophet, jurists believed that they acquired the ability to mirror his textual interpretations. I then describe how traditional linkages between knowledge and ethics have been eroded by the importation of Western learning techniques, scrutinizing the effects of these changes on substantive legal doctrine. The second overarching theme of my research examines how changes in pedagogical methods have produced a corresponding shift in "episteme". Using Foucault, I argue that premodern religious learning was dominated by an episteme centered on language and grammar. I proceed to describe how modern educational reforms have succeeded in inaugurating a new episteme modeled on the natural sciences. I assess the impact of this shift on modes of legal reasoning.

}, url = {http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10382786}, author = {Aria Nakissa} } @mastersthesis {1295035, title = {The Implications of the Changes in the Elementary School Religious Education in Turkey between the Years 1980{\textendash}1989}, year = {2012}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Ayse Lokmanoglu} } @mastersthesis {1295037, title = {Social Media as Passive Polling: Using Twitter and Online Forums to Map Islamism in Egypt}, year = {2012}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Todd Mostak} } @mastersthesis {1295038, title = {The Cultural Power of Poetry in Late Timurid Iran and its Representation in the Portable Arts}, year = {2012}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Marian Smith} } @mastersthesis {1295034, title = {Beirut{\textquoteright}s Reconstruction: Citizens{\textquoteright} Deaths, the Death of Citizenship?}, year = {2012}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {George Somi} } @mastersthesis {1297324, title = {Reception of European Law, Origins and Islamic Legal Revivalism, and Transformations in Islamic Jurisprudence}, year = {2011}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation examines the reception of European law in Egypt, the origins of Egyptian movements to revive Islamic law, and foundations of transformations in Egyptian-Islamic legal thought between 1875 and 1960. The dissertation has two principal arguments. First, it maintains that an understanding of present-day Islamic law, both theoretical and applied, requires an understanding of developments that occurred in Egyptian legal thought and education between 1875 and 1960. Second, the dissertation demonstrates how the reception of European law in Egypt impacted the country{\textquoteright}s intellectual culture, its legal-educational institutions, the alignment patterns of its law scholars, and Islamic legal thought between 1875 and 1960. Although the influence of European law and legal thought only partially explains the transformations that took place in Islamic law and legal thought in Egypt, the dissertation argues nonetheless that European influence laid foundations for certain transformations that occurred. Section 1 narrates the evolution of the popular Egyptian desire to revive Islamic law in the face of European legal reception. Section 2 argues that scholars in Europe created fields of knowledge that influenced Egyptian scholars{\textquoteright} approaches to secular and Islamic law. Section 3 narrates the intellectual and curricular history of Egypt{\textquoteright}s law faculties. The section focuses on the Cairo University Law Faculty. Section 4 examines a transformational treatise in Islamic obligations and contract doctrine, Chafik Chehata{\textquoteright}s Essai d{\textquoteright}une th{\'e}orie g{\'e}n{\'e}rale de l{\textquoteright}obligation en droit musulman (1936). The treatise is analyzed as an example of how European ideas inspired the formation of "general theory" writing in Egyptian-Islamic legal thought.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/856602995?accountid=11311}, author = {Leonard Wood} } @mastersthesis {1297322, title = {Aden and the End of Empire, 1936{\textendash}1960}, year = {2011}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation seeks to reinsert the port city of Aden into the postwar world of the rising Cold War, escalating decolonization, and growing global interconnectivity. As the world{\textquoteright}s second largest port during the 1950s, Aden is a significant venue for historical research and an under-appreciated link of the imperial and {\textquotedblleft}Western{\textquotedblright} chain of port cities that circled the globe after the Second World War. Rather than retreating from {\textquotedblleft}East of Suez{\textquotedblright} the British Empire re-imagined their control of Aden as a modern Cold War project inline with both enlightened imperialism and Free World interests. The city{\textquoteright}s decolonization is therefore a paradigmatic case of British postwar efforts to retain some of their more valuable and functional colonies in a bipolar world system. Aden{\textquoteright}s rise and fall also provides insight into novel forms of anti-imperial resistance that surfaced between the onset of Aden{\textquoteright}s formal colonization in 1937 and the rapid expansion of the city{\textquoteright}s postwar economy, best symbolized by the opening of the Little Aden Oil Refinery in 1954. During this time span organized labor would play the central part in resisting Aden{\textquoteright}s uncontrolled expansion as well as the determined British attempt to surgically remove Aden from the Arab political space and transform it instead into a global port city. The imperial administration attempted to do so by enhancing the city{\textquoteright}s cosmopolitan ethnic makeup and recasting Aden as an important node of the burgeoning Anglo-American alliance. Though both efforts were successful to a certain degree, the imperial administration simultaneously neglected several longstanding socioeconomic issues that plagued Aden{\textquoteright}s economy: namely, immigration, housing and cost of living. These problems gradually leached into the political debates concerning Aden{\textquoteright}s future and gradually drove Aden{\textquoteright}s labor movement and anti-imperial body politic towards extremism and rejectionism. Labor-Empire actions and reactions fulminated in a pivotal turning point of its postwar development in 1960. This moment{\textemdash}the removal of the right to strike{\textemdash}neatly illustrates how later anti-imperial movements engaged with different dialogues, networks and international spaces in order to outflank their imperial opponents and force them to adopt new and unprecedented strategies to counter and neutralize these new threats.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/878209335?accountid=11311}, author = {Michael James Esdaile} } @mastersthesis {1296466, title = {A Radical Rethinking of Empire: Ottoman State and Society during the Greek War of Independence 1821{\textendash}1826}, year = {2011}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation investigates the Greek War of Independence as an Ottoman experience, exploring in particular how Sultan Mahmud II (1808-1839) and the central state elite tried to make sense of and reacted to the rapidly changing world around them. It explores how the perceptions, actions and reactions of the Ottoman state to the Greek insurgency had a deep and long-lasting impact on both Ottoman state and society, and how it necessitated a radical rethinking of the empire. Specifically, it looks into the war{\textquoteright}s ensuing need to create a self-mobilizing proto-citizen, a project that was articulated by the Ottoman state as a response to the threat posed by the Greek insurgents. This study thus suggests that nineteenth century Ottoman history, especially the history of Tanzimat, cannot be properly understood without connecting it to the Greek War of Independence {\textemdash}something that has been sorely lacking in most {\textquotedblleft}classical{\textquotedblright} histories of the Tanzimat period.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/915016878?accountid=11311}, author = {Sukru Ilicak} } @mastersthesis {1296464, title = {Contours of Persianate Community, 1722{\textendash}1835}, year = {2011}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

Nations tell stories about themselves that tend to cohere around a shared language and a history unique to a particular land. South and West Asia{\textemdash}regions that shared Persian as a language of social, cultural and political power and prestige for centuries, until the early 19th century{\textemdash}present a conundrum in the context of nationalist narratives and the uniqueness these narratives claim for themselves. Literary and historical scholarship on the Persianate world largely reflects the assumptions underpinning these narratives, and, as a result, the scope and analyses of this scholarship are structured by the logic of protonationalist sensibilities. This dissertation seeks to contribute to a growing body of work on Persianate culture, considering how a shared language of learning and power, which was enabled by and reinforced the circulation of ideas, goods, texts, people and practices, was vital in the constitution of cultural ideas and social systems in the neighboring lands of Iran and India. Texts that scholars have generally read as iconically protonationalist are reconsidered alongside contemporaneous texts from a variety of genres that share features as commemorative texts of self and community. This dissertation argues that a shared Persianate culture, vested in a corpus of learning and expressed in an ethics of comportment (adab), was the basis of conceptions of self and community in the turbulent century that caused populations to disperse, centers of power to shift and the circulations that interlinked Persianate regions to ebb and flow. Beginning with the two assumed bases of protonationalist and nationalist community, land as society and language as culture, this dissertation begins the work of making sense of early modern Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/914703512?accountid=11311}, author = {Mana Kia} } @mastersthesis {1295043, title = {Islamic Educational Treatises: A Guiding Light for Instructors, Students, and Their Books}, year = {2011}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Hunter Bandy} } @mastersthesis {1295042, title = {Women and Children First? The Impact of Humanitarian Practices on Sudanese Refugees in Cairo}, year = {2011}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Zara Bohan} } @mastersthesis {1295041, title = {Belligerent Occupation and Humanitarianization in Gaza: Law and Practice}, year = {2011}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Lani Frerichs} } @mastersthesis {1295040, title = {Male Voices and the Woman-Nation Trope: Ahlam Mosteghanemi Rewrites Kateb Yacine}, year = {2011}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Claire Kelly} } @mastersthesis {1295039, title = {Foreign Boots, Arab Soil: Popular Views of American Bases in Kuwait and Bahrain}, year = {2011}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Marshall Nannes} } @mastersthesis {1297327, title = {Friends Fall Apart: The Wax and Wane of Indo-Egyptian Relations, 1947{\textendash}1970}, year = {2010}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

As a student of history, when one studies either Middle Eastern history or diplomatic/international history after the WWII, it is almost impossible to avoid coming across terms such as the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism, Nehru and Nasser, for instance. Student often learn how the Bandung Conference marked the watershed in the history of the so-called Third World countries. How those countries attempted to balance themselves between the two super powers representing completely different political ideologies in the Cold War. Then the Suez crisis of 1956 and how Nasser came out of the crisis as a hero in a war many people saw as an attempt of the British and the French, with the help of the Israelis, to resurrect the imperialism in Egypt.

One often learns about those historical moments. Yet the relations between Egypt and India, which were important players in the international arena, are not well studied and did not receive high priority. Many literatures in the field of foreign relations, foreign policies and foreign affairs of Egypt and India are overwhelmingly about Egypt or India with the U.S. Europe or with their neighbors, or in the region in which the two countries are located. One wonders what had happened to the cordial relationships between Egypt and India after the Bandung conference and Suez crisis when their relations reached its zenith. How did the two countries develop and nurture their relations is not well researched.

My thesis revolves around a number of core historical questions. What had become of the once strong and vigorous relations between Egypt and India? What triggered the wane in cordial relations between Egypt and India since 1956? By looking how the two countries reacted and reciprocated each other in a number of political crises, such as the Kashmir issue, the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 and the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, one can see the roots of the discord which led to the decline of their relations in 1960s. On the other hand, what were the cultural exchanges between the two countries and what were the results of such exchanges? How cultural activities across borders are vital to the fostering and strengthening of relations among nations.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/612735885?accountid=11311}, author = {Chotirat Komaradat} } @mastersthesis {1297325, title = {Cultivating Mystery: Miracles and the Coptic Moral Imaginary}, year = {2010}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

An ethnographic account of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, Cultivating Mystery argues that an anthropological study of miracles can help to explain the social world of a religious minority that perceives itself as beleaguered in the midst of a Muslim nation. Miracle accounts are one way by which a religious community constructs itself along moral lines and maintains, contests, and negotiates the social boundaries between self and other. An emphasis on materiality is intended to make a critical intervention in ongoing debates about belief by illuminating how religiously charged objects and language are constitutive of the relationship between inter-religious politics and faith as embodied practice.

The dynamic of miracles and materiality is further complicated by the mystery that emerges and is cultivated in this intersection. I employ the concept of mystery as an umbrella term for encounters with things not seen, or seen but not quite understood, encounters that seem always to elude capture in semiotic form, and yet can only be captured in semiotic form. A revelation is made in material form, yet the revelation itself conceals something from the religious practitioner. Gestures toward a largely invisible world, made by signs of the miraculous, are used to create relationships between heavenly beings and those on earth. These relationships, in turn, are taken by pious Copts as reflecting their moral superiority in the context of Muslim Egypt.

After introducing the concepts of mystery, materiality, and miracles in Chapter One, Part I of the dissertation examines the historical background that frames the current investment in the miraculous that one today finds among Copts. Chapter Two discusses the figure of Baba (Pope) Kyrillos VI (pope 1959-1971) who is widely considered a saintly man by contemporary Copts, and the current Coptic Pope, Shenouda III (1971-present) with a particular emphasis on the changing Church-State relationship over the last four decades. Chapter Three offers an analysis of the 1968 apparition of the Virgin Mary in a neighborhood of Cairo highlighting how the current political atmosphere, especially in terms of Muslim-Christian tensions, is imposed on a retrospective view of the apparition.

Part II explores the materiality of difference and piety. Chapter Four examines the increasing Coptic mobility around Egypt to Coptic holy sites and the ways in which the places visited and the very materiality of these places shape a particular mode of moral being all the while discreetly cultivating, on the one hand, a sense of mystery in encounters with the relics of holiness (such as the bones of saints), and, on the other hand, a sense of difference from the Muslim Other. Chapter Five expands on the previous chapter by specifically looking at two Coptic interlocutors{\textquoteright} encounters with saints and the Devil through material objects. Of particular concern are the signs that for some Copts are taken to be indications of their piety.

Part III consists of one chapter (Chapter Six), which is a theoretical reflection on the relationship between faith and skepticism wherein I argue that not only are these facets of religious practice two sides of the same coin, but that it is perhaps in the space between them, between one{\textquoteright}s simultaneous embrace of the tenets of her religion and the skepticism that creeps up behind her, where mystery resides. To invoke, with a twist, a popular Biblical passage, faith without skepticism is dead.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/614065829?accountid=11311}, author = {Anthony Shenoda} } @mastersthesis {1296463, title = {Azhar ash-Shir: Romanticism, Translation and Ambivalence towards Modernity in Early 20th Century Egypt}, year = {2010}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Sara Berger} } @mastersthesis {1296462, title = {Communities Like Your Own: The Question of the Animal in Ibrahim al-Koni{\textquoteright}s {\textquoteright}The Bleeding of the Stone{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteright}Gold Dust{\textquoteright} }, year = {2010}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Allison Blecker} } @mastersthesis {1296461, title = {Boudoir of Spirit: The Rhetoric of Form in the Medieval Near East}, year = {2010}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Henry Bowles} } @mastersthesis {1296460, title = {Piracy on the High Sands: The Failure of Regulatory Reform After the 2006 Kuwait Stock Exchange Correction}, year = {2010}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Erin Bys} } @mastersthesis {1296453, title = {Dancing through the House of Many Mansions: Dabkeh in Contemporary Lebanon}, year = {2010}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Marielle Costanza} } @mastersthesis {1296451, title = {Kissinger and the King: Reevaluating the Jordanian Option in the 1970{\textquoteright}s Peace Process}, year = {2010}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Hillary Downs} } @mastersthesis {1297333, title = {From Tradition to Law: The Origins and Early Development of the Sh{\={a}}fi{\textquoteleft}i School of Law in Ninth-Century Egypt}, year = {2009}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

Unraveling the complex dynamics that created and sustained the hegemony of the four principal schools of Sunni Islamic law necessarily requires an appreciation of the schools{\textquoteright} historical genesis. This dissertation provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence and early development of a Sunni legal school (madhhab fiqhi), drawing on new evidence from a range of hitherto unstudied primary sources. Through a reconstruction of the socio-political, intellectual, and textual history of the Sh{\={a}}fi{\textquoteright}i school during its formative stage in ninth-century Egypt, my study identifies the factors that contributed to the emergence and success of Shafi{\textquoteright}i doctrine; traces how this doctrine was propagated and re-interpreted, and from where it derived its authority; and explores the intimate connection between writing and thought in Islamic legal discourse. The dissertation concludes that the innovative legal hermeneutic of Muhammad b. Idris al-Sh{\={a}}fi{\textquoteright}i (d. 204/820), which enshrined normativity in a clearly demarcated canon of sacred sources, played a crucial role in the transformation of Islamic law from a diffuse oral tradition into a written legal science.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304889761?accountid=11311}, author = {Ahmed El-Shamsy} } @mastersthesis {1297332, title = {Ottoman Methods of Conquest: Legal Imperialism and the City of Aleppo 1480-1570 }, year = {2009}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This thesis examines the methods by which the Ottoman Empire conquered and endeavored to control the city of Aleppo{\textemdash}a cosmopolitan urban center now in northern Syria. It employs a broad understanding of conquest, one that considers engagements and orientations stretching far around the event of Aleppo{\textquoteright}s military surrender in 1516. This understanding, moreover, involves legal culture in ways not typically fronted in studies of imperial conquest. The thesis contends that the Ottomans{\textemdash}who after displacing the Mamluk Empire governed the core of the Islamic world{\textemdash}maintained an especially robust conception of their rule as a law-giving enterprise, which characterized their attention to everything from the details of judicial administration to the rhetoric of imperial self-justification. Using various sources, including legal codes and local law court records, this thesis describes an Ottoman project to solicit, nurture, and if necessary, impose a new legal order. Far from suggesting perfect coherence in practice, the combinative and experimental qualities of Ottoman involvement are thrown into relief. This dynamic process and the priorities it engendered are grouped under the rubric legal imperialism.

The thesis undertakes a detailed survey of the late Mamluk legal system, introducing the persons, institutions, and ideas that the Ottomans would inherit. The role of judges, law courts, legal documents, and legal identities receives special treatment, and the diffuse yet functional nature of the Mamluk arrangement is emphasized. A brief survey of Mamluk-Ottoman relations reveals that the conquerors could not have stepped into an unfamiliar world.

An overview of the Ottomans{\textquoteright} conquering past and the sources, jurisdictions, and hierarchies of Ottoman law give historical shape to legal imperialism. The thesis then explores Ottoman Aleppo{\textquoteright}s early history using contemporary cadastral surveys, law codes, court records, and biographical literature. The spectacular killing of a centrally-appointed surveyor is used to demonstrate the protracted and complex nature of Ottomanization for a city long presumed to have succumbed easily. The construction of a judicial archive, the inspection of legal records (especially those pertaining to religious endowments), and the elevation of the Hanafi legal community{\textemdash}all developments with Mamluk antecedents{\textemdash}reveal Istanbul{\textquoteright}s concern to concentrate judicial practice.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304890544?accountid=11311}, author = {Timothy J. Fitzgerald} } @mastersthesis {1297331, title = {The Confluence and Construction of Traditions: Al-Qushayri (d. 465/1072) and the Intersection of Qur{\textquoteright}{\={a}}nic Exegesis, Theology, and Sufism}, year = {2009}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation investigates the life and works of Abu al-Q{\={a}}sim {\textquoteleft}Abd al-Karim al-Qushayri (d. 465/1072). While the majority of western studies of al-Qushayri have concentrated almost exclusively on his Sufi legacy and the Ris{\={a}}la, his treatise on Sufism, the present study makes a more holistic account of his life, taking into consideration his wider scholastic interests and the socio-political landscape of Nishapur, the city in which he lived. The various narratives of his life, as variously reported in the historical records, are brought together in order to more fully expose the horizon of his historical moment. Special attention is paid to the urban factionalism and eventual persecution that wracked Nishapur, as both of these historical phenomena directly affected al-Qushayri.

The central focus, however, is on his scholastic identity and the related traditions with which he engaged. While significant mention is made of his contribution to hadith and Sh{\={a}}fi{\textquoteleft}ism, the central focus of this study is on the confluence of three especially influential traditions: Sufism, Ash{\textquoteleft}ari theology, and Qur{\textquoteright}{\={a}}nic exegesis. Al-Qushayri{\textquoteright}s social network of teachers is delineated for each of these traditions, with shared linkages carefully mapped across the course of his life. His view of pedagogy and perpetuation is investigated as well. For his work in Ash{\textquoteleft}arism and scriptural commentary, his textual legacy and his role in continuing each tradition is also given.

As to textual analysis, while the Ris{\={a}}la receives ample consideration, greater attention is paid to his other major work, the Lat{\={a}}{\textquoteright} if al-ish{\={a}}r{\={a}}t ("Subtleties of the Signs"), a commentary of the Qur{\textquoteright}{\={a}}n written at the same time. The commentary is studied and characterized and its textual genealogy is traced against relevant sources. Finally, cases from the Lat{\={a}}{\textquoteright} if al-ish{\={a}}r{\={a}}t are presented where the intersection of these various scholastic traditions are most evident.

This multivalent approach brings forward the nuanced and interwoven texture of al-Qushayri{\textquoteright}s life, in specific, and demonstrates the constructed nature of tradition, in general.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304891963?accountid=11311}, author = {Martin Nguyen} } @mastersthesis {1297328, title = {State and Society in the Marketplace: Bursa in the Late 15th Century}, year = {2009}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The story of the Ottoman urban economy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is part of a broader transition that took place in the administrative, economic and social spheres as the Ottoman principality turned into a centralized empire. No historical study has been made of the Medieval Anatolian town economy and of the process through which it was transformed into an imperial system. This dissertation proposes to offer the first in-depth look at such a transformation process through a study of late fifteenth century Bursa, paying particular attention to urban production and market relations, to the legacy of medieval brotherhoods called ahis, and to the relationship between the Ottoman state with this city{\textquoteright}s economy.

The main sources used in this dissertation are the Bursa k{\={a}}di court records, together with a number of other sources such as cadastral surveys, sultanic law codes, imperial orders, pious endowment registers and manuals of ethics. Based on my research into these sources, I argue that fifteenth-century Ottoman Bursa displayed the characteristics of a period of transition towards some form of early modernity in terms of codified rules replacing ad hoc arrangements, the state playing an increasing role in the marketplace, proliferation and systematization of official record keeping, and the appearance of formal and hierarchical craft guilds.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304890612?accountid=11311}, author = {Iklil Oya Selcuk} } @mastersthesis {1297326, title = {Marks of Contagion: The Plague, the Bourse, the Word and the Law in the Early Modern Mediterranean 1720-1762}, year = {2009}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is a study of two episodes of mass mortality, in Marseilles during 1720{\textendash}21, and in Aleppo, Syria, during 1761{\textendash}62. Linked by trade ties, missionary outreach, and diplomatic contacts, the two cities were a microcosm of eighteenth-century relations across the Mediterranean. In these relations the diagnosis of bubonic plague was a significant factor. I argue in my dissertation that despite the contemporary belief that the Levant was a source of plague, the connection between plague epidemics in Aleppo and in southern France was almost certainly literary rather than biological, except in the sense that they both reflected sickness and death from diseases prevalent in the Mediterranean basin.

For centuries, bubonic plague has been the very emblem of epidemic disease. The mass mortality associated with it led to major historical shifts. But what was the plague? In my dissertation I argue that during the early-modern period, diagnosis of plague, and the quarantine institutions which oversaw it, arose from fierce struggles for economic, political and social dominance. They bisected the Mediterranean and contributed substantially to the present-day conceptual divide between {\textquoteleft}East{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteleft}West.{\textquoteright} Rather than indicating the presence of a bacterium, I argue that reference to plague in early-modern sources are more plausibly understood as a legal category being transformed by the nation-state. The aversion of Ottoman officials to quarantine until the mid-1800s was not {\textquoteleft}fatalism,{\textquoteright} but rather a desire to protect their economic and political interests.

Diagnoses of plague that mandated quarantine were the product of a long documentary chain involving communication across several thousand miles and translation between many languages and genres. In the complex interaction between biological reality and its representations, there was ample room not only for misunderstanding, but also for deliberate distortion. And yet, diagnostic institutions like quarantine and the sanitary cordon had the power not just to specify death{\textquoteright}s official meaning, but potentially to change the rate at which it actually occurred. My dissertation therefore emphasizes the ecology of plague in Mediterranean cities, meaning not only the natural setting, but also social, economic and political relations, and the literature that provided their vocabulary.

}, author = {Aaron Shakow} } @mastersthesis {1296472, title = {An Oral History: The Kuwaiti Community in India in the 1940{\textquoteright}s, 1950{\textquoteright}s and 1960{\textquoteright}s}, year = {2009}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Rasha Al-Duwaisan} } @mastersthesis {1296475, title = {Exporting Iran{\textquoteright}s Islamic Revolution: Case Studies in Lebanon and Iraq}, year = {2009}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Pouya Alimagham} } @mastersthesis {1296473, title = {Renegotiating the Public Sphere: Gender and Class in Modern Morocco}, year = {2009}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Emmaline Gayk} } @mastersthesis {1296476, title = {Migrant Workers in {\textquoteright}Enclave{\textquoteright} Industrial Camps in the Arab Gulf States}, year = {2009}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Thanavon Pamranon} } @mastersthesis {1296474, title = {Quasi-States and Contentious Civil Societies: Explaining Rates of Contestation between Civil Society Organizations and the Palestinian Authority, 1994{\textendash}2006}, year = {2009}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Aaron Wenner} } @mastersthesis {1296477, title = {Policing Palestine, 1917{\textendash}1937: British Structures of {\textquoteright}Law and Order{\textquoteright} and Their Uneven Impact on Jewish and Arab Communities}, year = {2009}, type = {AM thesis}, author = {Alex Winder} } @mastersthesis {1298687, title = {Representation and the Republic: North African Art and Material Culture in Paris}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {North African art and material culture -- textiles, pottery, jewelry and other objects -- have been exhibited and sold in France since the nineteenth century. Today these objects are central to both state-run museum projects and to projects of self-representation carried out by people of North African origin within France. The dissertation draws on eighteen months of field research in Paris, bringing together both archival and ethnographic research to explore the symbolic production of North African objects as they circulate through different contexts, both historically and today. The first two chapters examine the historical presence of the arts of North Africa in France, starting with the nineteenth and early twentieth century Universal and Colonial Exhibitions and including colonial-era efforts to standardize and commodify Moroccan artisanal production for sale in France. The second chapter analyzes collection practices at France{\textquoteright}s main ethnographic museum, the Musee de l{\textquoteright}Homme, with a particular focus on the 1934 Exposition du Sahara. Chapters three to five explore the circulation of North African art and material culture in Paris today. An analysis of the reconceptualization of colonial-era collections from North Africa at the new Musee du Quai Branly is followed by an examination of the work of Berber cultural associations, where similar objects are exhibited, discussed, and used. The final chapter explores sites where North African objects are sold in Paris today, with a particular focus on distributors who conceptualize their work in terms of cultural exchange. Throughout the dissertation there is a special attention to the ways in which North African cultural objects circulate ambiguously through the categories of art, artifact, commodity, and {\textquoteright}diasporic object.{\textquoteright} This term draws attention to uses of material culture that are oriented both toward the creation a specific ethnic identity and to creating a space for that identity within contemporary France, in response to current debates over republicanism and the place of minority communities. By exploring the ways in which North African art and material culture are given new meanings in the transnational context, the dissertation reveals how cultural objects are implicated in arguments about the politics of representation and contemporary national identities. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346. Telephone 1-800-521-3042; e-mail: disspub@umi.com}, author = {Lisa Marie Bernasek} } @mastersthesis {1298685, title = {Beyond the Social and the Spiritual: Redefining the Urban Confraternities of Late Medieval Anatolia}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the phenomenon of the urban confraternity in 13th and 14 th-century Anatolia. Urban confraternities in late medieval Anatolia played a range of roles in cities like Ankara, Erzincan, Konya and Sivas. The important political and social void filled specifically by akhi organizations in 13th and 14th-century Anatolia can only be understood within the context of the importance of urban centers during this time period of political instability and attempts at reform, launched by both Christian and Islamic religious institutions.

Despite the fact that these associations of men living in urban centers in late medieval Anatolia have been addressed in scholarship, a real understanding of what functions the organizations performed, how they were organized, their relationship with cities and with various contemporary religious and political authorities has not been established. This is due both to the consistently changing nature of the brotherhoods and also to the ability of the concept of futuwwa (Arab., qualities of youth) to transform itself depending on the social and political reality within which it existed. This dissertation presents a detailed reconstruction of the basis of the moral code of futuwwa as it changed over time; it is also a study of the way in which that code was articulated in Anatolia (in Arabic, Armenian, Persian and Turkish). This dissertation attempts to reconsider one aspect of the history of 13th and 14th-century Anatolia from the perspective of regional urban history rather than a standard rule-oriented (i.e., Seljuk or Cilician) viewpoint. The goal in doing so is to present a more complete picture of the time. This dissertation shows that all over Anatolia in the 13th and 14th centuries urban associations of men existed playing similar roles and interacting with authorities (whether they were Christian or Muslim, Armenian or Turkish) in similar ways. Re-assessing the history of the region from this new perspective allows us to better understand the social realities of the age.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304597393?accountid=11311}, author = {Rachel Goshgarian} } @mastersthesis {1297717, title = {Commerce and Networks of Exchange between the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Near East from the Early Ninth Century to the Arrival of the Crusaders}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

There is no modern work devoted to trade relations between the Byzantines and Near Easterners in the central Middle Ages, with the exception of David Jacoby{\textquoteright}s articles investigating specifically the trade relations between Byzantium and Fatimid Egypt from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. The purpose of the present research is to fill in this gap in scholarship. The movement of commodities, the merchants who traded them, and the routes that these merchants used to travel between the Islamic Near East and the Byzantine Empire in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries are the focus of this dissertation.

In order to address these issues, we employ a tripartite approach: making full use of the sources, such as Arabic geographies and Byzantine saints{\textquoteright} lives, which have previously been only partially studied; consulting other written sources that have not been used at all, such as medicinal writing in Arabic and Greek and belles-lettres works in Arabic; and investigating the relationship of objects that moved via non-economic means, such as diplomatic gifts and booty, to commodities. Based on our findings, we present observations concerning the nature of Byzantine-Islamic trade, the role of the Byzantine provinces in long-distance trade, and the role of Byzantium in the trade between northern Europe and the Islamic Near East.

Our findings show that in the ninth and early tenth centuries, the Byzantine Empire was an exporter of silk and expensive objects to the Islamic markets; it imported luxury objects in return; and the merchants from Islamic lands did not penetrate the Byzantine provinces. By the eleventh century, the Byzantine Empire exported textiles of different types as well as vessels, utensils, and foodstuffs; and merchants from Islamic lands were present in Byzantine provinces such as western Asia Minor and Bithynia. The turning point seems to have been sometime in the mid- or late tenth century. We also observe that the gift exchanges and looting (noneconomic exchanges), which took place between Byzantium and the Islamic Near East, were economic phenomena: gifts were used as promotional items to increase demand of the item in question, and looted items were sold back to the looted party for profit.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304600568?accountid=11311}, author = {Koray Durak} } @mastersthesis {1297714, title = {Explaining Multi-generation Family Business Success in the Gulf States}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation examines the success and survival of third-generation family firms in the Gulf States. A framework derived from a comprehensive review of the family business literature identified eleven factors necessary to the long-term survival of family firms. This framework was expanded to include five factors drawn from an analysis of the Gulf business history as it evolved from the late nineteenth century and as it responded to the oil economy from the mid-twentieth century forward.

To explore this topic thoroughly, this research developed four case studies, through personal interviews, public and private records, and archival materials. Three of the family firms, Jaidah, Zamil, and Sultan (W. J. Towell), survived to the third generation while one firm, Darwish, was divided among its three sibling founders. The framework was applied to each of the four cases to ascertain the extent to which factors affected the continuity of the firms studied.

This research found that the relevancy of the family business literature factors was often shaped by local traditions. Analyzing these firms from this dual vantage identified three additional factors{\textemdash}creation of venues, transferring ownership to companies, and exit funds{\textemdash}that can facilitate in overcoming the complexities manifested as family firms progress to later stages.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304603632?accountid=11311}, author = {Mazen Jaidah} } @mastersthesis {1297711, title = {Work No Words: Voluntarism, Subjectivity, and Moral Economies of Exchange Among Khoja Ismaili Muslims}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

Voluntarism in the multi-ethnic, transnational Shia Imami Nizari Ismaili Muslim community provides a window into the complex interactions of religious ethics, the subject, and the state. While most studies argue that voluntarism is a distinctly American phenomenon linked to citizenship, most Ismailis do not see it as necessarily connected to the nation-state and see no conflict between faith and citizenship. For them, service is a 1400 year tradition entailing the balance between the spiritual and material aspects of life. This dissertation is about one Nizari Ismaili diasporic group called Khoja Ismailis, originally a trading caste from western India that converted from Hinduism to Ismailism around the 11th century. It explores how Khoja Ismailis in Houston, Texas, view and practice seva, or voluntarism, as part of a mediated Islamic moral economy as well as a civic economy, thus binding them with Imam, state, and society. Complicating these moral economies are a hierarchy of service linked to knowledge, class, and symbolic proximity to the Imam, and a hierarchy of gender linked to culturally-based patriarchal logics. Voluntarism reinforces a historical and transnational pan-Ismaili identity, and it becomes a mode through which pious and civic subjectivities are produced. The Ismaili community{\textquoteright}s institutional structures, transnational character, and authority of the Imam shape their voluntarism. This dissertation contributes to literature on philanthropy and voluntarism, moral economies, subjectivity, and native anthropology. It draws on participant-observation, formal and informal interviews, and archival work conducted in Houston, Washington D.C., and New York, United States; Vancouver, Canada; Karachi, Pakistan; Mumbai, Chennai, and Bhuj, India; and Khorog, Tajikistan from 2003{\textendash}2005.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/220126512?accountid=11311}, author = {Zahra Jamal} } @mastersthesis {1297709, title = {Subjects of the Sultan, Disciples of the Shah: Formation and Transformation of the Kizilbash/Alevi Communities in Ottoman Anatolia}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation deals with the history of the Alevi communities historically known as the Kizilbash in Ottoman Anatolia. Scholars have typically treated Alevism as an undifferentiated strain within the hazy category of "heterodox folk Islam" and mostly in terms of the role these communities played in the sixteenth-century Ottoman-Safavid conflict. There has thus been little effort to explore Alevi history in its own right. This dissertation proposes to fill this gap by examining the development of the Alevis{\textquoteright} socio-religious organization, which is centered around a number of charismatic family lines called ocaks. Drawing upon a group of newly available documents and manuscripts emanating from within the Alevi milieu itself, this dissertation traces the origins of the ocak system to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of late medieval Anatolia and accounts for the system{\textquoteright}s evolution up to the nineteenth century.

Chapter one reveals the historical affinity of a number of prominent Alevi ocaks in eastern Anatolia with the Waf{\textquoteright}i order and shows how from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards the various branches of the Wafa{\textquoteright}iyya came to merge with the Safavid-led Kizilbash movement, gradually evolving into distinct components of the Alevi ocak system. Chapters two and three deal with the trajectory of the Alevi-Bektashi symbiosis. Highlighting Alevis{\textquoteright} historical ties to the Abdal/Bektashi convent in Karbala, these chapters propose looking beyond the central Bektashi convent in Kir{\c s}ehir for a fuller grasp of the issue. Chapter four, devoted to Alevi-Safavid relations, argues that the Alevis conceived of their bond with the Safavids primarily in Sufi terms and that they continued in their spiritual attachment to the shahs even after the revolutionary phase of the Kizilbash movement. Relations between the shahs and their Anatolian followers were maintained through the mediation of the Abdal/Bektashi convent in Karbala. Until the late seventeenth century, the Safavids also continued to bestow hilafetnames on members of Alevi ocaks and to dispatch religious treatises to Anatolia. The Safavid memory among the Alevis began to fade away following the demise of the dynasty around the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent increase in influence of the {\c C}elebi Bektashis among them.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304600547?accountid=11311}, author = {Ayfer Karakaya-Stump} } @mastersthesis {1297708, title = {Food as a Window Into Daily Life in Fourteenth Century Central Anatolia}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation seeks to reconstruct the texture of daily life and, through this, worldviews in fourteenth century Central Anatolia. It uses the various parts that food plays in the human experience both as a sampling mechanism and as a way to organize its discussion of ordinary lives in four main thematic areas, each one covered in a separate chapter. The resulting dissertation constitutes one of the first broad-ranging social histories of the final phase in this region{\textquoteright}s transition between the (Christian-ruled) Byzantine and (Muslim-Ruled) Ottoman period.

Chapter One is entirely devoted to the source material (hagiographies, chronicles and other narrative sources) and to its analysis in the context of an under-documented period. It also offers a new look at waqfiyya s (Islamic endowment deeds), a type of document whose relevance for rural and agricultural history has largely been disregarded. Chapter Two covers food production (gardens, cereal farming and animal husbandry) as the professional activity of the majority of the population, as well as life in the countryside and the relationship that people entertained with the land. Chapter Three concentrates on food exchanges, exploring the networks of interaction and information that developed with trade, as well as the various food-related points of contact between the rulers and the ruled (taxes, army logistics, plunder, etc.). Chapter Four, the most substantial in this dissertation, uses the meal as a central concept to discuss a large number of issues pertaining to food consumption, from social interactions to cooking vessels and from hospitality to the social connotations of given food items. Finally, Chapter Five investigates food as it interacts with religion, both by looking at festivals and rituals that involve food as a sample of religious practices, and by studying the religious associations of particular foodstuffs.

The conclusion presents fourteenth century Central Anatolian society as one deeply marked by social stratification yet in which even ordinary people enjoyed a significant measure of agency and awareness of the world beyond their immediate surroundings. In a broader perspective, it also uses a comparison with literary fiction to determine in what respects and to what extent an understanding of late mediaeval worldviews is at all possible.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304597443?accountid=11311}, author = {Nicolas Trepanier} } @mastersthesis {1297706, title = {Before Qadi and Grand Vizier: Intra-Communal Dispute Resolution and Legal Transactions Among Christians and Jews in the Plural Society of Seventeenth Century Istanbul}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation studies the use of legal institutions provided by the Islamic state in the resolution of intracommunal disputes and in the registration of legal transactions among Christians and Jews in late seventeenth century Istanbul. While being the capital city of an Islamic Empire, Ottoman Istanbul in the 1680s and 90s was home to roughly 250,000 Christians and Jews who shared the city with an equal number of Muslims. Even though Islamic law allowed Christians and Jews as dhimmis to resolve most intracommunal legal disputes before an autonomous legal tribunal operated by their respective religious community, many dhimmis forfeited this privilege and preferred to resort instead to legal institutions operated by the Islamic state.

This study examines the voluntary use by dhimmis of three forms of dispute resolution provided by the Islamic state. In addition to the use of the ordinary justice system administered by the qadi of a sharica court, two thus far largely ignored forms of conflict resolution will be considered: the extraordinary justice system of the Imperial Council (divan-i h{\"u}m ayun), and the amicable settlement of disputes (sulh).

Based primarily on Ottoman archival documents, namely the shari{\textquoteleft}a court records of Galata and Hask{\"o}y, the complaints registers of the divan ({\c s}ikayet defterleri), and on the fatwa collections of the sheikh ul-Islams of the period, this study explores with regard to non-Muslims a local manifestation of Islamic law rather than its textbook version provided in the doctrinal works of Islamic jurisprudence. While sharing the same legal status of dhimmi, the use of Islamic legal institutions varied greatly between Orthodox Christians, Armenians and Jews according to religion, gender or function within their community. Furthermore, this thesis shows that Istanbul{\textquoteright}s dhimmis exercised a remarkable degree of agency with regard to (1) the choice of court, (2) the decision on the form of conflict resolution, and (3) through their approach to the chosen legal process.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304599799?accountid=11311}, author = {Richard Wittmann} } @mastersthesis {1297684, title = {The Provincial Challenge: Regionalism, Crisis, and Integration in the Late Ottoman Empire (1792-1812)}, year = {2008}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation focuses on a set of historical circumstances in the Ottoman Empire wherein a new type of provincial elite emerged in the Balkans and Anatolia, consolidated their power in their provincial units and challenged the constitutional basis of the Ottoman imperial system in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The dissertation operates in two parts. The first part analyzes the institutional transformation of Ottoman provincial governance in the eighteenth century. Here, I discuss different mechanisms whereby some local individuals and families consolidated their power and gradually established their control over their provincial units. I particularly focus on the mechanisms of the delegation of authority from imperial authorities to local notables, the emergence of a managerial class as a result of the expansion of tax farming and the participation of communities in the election of municipal overseers.

In Part Two, I depict the circumstances in different Ottoman provinces that transformed these individuals and families from local to regional and from regional to imperial actors. I analyze the political processes whereby they established their regional autonomy, set up networks on an imperial scale and became major actors within the imperial establishment. Then, I focus on the political developments between 1806 and 1808, a period of political turmoil, factional struggle and revolution. This political crisis gave birth to an alliance between some provincial power-holders and a faction in the central government. This alliance produced a major document, the Deed of Agreement (Sened-i ittifak), signed by members of the central state and provincial leaders and redefining authority within the imperial state. In the last chapter, I scrutinize the constitutional orientation of this document.

As a conclusion, I argue that the provincial challenge experienced by the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created possibilities for the transformation of the empire into a more participatory and integrationist polity.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304599897?accountid=11311}, author = {Ali Yaycioglu} } @mastersthesis {1298686, title = {Secularism Under Siege in Lebanon{\textquoteright}s Second Republic}, year = {2007}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

Secularism, defined simply as the full neutrality of the state in its relations with citizens, has failed to be instituted comprehensively in Lebanon, the sole Arab state whose constitution as of 1926 does not establish an official religion of state or jurisdiction. A multi-communal country par excellence, the modern Republic of Lebanon has narrowly escaped the fate of partition India, Palestine or the former Jugoslavia suffered as a result of inter-communal contest.

This dissertation traces the evolution of secular and sectarian forms of government in Lebanon from pre-modern times until the present day. The genealogy of secularism is examined as a discursive ideology, as a byproduct of socio-economic development and as an embodiment of non-discriminatory political, legal, and institutional practice. The thesis proposes that Levantine history exhibited trends towards secular nationalism as early as the sixteenth century, while presenting multiple reasons why secularism was not ratified to a greater degree by the end of the twentieth.

Thematically, the thesis moves from a broad, sweeping overview of the historical contours secularism developed on a global and regional plane to individual case studies illustrating the predicament of secularism in contemporary Lebanon. The sequence of chapters relates secularism to (proto-) nationalism, (Bonapartist) republicanism, consociationalism, capitalism, civic school curricula in history and religion, a deconfessionalized body of personal status laws and Lebanon{\textquoteright}s contemporary religious and political discourse.

The thesis argues that the political transformations Lebanon passed through, and the difficulties secularism has encountered, were different in form, but not altogether in kind, from those attendant on other countries. Comparable multi-communal cases such as the Swiss analogue are adduced as edifying examples which may relativize the preconception of exceptionalism.

Gaining a deeper understanding of Lebanon{\textquoteright}s long engagement with confessional diversity may help account for the intensity of periodic communal conflict while explaining why secularism was recognized from early on as all the more vital and pragmatic necessity for the survival of a model of coexistence. The apparent paradox posed by Lebanon is that of a country which has served at once as the "cradle and grave" ("mahd wa lahd") of Arab secularism.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304848152?accountid=11311}, author = {Mark Farha} } @mastersthesis {1298684, title = {Ottoman-Mamluk Relations: Diplomacy and Perceptions}, year = {2007}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation analyses the relationship between the Ottoman and the Mamluk powers from the mid-fourteenth century to 1512, or from the inception of Ottoman-Mamluk diplomatic relations through the rule of B{\={a}}yezid II. During this period, the relationship between these two powers underwent a transformation. In reconstructing this transformation, previous scholars have chosen to focus on moments of conflict and war. However, the two regions in which the Ottoman and Mamluk powers ruled were connected by a wide range of political, diplomatic, social, cultural, and commercial networks that were established long before the emergence of the two powers. Such networks were a part of Ottoman-Mamluk relations, as was the hostility, which became prevalent in the interactions between the Ottoman and the Mamluk rulers after the 1450s. By studying these networks and by placing particular emphasis on diplomatic ones, this dissertation reevaluates the interactions between the two powers.

While narrating the relationship between the Ottomans and the Mamluks, the dissertation also examines diplomatic incidents that took place between the two courts. Primary sources that report about the contacts between the two powers put a particular emphasis on those diplomatic incidents. This emphasis not only reveals the significant role of diplomacy in the communication between rulers, but also offers critical insight into the minds of sovereigns. Through meticulously crafted letters and carefully chosen envoys and gifts, rulers exchanged their political visions and mutual perceptions. By studying such diplomatic culture and the symbols embedded in it, this dissertation attempts to illuminate both the changing mutual perceptions of these two societies and the diplomatic conventions that were practiced in the larger Medieval Islamic world.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304848199?accountid=11311}, author = {Emire Cihan Muslu} } @mastersthesis {1298682, title = {The "New Mi{\textquoteright}yar" of al-Mahdi al-Wazzani: Local Interpretation of Family Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Fez}, year = {2007}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In 1910, al-Mahdi al-Wazzani, a distinguished Maliki mufti of Fez, published an extensive compilation of Maliki fatwas and named it the New Mi{\textquoteright}yar (al-Mi{\textquoteright}yar al-jadid, or the New Standard Measure). This dissertation investigates the New Mi{\textquoteright}yar as a mufti{\textquoteright}s interpretation of his society. Al-Wazzani thought with his fatwas, and I unpack the way he discursively constructed his world and conveyed it in his fatwa compilation. The family serves as a unit of analysis and a conceptual framework, and the New Mi{\textquoteright}yar provides the arena for exploring al-Wazzani{\textquoteright}s interpretation of the Fasi family. This study, informed by discourse analysis and cultural anthropology, contributes another strategy for reading fatwa literature by offering a methodology for the investigation of fatwas as cultural texts. My point of departure is that the juridical opinion, even in its most specialized version, is a cultural phenomenon that takes place within a certain human culture and projects its internal logic. With this in mind, I approach al-Wazzani{\textquoteright}s New Mi{\textquoteright}yar as an embodiment of a specific society as seen through the eyes of one mufti.

Taken together, chapters one and two present a portrait of al-Mahdi al-Wazzani and his New Mi{\textquoteright}yar. Chapter one is a detailed account of al-Wazzani{\textquoteright}s biography. In chapter two, I investigate the New Mi{\textquoteright}yar {\textemdash}that is, the historical circumstances of its production, and its nature and characteristics. Chapters three and four focus on al-Wazzani{\textquoteright}s juristic interpretation of the family in late nineteenth-century Fez. These chapters are particularly concerned with the relationship between property and family. Chapter three is an exploration of the way al-Wazzani conceptualized the association between religious endowments and the family. Chapter four examines al-Wazzani{\textquoteright}s interpretation of women{\textquoteright}s relationships to their maintenance. These chapters offer a sense of al-Wazzani{\textquoteright}s understanding of the patriarchal-patrilineal familial order. I argue that al-Wazzani understood the Fasi family as a social unit anchored in patrilineal ideology of kinship and patriarchal ideals and norms as expressed in shari{\textquoteright}a law. However, this family form as constructed by al-Wazzani was a highly complicated unit, marked by contradictions and conflicts. Above all it was a dynamic set of relationships between individuals and was the product of negotiation and construction.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304847282?accountid=11311}, author = {Etty Terem} } @mastersthesis {1296781, title = {Egypt{\textquoteright}s Muslim Brotherhood: A Social Movement Alternative to the National Democratic Party?}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296780, title = {Truth In Search of Power: Wahhabism and the Development of a New Islamic Orthodoxy}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296779, title = {The Centre for Arab Genomic Studies (CAGS): At the Crossroads between Science and Society}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296778, title = {The Internet in the Middle East: Lessons for Arab Children}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296777, title = {The Marginal Situation of Underprivileged Urban Youth in Contemporary Tehran}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296776, title = {Middle Eastern Authoritarianism: Political Islam and the West}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296775, title = {Iranian Involvement with Iraq Since the Fall of Saddam: A Policy Analysis}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296774, title = {Powering and Empowering the Provincial Capital: Electricity, Street Lighting and Citizenship in Late Ottoman Damascus}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296773, title = {The Monarchy and Women{\textquoteright}s Human Rights: The 2004 Mudawwana and the Process of Family Law Reform in Morocco}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296772, title = {Federalism and National Unity: A Look at the Principle of Federalism through the 2005 Permanent Constitution of Iraq and the {\textquoteright}Law of Specific Executive Procedures Formation of Regions{\textquoteright}}, year = {2007}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1299138, title = {From Petrodollars to Islamic Dollars: The Strategic Construction of Islamic Banking in the Arab Gulf}, year = {2006}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation develops an analytic framework to explain the emergence of Islamic banking: a "least likely case" of cultural persistence in the technocratic field of finance where the compulsion to standardize practices is most intense. I maintain that the origins and repercussions of Islamic finance cannot be fully understood without recognizing its character as a constructivist project. I then develop this argument by analyzing Islamic banks---their origins; their development in the Gulf States; their negotiation with global finance; and their relationship to political Islamism---through the conceptual lens of strategic constructivism.

Strategic constructivism is the act of making an institution work towards alternative political goals through symbolic action. In situations of hierarchy, creative syncretism enables agents to change the symbolic content of imposed institutions, signaling different political goals and mobilizing society to achieve them. At its most successful, strategic constructivism has the potential to remake politics by shifting the balance of power between groups. Conceptually, it provides a framework for integrating symbolic power into the study of institutions in order to generate a political theory of institutional change.

In the Arab Gulf, the strategic construction of Islamic banks enabled Islamist activists to place capital in the service of Islamic identity, transforming the oil windfall into a politically salient project. My research in Kuwait reveals how Islamic finance works on the symbolic level, empowering new agendas through earmarking, and facilitating Islamist collective action between likeminded organizations and politicians. The interplay of culture and capital is mutually reinforcing, suggesting that the liberalization of Gulf economies may actually hasten the Islamization of Gulf societies.

However, this enterprise is dependent on the acceptance of Islamic finance by state and international regulatory authorities. My research reveals a paradoxical finding: international financial institutions have helped midwife the institutionalization of Islamic financial markets. Indeed, the Islamic banks have used their endorsement to challenge the opposition of their own state authorities to the integration of religious language into financial standards. Equally surprising is the decisive role played by September 11th in overcoming these objections, paving the way for the future growth of the industry.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305340119?accountid=11311}, author = {Kristin Smith} } @mastersthesis {1298698, title = {A Bitter Homecoming: Tunisian Veterans of the First and Second World Wars }, year = {2006}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation examines the lives of Tunisian veterans who fought for the French during the First and Second World Wars. My thesis breaks new ground in that it attempts to place the story of Tunisian veterans in the wider global context of the World Wars and decolonization. Earlier studies of Tunisian veterans, while comprehensive in some aspects, limit their inquiry to a specifically Tunisian context. My research into recently-released French archives documenting Tunisian veterans in the 1950s also contributes to the importance of my thesis. Whereas most Tunisian historians have considered the veterans as "collaborators" with the French, my research indicates that such generalizations simply do not describe the complex relationship between the veterans and French colonial rule. Rather, I argue that veterans participated in and, in some cases, seem to have organized armed resistance to French rule. In contrast to similar research on African veterans from French Equatorial Africa (AOF), my research on North African veterans reveals that the political roles open to Tunisian veterans in the post-independence period were few and far between, unlike the situation in the Ivory Coast or Mali. Finally, my limited interviews with Tunisian veterans and my use of interviews transcribed by other Tunisian scholars provide unique insights as to how veterans themselves interpreted the wartime and post-war environment.

The introduction functions as an historiographical overview positioning Tunisian veterans within the wider context of veterans{\textquoteright} movements in France, North Africa, and elsewhere. Specifically, I pose the question of why Tunisian veterans did not become politicized as did other Arab veterans (notably in Iraq and Morocco). The first chapter deals with the establishment of the French Protectorate in Tunisia and the First World War. I explore the depth of pan-Islamic and pro-Ottoman sympathies among the troops, as well as the experience of Tunisian troops in German prisoner-of-war camps. The second chapter deals with the aftermath of the First World War and the halting efforts to define social benefits for the veterans. The veterans and their descendants use their correspondence with the French administration to negotiate benefits on the basis of their wartime sacrifices. The third chapter deals with the Second World War and the enormous upheaval of the French defeat in 1940. I use an appeal by Marshal P{\'e}tain and a Free French Franco-Arabic military journal Al-Nasr, published from 1943-1946, to detail the intense French propaganda efforts to retain the loyalty of Muslim soldiers. The fourth chapter details belated French efforts to reinvigorate their policies towards the veterans, while exploring the increased militancy of some veterans as French power waned in the late 1950s. The fifth chapter deals with the post-independence period (1956-Present) and describes how Tunisian veterans were pushed to the margins of historical memory (both in France and in Tunisia). The chapter ends with a discussion of how and why the veterans have once again emerged as a potent symbol for national unity and pride in both France and Tunisia in recent years.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305338363?accountid=11311}, author = {Thomas DeGeorges} } @mastersthesis {1298697, title = {"Not Their Fathers{\textquoteright} Days": Idioms of Space and Time in the Urban Arabian Gulf }, year = {2006}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In this dissertation, my primary aims are threefold: to contribute to the anthropological and regional studies{\textquoteright} discussion about the Arabian-Persian Gulf region; to investigate the concrete manifestations of what Mike Davis (1992) has called "the sociology of the boom"; and to develop the connection between anthropology{\textquoteright}s concerns with the concrete and everyday, and (Frankfurt School) critical theory{\textquoteright}s dialectical analysis of the processes of the "aestheticization" of the everyday.

The Arabian Gulf region has been largely ignored by scholars interested in cultural and social processes. Although there are a few notable exceptions, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have generally conceded the debate to policy-driven scholars with rather specialized agendas focusing on the development of the "Oil State." The work here is based on approximately fourteen months{\textquoteright} fieldwork in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Dubai is a peculiar example of boom urbanization. With a population that has increased nearly twenty-fold since the late 1960s, a majority expatriate population working in the service industries, and a national minority jealously guarding its relative wealth, the semi-independent city-state has been undergoing a rapid and radical, if not fundamental, change in its urban form and morphology. The city fathers, who form a super-elite class in control of powerful holding corporations, have been embarking upon a program of remaking the city from a regional re-export node into a world city whose image jostles the likes of Sydney, Hong Kong, and even New York.

City inhabitants, meanwhile, have not been passively going along with this program. I look, mainly, at three different groups: locals who are proponents of these changes; locals who are critical; and South Asian expatriates, the largest group in Dubai, and also one of its most politically and economically marginalized. My results point toward the important role of idioms of time and space in everyday attempts to grapple with these often traumatizing circumstances: from nostalgic idylls of "a village that is no more," to futuristic idylls of a "brave new city," to South Asians{\textquoteright} idioms of transience and uncertainty.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305336664?accountid=11311}, author = {Ahmed Kanna} } @mastersthesis {1298694, title = {The Last of the Cosmopolitans? Rum Polites of Istanbul in Athens: Exploring the Identity of the City}, year = {2006}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

The city has an identity, which cannot be reduced to the identity of those currently living in the city. The link between city and identity can be explored outside the city, in the diaspora of the city, by looking at how the former residents relate to it as a source of identity.

This dissertation is an ethnography of the Rum Polites--a Greek-speaking, Christian Orthodox, Istanbul-born group of people who were displaced following a series of tragic events. Their number in Istanbul fell from over 300,000 to 2,000 during the 20th century. Today they live mostly in Athens, the location of my fieldwork (2000-2004). Employing established methods of ethnographic observation, life story, interview, archival research, and textual analysis, I delineate a distinct cultural identity of the Rum Polites in Athens. Despite their shared religion, ethnicity, and language, Rum Polites differentiate themselves from other Greeks in Greece, through a notion of cultural distinction, which is observable in their practice of everyday life, social organization, and intellectual and artistic production.

The use of two terms of self-designation, Rum (Roman/Orthodox), and Polites (urbanites/Istanbulites), indicates an identification with Istanbul, known as the City for being the symbolic capital in Greek cosmology, as well as an adherence to the grand legacy of the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, during which the Rum Polites were forming the cultural and economic elite. The claim to this glorious heritage is made through an ongoing connection to the City, which is the basis for their cultural distinction and their cosmopolitan identity.

Identification with the multicultural city both positions the Rum Polites beyond nationalist divides between Greece and Turkey, and links them to its current residents, who also yearn nostalgically for the cosmopolitan past of Istanbul. The exploration of a place from the perspective of the displaced opens up new dimensions in the understanding of concepts like minority, migrant, diaspora, and identity in the city.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305338328?accountid=11311}, author = {Ilay Romain Ors} } @mastersthesis {1298693, title = {Ottoman Modernity: The Nizamiye Courts in the Late Nineteenth Century}, year = {2006}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

My dissertation is an exploration of the Nizamiye court system during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Though one of the more ambitious state projects launched in the framework of the Tanzimat reforms, the Nizamiye judicial system stands out as an understudied chapter in Ottoman history. Written from a sociolegal perspective that combines large-scale and microhistorical observations, this study approaches the law as an aspect of social relationships. It criticizes some of the major common wisdoms about the Nizamiye courts and offers alternative or complementary observations on the basis of Ottoman sources.

In the first chapter I argue that a heuristic process of legal borrowing and rationalization resulted in a syncretic judicial system which I identify as an Ottoman version of the Continental Law. The introduction of detailed procedural codes was embedded in a new "procedure ideology" promoted by the high echelons of the judicial systems.

In the second chapter I explore aspects in the division of labor between the Sharia and Nizamiye courts as a means of challenging the secular/religious divide that dominates common depictions of nineteenth century Ottoman law. Alternative explanations to the ambiguity that characterized the division of labor between the Sharia and Nizamiye lower courts are offered.

In the third chapter I explore the strategies employed by the Ministry of Justice in representing and handling issues of official discipline and systemic irregularities. I argue that the ministry{\textquoteright}s attitudes to these issues were guided by modern versions of accountability and reflexivity.

In the fourth chapter the new institution of public prosecution is examined and set against the "appearance of stateness" that was systematically produced in the period of Abd{\"u}lhamid II. Civil litigation involving state agencies and private individuals is further investigated in order to offer few observations on state/law configurations in this period.

The fifth chapter is a microhistorical reconstruction of a single criminal trial that addressed a violent encounter between a group of officials and an Armenian merchant. I present several insights on continuity and change in Ottoman perceptions of law by spinning threads of meaning connecting the courtroom to both its direct and broader context.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305340820?accountid=11311}, author = {Avi Rubin} } @mastersthesis {1298690, title = {Households, Guilds, and Neighborhoods: Social Solidarities in Ottoman Aleppo 1640-1700}, year = {2006}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This thesis examines the social and political transformations of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century by tracing changes in the urban institutions of a provincial city. It considers the question of how, in a period of persistent warfare, urban populations reorganized local institutions in efforts to maintain social and political order. Making use of local court records and central state correspondence, the study focuses on the city of Aleppo, and investigates three basic social units---the residential quarter, professional organization, and patrimonial household---as they underwent two major developments: the diffusion of military cadres in provincial society and the regularized imposition of extraordinary taxes.

Focusing on the residential quarter, Part I demonstrates the instrumental importance of this unit in the taxation process and, challenging common assumptions, shows that the central administration remained capable of rigorous and probing cadastral surveys that are associated with "classical" sixteenth-century fiscal administration. Residents of urban quarters in turn met the demands of extraordinary taxation in a variety of ways, primarily by subsidizing tax payments for the poor, jointly managing declining properties, and establishing charitable endowments.

Part Two examines two types of professional organizations, guilds and military garrisons. The first chapter of this part considers shifting patterns of leadership and membership in four large guilds as ambitious guildsmen and merchants affiliated with military units and formed ties of clientage with soldiers. The second chapter examines the reverse process by which members of local, city-based military units became enmeshed in the social and economic life of the city. Over time, military units shifted from hierarchical organizations with unity of command to more egalitarian structures motivated by commercial interests.

Part III concentrates on one strategy of household-building among the social elite: the acquisition of slaves. Slaveholding in Aleppo was facilitated by the regular movement through the city of military cadres, who sold slaves either as a commercial venture or due to financial necessity. Valued as servants, soldiers, companions, and business agents, slaves assimilated to the households of merchants and military-administrative officials, in some cases providing critical human and material resources for the households{\textquoteright} continuity.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305332955?accountid=11311}, author = {Charles Wilkins} } @mastersthesis {1296790, title = {New Geographies of Resistance: Urban Protest in the Seef District in Bahrain}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296789, title = {Anonymity and Identity: A Reordering of Citizenship Rights by Female Heads of Households in Cairo}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296788, title = {The Stars and Stripes in the Sublime Porte: America in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296787, title = {Turkey in to the EU: Past Challenges and Future Prospects}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296786, title = {Miracle or Mirage: An Assessment of the Dubai Model of Economic Development}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296785, title = {Transcending Boundaries: Jewish and Muslim Shared Saint Veneration in Morocco}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296783, title = {The Female Body and Patriarchal Resistance in Modern Arabic Literature: A Study of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, Woman at Point Zero, Voices, The Tent and The Story of Zahra}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296782, title = {The New Hijab? Negotiating Tradition and Identity through Dress: Fieldwork among Muslim Women in the Greater Boston Area}, year = {2006}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1298715, title = {The Ottoman Interregnum (1402-1413): Politics and Narratives of Dynastic Succession}, year = {2005}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the formative but obscure time in Ottoman history known as the Interregnum (1402{\textendash}1413). The Interregnum was a period of dynastic warfare following the Battle of Ankara, in which the Ottoman Sultan Yildirim B{\={a}}yezid I was crushed by the Central Asian conqueror Timur and his empire was dismembered. The ensuing struggles for the succession between B{\={a}}yezid{\textquoteright}s heirs were bloody and socially divisive, making the Interregnum one of the most complex and troubled periods in Ottoman history.

Despite the fact that the Interregnum played a formative role for the later Ottoman Empire, this period has received little scholarly attention to date, and even its events are largely unknown. This is due to the extreme complexity of the period{\textquoteright}s politics, which involved many internal factions and foreign powers, as well as the varied nature of the sources available for its study. This dissertation is a detailed reconstruction of events based on the available sources, and also a study of the political culture of the period in question. Specific themes addressed include attitudes on fratricide and dynastic succession and the role of the Interregnum in the appearance of the first Ottoman historical literature in the courts of the rival princes, which reflects the unique political concerns of the time. Specifically, it is argued that two works composed in the court of the winner of the Interregnum Sultan Mehemmed I represent a deliberate attempt to justify his actions against his brothers. In order to explore this theme, extensive original translations of these works are provided, as well as of many other relevant sources. The present study will be essential reading for scholars in the broader field of Ottoman studies, since it sheds light on the politics of a formative period in Ottoman history. It will also interest historians concerned with the role of periods of political instability and civil strife in shaping the politics and historical consciousness of a society.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305000820?accountid=11311}, author = {Dimitris Kastritsis} } @mastersthesis {1298714, title = {And Sulh Is Best: Amicable Settlement and Dispute Resolution in Islamic Law}, year = {2005}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation studies the concept of sulh , i.e. peacemaking or amicable settlement, in Islamic law. Through a survey of exegetical and legal works dating from the 8th to the 13th centuries C.E., I trace its development as one of the nominate contracts of Islamic law and one of the institutionalized methods for dispute resolution alongside qad{\={a}}{\textquoteright} {\textquoteleft}adjudication{\textquoteright} and tahkim {\textquoteleft}arbitration{\textquoteright}. I also examine the role of sulh in two different settings: the Ottoman q{\={a}}di courts from the 16th to the 18th centuries C.E. and the venues for dispute resolution in the American Muslim community today.

Although sulh is commanded by the primary sources of Islamic law, it is adjudication by q{\={a}}di that dominated juristic attention and contemporary studies of Islamic law. Qad{\={a}}{\textquoteright} appears as the preeminent avenue for channeling disputes according to the shari{\textquoteleft}ah whereas sulh a mechanism operative only within the informal, private settings of Muslim social life. I find that this focus on adjudication has obscured not only the significance that Islamic law accords to sulh, but the fact that its scope extends unto the context of the courtroom. The Ottoman court records illustrate that sulh had played a considerable role in the Ottoman justice system in various jurisdictions throughout the empire during the period studied.

Although they were in favor of settlements arrived at through mutual compromise, jurists were concerned to ensure that they were equitable and in harmony with other Islamic principles. Thus, they debated when judges should encourage sulh and when he should proceed to adjudicate, and scrutinized sulh contracts to ensure they did not contravene rules on ownership and transfer of property. They also created a new role for sulh as a contract: it not only functions to terminate an existing dispute, but also to avert future conflict by regulating the use of property in neighborly and communal settings. And as the American Muslims attempt to reconcile the dual legal frameworks governing their lives in the United States today, one secular and one Islamic, and explore the alternatives provided by Islamic law for dispute resolution, their legal discourse shows that the ideals of sulh continue to rank high in the eye of the Muslim individual as well as community at large.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305007569?accountid=11311}, author = {Aida Othman} } @mastersthesis {1298709, title = {Signs Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Persian Travel Literature to Europe}, year = {2005}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

My dissertation, Signs taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Persian Travel Literature to Europe is a re-examination of the significance of Persian travel narratives to Europe for Qajar Iran (1796{\textendash}1925). Through textual and contextual analysis of Qajar travel accounts to Europe, I have demonstrated the ways in which Qajar historiography{\textquoteright}s focus on travelogues as sites of Europe is a result of an anticipatory history that reads the nineteenth century in light of later developments that the historical actors themselves could not have foreseen. This has led to the omission of certain nineteenth century travelogues from the historiography and also blinded historians to other interpretive possibilities of these texts, specifically the ways in which they narrate Qajar Imperial power, reveal changes in the writing culture of Iran in the nineteenth century, and demonstrate the state{\textquoteright}s growing interest in geographical knowledge.

By shifting my analytical framework from {\textquotedblleft}what{\textquotedblright} was written to {\textquotedblleft}why{\textquotedblright} these travelogues were written, and more importantly, how they were consumed, I argue for an interpretation of travel literature to Europe as narrators of the power of the Qajar court, and later in the century, that of Iran{\textquoteright}s territorial integrity. Additionally, by contextualizing the travelogues within the larger body of geographical and historical writings of their own period, I demonstrate the ways in which these texts interacted with other types of narratives, such as chronicles, geographies, and the court{\textquoteright}s official gazette.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305008787?accountid=11311}, author = {Naghmeh Sohrabi} } @mastersthesis {1298705, title = {The Sultan and the Sultanate: Envisioning Rulership in the Age of S{\"u}leym{\={a}}n the Lawgiver (1520-1566)}, year = {2005}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

My thesis examines the formation of a uniquely Ottoman theory of rulership during the age of Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520{\textendash}1566) through an extensive study of political treatises written in this period, most of which are in manuscript form and new to current scholarship. My thesis shows that a paradigmatic transformation took place in political reasoning that in turn led to a new mode of political writing and an extensive reshuffling of political ideals, visions, symbols, and theories in this period that had a lasting impact on the way the Ottoman ruling elite viewed their ruler, government, and society.

The conventional perception of rulership as a continuation of the historical caliphate with the claim of presenting the sultan as the universal head of the Muslim community lost its appeal. Instead, because of the permeation of Sufistic imageries into political theory, the caliphate was defined as a cosmic rank between Man and God, attained in the spiritual sphere. The pursuit of moralism and piety in rulership that dominated the previous political theory gave way to legalism that evaluated governance by the ruler{\textquoteright}s observation of laws rather than his moral behavior. In this approach, the observance of customs, religious code, and sultanic laws became the touchstone for measuring the quality of government that was previously gauged on the basis of the sultan{\textquoteright}s piety.

The focus of political analysis shifted from the personality of the ruler to the existing government, its institutions, and procedural practices. In contrast to previous conceptions that reigned supreme in political theory, in the new paradigm, the grand vizier replaced the sultan as the center of government. The sultan was then conceived to be a distant but a legitimating figure for the dynasty while the grand vizier was promoted to the position of actual ruler in the Ottoman state. Consequently, relatively divorced from the moralistic, idealistic, personality-oriented, and sultan-centric paradigm in political reasoning, this realist and empirical approach to the question of rulership promoted such ideas as {\textquoteleft}government by law{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteleft}institutional continuity of the state{\textquoteright} as primary objectives of rulership.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305002362?accountid=11311}, author = {Huseyin Yilmaz} } @mastersthesis {1296809, title = {Innocents Abroad: American Tourists, Travel Narratives, the Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Late Nineteenth Century}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296808, title = {From Usama Ibn Munqidh to Usama Bin Laden: Islamic Rememberings of the Crusades}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296807, title = {Public Health and Colonialism in 1920{\textquoteright}s Morocco}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296806, title = {Al-Kawakibi{\textquoteright}s Thesis and Its Echoes in the Modern and Contemporary Arab World: Arabism, Islamism, Secularism, and Beyond Ideologization}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296805, title = {Who Muted the Libyan? A Research Agenda for the Libyan Colonial Period: 1911{\textendash}1943}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296804, title = {Writing History from Memory: How Memory Narratives Become History in Jenin Refugee Camp}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296801, title = {Economic Diversification in the Gulf States of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and UAE}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296797, title = {{\textquoteright}The Organization of Law, the Organization of Space and Subjects{\textquoteright} Experience of Justice and Imperial Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1453{\textendash}1566}, year = {2005}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1299777, title = {Family and Society in a Seventeenth Century Ottoman City: The {\textquoteright}Alamis of Jerusalem}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is a study of an Arab-Muslim family from Jerusalem during the early seventeenth century. It examines the life and times of the {\textquoteright}Alami family, an {\textquoteleft}ulam{\={a}}{\textquoteright} family of long-standing social and cultural prestige that had been living in Jerusalem for many generations. The seventeenth century was witness to many changes in the social, cultural and political landscape of Jerusalem as it became more firmly integrated into the Ottoman Empire. These changes posed challenges for the {\textquoteright}Alamis, their claims to prestige and status, and their strategies for maintaining their privileged position in society. Like urban a{\textquoteleft}y{\={a}}n elsewhere in the Arab-Ottoman world, the {\textquoteright}Alami family{\textquoteright}s elite status rested on their access to and accumulation of material and symbolic wealth. This dissertation explores the various strategies employed by members of this family to ensure the continuation of their status as elites.

This study lies at the juncture of family history and the history of Ottoman Palestine, and more specifically Ottoman Jerusalem. The family as a category of historical analysis has been shown to be a useful tool for unearthing the social, cultural, economic and political history of the city and region. This dissertation can be seen as a preliminary foray into the writing of the history of family and family life in seventeenth century Jerusalem. The dissertation unfolds as four chapters. Chapter One provides a general overview of the geographic, political and spiritual importance of Jerusalem in the Ottoman worldview; the urban geography of the city; and the demographic and social composition of the city{\textquoteright}s residents. Chapter Two looks at the construction of prestige and elite status through the configuration of lineage and genealogies and through the marital strategies employed by the {\textquoteright}Alamis. Chapter Three examines the accumulation of economic wealth and the ties forged through moneylending and property exchange. The final chapter explores how some members of the {\textquoteright}Alami family created a niche for themselves in the new religious environment in Jerusalem while drawing upon commonly recognized religious and cultural symbols.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305191109?accountid=11311}, author = {Diana Abouali} } @mastersthesis {1299776, title = {Levantine Trajectories: The Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria, 1860-1914}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

My dissertation investigates the articulation and dissemination of radicalism in and between Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria in the late 19th and early 20th century. It argues that there existed a deep connection between the brand of radicalism that emerged in these cities, its dissemination, and the movements of various social and intellectual networks between the three cities. It establishes the existence of a geography of contestation, or a special radical trajectory linking Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria, and underlines the strong similarities between the brands of leftist thought, projects, and militant practices that emerged in each of these cities, and in particular in Beirut and Alexandria.

This work emphasizes the role of subversive and potentially subversive social practices in facilitating or predisposing the emergence of radicalism. Specifically, it links radicalism to the rise of new genres, new forums and new spaces, and in particular to the press and the theater. It also emphasizes the establishment of trans-national networks of intellectuals, dramastists, and workers, that allowed for the circulation of people and radical ideas especially between Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria, and the emergence of a geography of contestation linking the three cities. This study also suggests reading radicalism partly as the appropriation, by emerging new classes and categories, of discursive spheres that had hitherto been reserved to specific and {\textquotedblleft}traditional{\textquotedblright} sources of authority, namely political and cultural elites. With this appropriation came the right to perform, consume, and hence re-interpret religious, political, contemporary, and international topics.

One central argument of this study is that radicalism was linked to globalization. Indeed, we suggest viewing radicalism as simultaneously an indicator and a shaper of the first wave of globalization that was characterized first and foremost by extensive and unprecedented movement: of people, commodities, information and ideas. This dissertation explores the radical and subversive implications in the movement of people and information, through the press, the theater, and through labor networks. In particular, it shows how Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria attracted a number of networks whose members were attracted to, articulated, and promoted various brands of socialism and anarchism. It sheds light on the links established between these networks of intellectuals and workers on one hand, and internationalist and radical institutions throughout the world on the other. Specifically, it argues that there existed a privileged set of linkages between the three cities in question, which magnified radicalism in each one of them.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305191261?accountid=11311}, author = {Ilham Khuri-Makdisi} } @mastersthesis {1299147, title = {The Ottoman Age of Exploration: Spices, Maps and Conquest in the Sixteenth Century Indian Ocean}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is a study of Ottoman expansion in the Indian Ocean, beginning with Sultan Selim the Grim{\textquoteright}s conquest of Egypt in 1517, and ending with the corsair Mir Ali Beg{\textquoteright}s last naval expedition to the Swahili Coast in 1589. The aim of my research is to create a coherent narrative of the most important events during this period, while at the same time placing them within the context of the larger story of European overseas expansion during the Age of Exploration. Specifically, my thesis argues that the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over the northwest Indian Ocean littoral (including Yemen, the Horn of Africa, Basra and the Persian Gulf) mirrored both qualitatively and chronologically the overseas expansion of the Iberian powers, and particularly the rival and contemporaneous establishment of the Portuguese Estado da India.

Like the Portuguese, the Ottomans in the sixteenth century strove to seize control of the lucrative trade in spices between India and the markets of the Mediterranean, and began to articulate a claim to universal sovereignty whose legitimacy, also like that of the Portuguese, hinged on an ability to control the network of maritime communications that crisscrossed the Indian Ocean. As the century progressed, the Ottomans developed a constantly expanding array of tactics to defend this claim, including the strategic use of predatory corsair attacks against Portuguese shipping, the creation of a {\textquotedblleft}state monopoly{\textquotedblright} of the transit pepper trade through the Red Sea, and the construction of an extensive web of diplomatic and mercantile alliances stretching from Mombasa and Gujarat to Ceylon and Sumatra. Meanwhile, this unprecedented engagement with the outside world sparked a period of remarkable intellectual fluorescence at home. Throughout the century, but especially in the years after the mid 1550{\textquoteright}s, Ottoman scholars began to produce entirely new kinds of maps, geographies and travel narratives at precisely the same time that humanist scholars in Europe were compiling the first great published collections of Western discovery literature.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305190388?accountid=11311}, author = {Giancarlo L. Casale} } @mastersthesis {1299146, title = {The Nimatullahi Sayyids of Taft: A Study of the Evolution of a Late Medieval Iranian Sufi Tariqah}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

During the late medieval period, the Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}hi tariqah, founded by Sh{\={a}}h Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}h Wali (d.834/1431), became one of the most widespread Sufi orders in Iran. The present study traces that order{\textquoteright}s evolution during its formative years, from the late 8th/14th century to the end of the Safawid period, when Sh{\={a}}h Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}h{\textquoteright}s descendents relinquished their role as hereditary leaders of the order. In particular, it focuses on the process of the tariqah{\textquoteright}s institutionalization, and how it evolved from a small circle of disciples into a specialized and hierarchically organized entity with its own distinct practices, beliefs, and institutions. It suggests that this was a gradual and ongoing process, and that the tariqah underwent significant changes in the centuries following Sh{\={a}}h Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}h{\textquoteright}s death, in terms of doctrine, organization, and even sectarian affiliation.

Section One discusses the various biographies of Sh{\={a}}h Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}h and how those sources reflect the attempts of that shaykh{\textquoteright}s successors to institutionalize his charisma. In particular, it demonstrates how the later shaykhs of the tariqah were able to mold and redefine the order{\textquoteright}s past, adapting it to their own ends. Section Two explores various factors that are indicative of the tariqah{\textquoteright}s development during the 9th/15th century. These include the crystallization of a distinct initiatic chain, based on the principle of hereditary succession, around Sh{\={a}}h Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}h{\textquoteright}s descendents in the region of Yazd; the expansion of the tariqah{\textquoteright}s network of followers and their integration into the Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}hi biographical tradition; the development of distinctive Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}hi beliefs and practices, and the manner in which those beliefs were articulated over time by the leadership of the order. Section Three examines the dynamics of the Ni{\textquoteleft}matull{\={a}}hi relationship with the Safawids, accounting for their comparative success at a time when organized Sufism as a whole was decline in Iran. In particular, it focuses on the intense politicization of the leadership of the order during the 10th/16th century and on their gradual adoption of Ithn{\={a}}-{\textquoteleft}Ashari Shiism, the state religion of the Safawids.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305191167?accountid=11311}, author = {Michael Paul Connell} } @mastersthesis {1299145, title = {Incorporating Alevis: The Transformation of Governance and Faith-Based Collective Action in Turkey}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is about the ongoing transformation of the Turkish state{\textquoteright}s incorporative policies vis-{\`a}-vis the Alevis and the subsequent faith-based collective action of the Alevis through their nonprofit organizations. The data were collected during eighteen months of ethnographic field research between 1998 and 2001 in Istanbul{\textquoteright}s Alevi organizations. I identify Alevi associations and foundations that have, for the most part, emerged within the last fifteen years, as the locus of both the state{\textquoteright}s incorporative policies and the subsequent collective action of the Alevis. Since Alevi accommodation of and resistance to official policies take shape in these organizations, I present them as key sites to observe the imperfect implementation and the unintended consequences of the state{\textquoteright}s incorporative policies. By focusing on the interaction taking place in, around, and through these organizations, I assess the limits and the successes of the emerging discourse and regime of governance in Turkey. Overall, I show that the manifested regime and discourse of incorporation are the end result of the complex interaction between official policies, their formulations, expressions, and imperfect implementation on the one side, and the Alevi organizations{\textquoteright} strategies of reacting against, contesting, negotiating, accommodating, and cooperating with the official policies on the other. In an attempt to explore the overall transformation of governance I focus on highly intimate and localized values such as prejudices, stereotypes, and beliefs concerning heresy, sexual perversion, impurity, and bestiality. Since the implementation of incorporative policies depends on the practices, discourses, and attitudes of state functionaries who are predominantly Sunni, the outcome of the Alevis{\textquoteright} interaction with the agents and agencies of the state is often guided and shaped by sectarian values. To throw light on the dynamics of such unpredictable encounters, I show different instances in which the Alevis and Sunnis creatively rework their beliefs, values, cosmologies, and faiths to accommodate, facilitate, or impede incorporation. I conclude that as a result of the interaction not only the Turkish state{\textquoteright}s service provision in, and the control and regulation of the field of religion are challenged, but also the Alevi belief and practice, and consequently, the Alevi subjectivities are irrevocably altered.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305191385?accountid=11311}, author = {Aykan Erdemir} } @mastersthesis {1299143, title = {Seeking Loyalty: the Inner Asian Tradition of Personal Guards and Its Influence in Persia and China}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

How did the rulers try to generate their own loyal retainers in pre-modern Asia? As an attempt to answer the question, the dissertation first focus on the Inner Asian institution of personal guards, who were personally attached and fostered by the ruler, with a special emphasis on the special emotional bond between ruler and personal servitors; and, second, the influence of this Inner Asian institution on the empire-building processes in East and West Asia. For the rulers of a tribally based society, it was a paramount concern to secure a loyal force which was detached from any tribal affiliations or local interest. I demonstrate that many successful examples of steppe rulers created personal guards from servile and foreign elements. I also analyze a special mechanism, called a tie of fosterage, which the steppe empires established to generate loyalty from the personal adherents.

In addition, the dissertation aims, in an effort to overcome the regionally structured format of Turco-Mongol history, to locate the significance of the Inner Asian politico-military institution of personal guards and of its evolution in sedentary societies, such as Persia and China, in the larger context of Eurasian history. For this purpose, I examine the Inner Asian tradition of personal guards in widely scattered regions from the Middle East to East Asia and throughout an extended length of period from the sixth to the fourteenth century. I juxtapose and compare the Inner Asian tradition of personal guards with other institutions based on Central Asian guards in the Tang, the Yuan, the Abbasid, and the Buyid dynasties and seek correlations and similarities among those systems.

Despite the divergence stemming from the different local contexts, my analysis shows that there was a strong influence from the Inner Asian tradition of personal guards on the imperial systems of the neighboring sedentary societies. With the study of the institution of personal guards, I attempt to show the interconnected nature of the imperial systems in Inner Asia, Persia, and China. At the same time, by demonstrating the steppe influence, my analysis suggests a corrective viewpoint to the current unbalanced images of nomad-sedentary cultural interactions.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305194736?accountid=11311}, author = {Yonggyu Lee} } @mastersthesis {1299142, title = {A Jewish Messiah in the Ottoman Court: Sabbatai Sevi and the Emergence of a Judeo-Islamic Community (1666-1720)}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation is about a person and a community in perpetual transition. It seeks to present a new historical perspective of a highly influential Jewish messianic Sabbatian movement that surfaced in the Ottoman Empire in 1665. The movement emerged within the matrix of early modern Ottoman and European social and religious developments and after the conversion of the {\textquotedblleft}messiah{\textquotedblright} to Islam in 1666, it was transformed into a Judeo-Islamic messianic sect, better known in later periods as the sect of the D{\"o}nmes. The dissertation aims to interpret this experience within the Ottoman material and cultural world and to write a monograph on the movement and its sects, that takes specific Ottoman institutions, practices, personalities and networks into account.

This work attempts to bring together methodological approaches of social and intellectual history and religious studies. The first chapter is an account of the transformation of Sabbatai Sevi into Aziz Mehmed Efendi from 1665 to 1666. The second chapter narrates Aziz Mehmed Efendi{\textquoteright}s transformation into Sabbatai Mehmed Sevi. The third chapter deals with the formative period of the Ottoman Sabbatian community until 1720, when the third and final split occurred and the community was divided into the Yakubis , Karaka{\c s}{\textquoteright} and Kapancis. In the fourth chapter, I deal with the formation of Sabbatian identity by looking at the dialectic between the communities{\textquoteright} self-perception and the larger society{\textquoteright}s perception of the communities.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305190046?accountid=11311}, author = {Cengiz Sisman} } @mastersthesis {1299141, title = {The Muhtasib, Law, and Society in Early Mamluk Cairo and Fustat (648-802/1250-1400)}, year = {2004}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation brings the scholarship of {\textquotedblleft}legal realism{\textquotedblright} to the field of Islamic law by studying the application of law by the muhtasib in early Mamluk Cairo and Fustat (648{\textendash}802/1250{\textendash}1400). The muhtasib, best described as an inspector of the markets and public spaces in general, was a legal official charged with {\textquotedblleft}commanding right and forbidding wrong{\textquotedblright} and who would patrol the streets of the marketplaces and enforce {\textquotedblleft}laws{\textquotedblright} whenever he encountered a violation.

Drawing upon the lessons of the legal realists, this dissertation takes at its starting point that Islamic laws were not applied in a formalistic fashion. As is the case in legal systems generally, there is an intellectual step between the {\textquotedblleft}law on the books{\textquotedblright} and the {\textquotedblleft}law in action,{\textquoteright}{\textquotedblright} with much room for discretion, consciously or not, on the part of the implementer of the law{\textemdash}whether judge, muhtasib, or other{\textemdash}in this step. Beginning with these premises, this dissertation asks questions such as: How was the relevant law determined by the muhtasib in any given case? What were the factors influencing the muhtasib when applying law and making decisions? What was the relationship between the legal text and the context of daily life? And, most generally, how did the legal system function in that period?

The goal of this dissertation is to examine as many of the muhtasib{\textquoteright}s\ actions in early Mamluk Cairo and Fustat as can be gleaned from the historical sources, and come to general conclusions about the determination and application of law and the factors and conditions that accompanied these processes. The dissertation covers six substantive areas of the Mamluk-era muhtasib{\textquoteright}s actions and decision-making{\textemdash}(1) morality, health, safety, and public order; (2) religious endowments (waqf) and property; (3) weights and measures; (4) prices, currency, and taxation; (5) Muslim religious practice; and (6) Jews and Christians.

This dissertation shows that the muhtasib was a hybrid official, at the same time part of the traditional legal system but also responsible for carrying out the policy orders of the Sultan. As such, the position of the muhtasib contained the possibility of both supporting the legitimacy of a divine system while also bending to meet the particular needs of the day. This dissertation will hopefully advance our understanding of the Mamluk legal system, and in particular the position of muhtasib within it, as well as suggest new methods to study Islamic legal systems generally.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305193791?accountid=11311}, author = {Kristen Ann Stilt} } @mastersthesis {1296815, title = {Nationalism and Interpretations of the Past in Qajar Iran}, year = {2004}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296814, title = {A Critical Analysis of the Revolutionary Ideology of {\textquoteright}Ali Shari{\textquoteright}ati}, year = {2004}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296813, title = {Journey to Paterson, New Jersey: An Introductory Exploration of Visual Culture and Palestinian Americans}, year = {2004}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296812, title = {Turkey{\textquoteright}s Problem in Terms of Attracting Foreign Direct Investment}, year = {2004}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296811, title = {Three Explanations of the Lebanese Civil War (1975{\textendash}1990)}, year = {2004}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1296810, title = {Rabin: Hero of Israel. The Formation of Yitzhak Rabin{\textquoteright}s Legacy}, year = {2004}, type = {AM thesis} } @mastersthesis {1299775, title = {Community and Nation-State: The Shi{\textquoteright}is of Jabal {\textquoteright}Amil and the New Lebanon, 1918-1943}, year = {2003}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

At the end of the First World War, the Shi{\textquoteleft}i community of Jabal {\textquoteleft}Amil, along with other communities of the Arab Ottoman provinces, found themselves without a clearly defined political allegiance. Challenged by the breakdown of the Ottoman state and the rise of contending power dynamics between the colonial powers and emerging local players such as Amir Faysal, the {\textquoteleft}Amilis needed to establish a new identity to represent themselves. By 1943, this identity had developed within a newly formed Lebanese state.

This dissertation examines the evolution of the Shi{\textquoteleft}i {\textquoteleft}Amili identity in the period of the formation of the {\textquotedblleft}new{\textquotedblright} Lebanon. It underlines the impact of local and regional politics as well as the cultural influences, Muslim as well as Christian, for the formation of this identity. This study is one component in a growing effort towards addressing the current shortcomings of scholarship on Lebanon and Arab Shi{\textquoteleft}ism respectively. It both analyzes the historical narrative and provides a methodological model. At the historical level, it surveys and provides an account of the evolution of the Shi{\textquoteleft}i {\textquoteleft}Amili community politically and culturally in the course of the Mandate period, and discusses its most salient events. Methodologically, it presents a model for the transformation of this community from a marginal to an active, politically participating one, through its use of matlabiyya , a politics of demand.

This study also highlights the transformation of Arab nationalism from an ideology of opposition, protest, and empowerment of marginal communities (whether Arab Muslim, Christian or rural) into a tool for the assertion of political domination by the majority. This dissertation also provides an examination of an Arab Shi{\textquoteleft}i community without the common assumptions of Irano-centrism and the primordial importance of the religious institution. It approaches the {\textquoteleft}Amili community as an independent subject with relations to neighboring communities, while avoiding the pitfall of viewing this history solely in relation to the Iran or Najaf connection which has been emphasized in previous studies.

An additional result of this dissertation is to underline the limitations and short-comings of a unitary nationalist history, as has been the case in Lebanon.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305331775?accountid=11311}, author = {Tamara Ahmad Chalabi} } @mastersthesis {1299774, title = {The Ottoman State and the Greek Orthodox of Istanbul: Sovereignty and Identity at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century}, year = {2003}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Muslim and Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Istanbul were becoming more alike in terms of the way they lived and conducted their daily lives; on the other hand, the Greek Orthodox community (or certain members thereof) was also becoming more aware of itself as an entity distinct both from other groups that comprised the empire as well as from the Ottoman state that granted it varying degrees of sovereignty and autonomy. Both trends existed simultaneously: a growing feeling of a group identity, based on a distinct sense of a Greek heritage, did not undermine the sense of being an integral part of the fabric of Ottoman society.

The type of sovereignty the Ottoman state exercised over the Greek Orthodox community played a significant role in how the members of this portion of the subject population articulated their perceptions of their place in Istanbul at the turn of the eighteenth century. The paradoxical situation reveals itself in which the more Greek Orthodox subjects avail themselves of Ottoman institutions such as the Imperial Divan, the more decisions rendered there create an environment which fosters a heightened sense of belonging to a distinct group. This is, moreover, the period in which, for the first time, Greek Orthodox are incorporated into the state apparatus without conversion to Islam. Leading Greek Orthodox thus become leading Ottomans as well.

Ottoman archival documents found in the m{\"u}himme ({\textquotedblleft}important affairs{\textquotedblright}) and s˛ikayet ({\textquotedblleft}complaint{\textquotedblright}) registers supply the state{\textquoteright}s perspective on the degree of sovereignty granted the Greek Orthodox community while Greek literary sources provide viewpoints from within the elite of the community of its role in Ottoman society. Philological and textual analyses reveal the repetition and evolution in the meaning of certain Ottoman and Greek terms, such as, respectively, t{\={a}}{\textquoteleft}ife ({\textquotedblleft}group{\textquotedblright}) and genos ({\textquotedblleft}nation{\textquotedblright}). It is in the interplay of all these terms in dialogue with one another that the dynamic influence of the exercise of Ottoman sovereignty over the Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may be discerned.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305331752?accountid=11311}, author = {Karen Alexandra Leal} } @mastersthesis {1299772, title = {Ottoman Sufi Sheikhs between This World and the Hereafter: A Study of Nev{\textquoteright}{\i}̂z{\^a}de At{\^a}y{\i}̂{\textquoteright}s (1583-1635) Biographical Dictionary}, year = {2003}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation explores the growing influence of sheikhs in the lives of the ulema during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as represented in the work of an Ottoman {\textquoteleft}{\={a}}lim. My subject, the prominent biographer Nev{\textquoteright}iz{\={a}}de {\textquoteleft}At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i (1583{\textendash}1635), gives us a rich picture of the relationship between the ulema and sheikhs of his times and the past two generations in his biographical dictionary, the Had{\={a}}{\textquoteright}ik{\"u}{\textquoteright}l-Hak{\={a}}{\textquoteright}ik fi Tekmileti{\textquoteright}l-Sak{\={a}}{\textquoteright}ik. Through an examination of what {\textquoteleft}At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i chose to narrate, omit, and alter when presenting the life stories of the sheikhs, I argue that rather than a timeless opposition or an unchanging alliance between the ulema and sheikhs, the interactions of these two groups during this period was characterized by a new emphasis among a certain group of the ulema and the sheikhs on acceptance of the authority of the Ottoman sultan in this world as well as the valorization of otherworldliness.

To identify the ways in which {\textquoteleft}At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i{\textquoteright}s interests shaped the Had{\={a}}{\textquoteright}ik, the first two chapters examine the biographer and his work within the context of social circles, literary pursuits, and the Ottoman biography tradition of the time. I propose that much like his patrons among the high ranking ulema of Istanbul and his friends from the provincial notables, At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i was a member of an old elite and shared their interest in transmitting and transforming sixteenth-century literary traditions, such as composing the Had{\={a}}{\textquoteright}ik. The following three chapters focus on three themes which At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i chose to emphasize in his narration of the lives of the sheikhs and their relations with the ulema. The third chapter discusses {\textquoteleft}At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i{\textquoteright}s views on the persecution of the sheikhs during the sixteenth century, to examine how a seventeenth-century {\textquoteleft}{\={a}}lim with Sufi sympathies would represent the struggle between the sheikhs and the Ottoman authorities. As the strife between the sheikhs and the ulema during the sixteenth century did not hinder young ulema from choosing the Sufi path as an alternative to the {\textquoteleft}ilmiyye, the fourth chapter examines At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i{\textquoteright}s representation of this career change and reveals a so far unexplored interest of the learned circles of this period with otherworldliness. {\textquoteleft}At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i{\textquoteright}s concern with otherworldliness in the Had{\={a}}{\textquoteright}ik is explored farther in the last chapter, which aims to understand the place of the sheikhs in the cosmos of {\textquoteleft}At{\={a}}{\textquoteright}i.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/305333994?accountid=11311}, author = {Asl{\i} Niyazio{\u g}lu} } @book {1554476, title = {Debating Islam in the Jewish State: The Development of Policy toward Islamic Institutions in Israel}, year = {2001}, pages = {239}, publisher = {SUNY Press}, organization = {SUNY Press}, abstract = {

Using declassified documents from Israeli archives, Alisa Rubin Peled explores the development, implementation, and reform of the state{\textquoteright}s Islamic policy from 1948 to 2000. She addresses how Muslim communal institutions developed and whether Israel formulated a distinct "Islamic policy" toward shari{\textquoteright}a courts, waqf (charitable endowments), holy places, and religious education. Her analysis reveals the contradictions and nuances of a policy driven by a wide range of motives and implemented by a diverse group of government authorities, illustrating how Israeli policies produced a co-opted religious establishment lacking popular support and paved the way for a daring challenge by a grassroots Islamist Movement since the 1980s. As part of a wider debate on early Israeli history, she challenges the idea that Israeli policy was part of a greater monolithic policy toward the Arab minority.

}, url = {https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Debating-Islam-in-the-Jewish-State2}, author = {Alisa Rubin Peled} } @mastersthesis {1323041, title = {Reproducing Jews: The Social Uses and Cultural Meanings of the New Reproductive Technologies in Israel}, year = {1997}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

This dissertation addresses the efforts of contemporary Jewish Israelis to harness the new reproductive technologies to the task of reproducing Jews. In my thesis, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel, I focus particular analytic attention on the unusual confluence of social forces that have come together to enable unmarried Israeli women to conceive and give birth to children using state-subsidized, rabbinically-sanctioned artificial insemination. This ethnographic focus serves to highlight my larger theoretical concerns about how cultures are produced, contested and transformed through cultural imaginings of reproduction.

At the core of my research lies the question: How are Jews believed to come into being? A question that both secular and religious Jewish Israelis have been hard-pressed and yet eager to answer as they attempt to create cogent legislation for the appropriate uses of reproductive technology to assist in the reproduction of Jews. Indeed, the fact that secular legislation regarding the new reproductive technologies is grounded in orthodox rabbinic interpretations of Halakhic sources makes for very imaginative and innovative laws concerning the appropriate combinations of reproductive genetic material.

My dissertation research is grounded in two methodologies; one half of the dissertation is based on traditional ethnographic field research among Israelis who are using the new reproductive technologies to get pregnant; the second half is based on textual analysis of public discourse, government documents, legal materials and rabbinic responsa concerning the origins and nature of relatedness.

This research contributes directly to current anthropological debates about the nature of kinship and the ways the new reproductive technologies force cultural assumptions about relatedness to become explicit. I argue that the social uses of the new reproductive technologies in Israel do not necessarily destabilize foundational assumptions about kinship, nor do they necessarily privilege biogenetic understandings of relatedness. Indeed, in Israel the social uses of these technologies serve to enhance the authority of rabbinic conceptions of kinship while reinforcing the cultural imperative to reproduce.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304346401?accountid=11311}, author = {Susan Martha Kahn} } @mastersthesis {1323034, title = {Colonized Colonizers: Egyptian Nationalists and the Issue of the Sudan, 1875 to 1919}, year = {1995}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

My dissertation, "Colonized Colonizers: Egyptian Nationalists and the Issue of the Sudan, 1875-1919," examines the seemingly contradictory identification with both the colonizer and the colonized that shaped the inception and the development of the Egyptian nationalist movement. This paradox of identifications began during a strange confluence of political events in Egyptian and Sudanese history. The first Egyptian nationalist movement, known as the {\textquoteright}Urabi revolt, arose in 1881, only to meet defeat at the hands of the British, who invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882. The same year that sparked the {\textquoteright}Urabi rebellion in Egypt also witnessed an even more popular and powerful uprising in the Sudan, the Mahdi{\textquoteright}s rebellion. The leader of this movement aimed to rid the Sudan of the Egyptian administration, which had been established after Egypt conquered the Sudan in 1820. By 1884, the Mahdi had succeeded in besieging Khartoum, the last stronghold of the Egyptian army. By 1885, the Egyptians had lost all authority in the Sudan to the Mahdi.

In roughly four years, then, Egyptians had become occupied by the British and in effect colonized, while simultaneously losing their territory in the Sudan. These linked events produced a startling phenomenon in Egyptian nationalism. The same Egyptians who called for the overthrow of the British and proclaimed Egypt{\textquoteright}s rights to self-determination also demanded the reconquest of the Sudan, and the return of the region to Egyptian hegemony.

Many of these nationalists concerned with Egyptian independence and Sudanese dependence also participated in a literary renaissance in Egypt, in which they cultivated the arts of journalism, plays, poetry, short stories and songs. These new media became the instruments by which the nationalists could project their image of Egypt, and share that image with an ever-broadening community of Egyptians.

The Sudan and the Sudanese often became the background against which nationalist writers measured and evaluated their own society. When these writers discussed the Sudan or represented its people, their conflictual identification with both colonizer and colonized emerged. My dissertation examines the work of prominent nationalist writers and thinkers and how they used the Sudan and the Sudanese in their construction of Egyptian national identity.

}, url = {http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/304175603?accountid=11311}, author = {Eve Marie Troutt Powell} } @mastersthesis {1554471, title = {Debating Islam in the Jewish State: Formative moments in the Development of Policy towards Islamic Institutions in Israel}, year = {1994}, type = {PhD dissertation}, abstract = {

How did Muslim communal institutions develop in Israel? Did Israel formulate a distinct "Islamic policy" towards shari{\textquoteright}a courts, religious endowments (awqaf), holy places and religious education? What role did the Muslim community play in the establishment and administration of these institutions? How did Islam come to challenge secular nationalism as a focus for minority political mobilization by the 1980s? These are the principal questions addressed in this dissertation.

Using newly available sources, I argue that, following years of bitter interministerial debate, Israel adopted a fragmented policy towards Muslim communal institutions, which divided jurisdiction among several ministries with highly divergent agendas. Developed in fits and starts, mainly as "temporary" measures which eventually became permanent, the policy took shape through an informal system of checks and balances between the involved government authorities: the Ministries of Minority Affairs (1948-1949), Religious Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Education and the Advisor to the Prime Minister on Arab Affairs.

The policy debate was dominated by a dichotomy between a benevolent approach emphasizing cultural autonomy and a preoccupation with security considerations. The state supported communal autonomy in perceived religious realms such as personal status and freedom of worship. At the same time, the government suspected an intrinsic link between Islam and Arab political nationalism, its greatest fear. Thus, a system of strict central controls was implemented to prevent the emergence of a national Muslim leadership or an independent religious education system. Israeli policy also had a financial dimension: the mobilization of vast resources through control of the Muslim awqaf. The final motive in this mosaic was a quest to highlight Israel{\textquoteright}s enlightened treatment of Muslim holy places in order to broaden international support for the fledgling state.

By 1967, a crisis of succession developed as the demise of Muslim religious instruction in the state resulted in the collapse of the Muslim intelligentsia. In the absence of qualified personnel to succeed the first-generation Muslim establishment, subsequent appointments were made more on political than religious grounds, leading to a coopted religious establishment lacking popular support. In part as a consequence, since the 1980s, a national grassroots Islamist Movement has emerged to fill this leadership vacuum and challenge the official religious establishment created by the state.

}, url = {https://www.proquest.com/docview/304086496/fulltextPDF/CE97622BAA414EFEPQ/2?accountid=11311\&sourcetype=Dissertations\%20\&\%20Theses}, author = {Alisa Rubin Peled} }