PhD Dissertations

This dissertation goes “between the pen and the fields” 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 “traditional,” 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—my study focuses mainly on Ottoman Thrace and the Balkans, but also other regions including Egypt—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.

This dissertation is a historical reconstruction of the last Ottoman palace in Istanbul known as Yıldız. 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’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’s static historiography that has overlooked its extremely dynamic architectural evolution. The literature overview contextualizes the reasons for such scholarly lacuna: Sultan Abdülhamid II’s contested presence in nationalistic narratives factor into the discussion. Yıldız’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 Yıldız’s patrons and artists approached their commissions with historical rigor and with an eye for artisanship and the vernacular.

The second chapter follows Yıldız’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’s royal grounds show us that for a long time before Yıldız became Abdülhamid II’s royal residence, it belonged to the sultans’ powerful mothers and wives. The collective efforts of these entrepreneurial women converted Yıldız 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 Yıldız by Christian Sester, the court’s Bavarian head-gardener. Not only does this chapter outline the site’s dramatic physical transformations under Sester’s tutelage from the 1830s to the 1860s, but it also tracks his establishment of a cosmopolitan gardeners’ 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 Yıldız’s light, pavilion-like structures in the context of the century’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’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.

Yıldız’s history cannot be written without photograph albums, central to Abdülhamid 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 Yıldız in its most up-to-date incarnation and in the way that Abdülhamid 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 Abdülhamid’s own biography of imperial spaces, the precedents that he inhabited during his princely years. These sites, in turn, influenced his architectural patronage in Yıldız. 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 Yıldız 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’s austerity and its requisite international presence, and between tradition and invention.

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’ (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’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.

Meaningful mediums is a study of the political economy of writing in the first Ottoman city to develop a sustained urban print culture. Cairo’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’ 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’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’ 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.

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'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 Ikhwān al-Safa and al-Bunī (d.1225). I establish that talismans are generally categorized as science (`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'ān 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.

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'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.

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

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'état, 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'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'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 Condé, 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.

In 1703, the chief scribe (reisü'l-küttab) 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.

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' 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’ 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.

This dissertation analyzes everyday talk about livelihoods, or about the challenges of work and getting by, among displaced Kurds in the city of Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey. Over the past two decades, Diyarbakır 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 Diyarbakır, 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 ‘the economy’ alone. The interplay of people’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.

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.

This dissertation studies the construction of the marital bond and its dissolution with respect to the normative stipulations of the shari'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'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 Dāvud Pasha court’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’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’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.

This dissertation builds a socio-cultural biography of Paris's Gare du Nord, Europe'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’s socio-political trajectory: 1) the government’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.

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.

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 ('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 – such as attempts to explain communications with the souls of the dead, make sense of spirit possession, and differentiate real magic from charlatanism – 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's politico-religious landscape in the past two decades, such as the waning of the religious authority of the Shi'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.

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’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’ political loyalties were based on which entity best served their interests—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’s incorporation into Baghdad’s domain, the beginnings of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s exploration just northwest of urban Kirkuk, and the end of British mandate rule. The Iraqi central government’s integration efforts exacerbated fault lines between emergent Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab ethnic communities at a time when the city’s population and its urban fabric were growing rapidly. The oil industry, which provided the livelihood for a substantial percentage of Kirkuk’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’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’s aftermath are still evident today.

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 Andalusī 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 Andalusī 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—Muslim, Christian or Jewish—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 Andalusī 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 Andalusī 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.

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 “foreign fighters”: rootless, unaccountable extremists attempting to impose rigid forms of Islam on local “moderate” 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 “jihad” 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-à-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 “Global War on Terror.” 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.

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’s Faculty of Sharīʿah and Cairo University’s Dār al-ʿUlūm. 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’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’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.