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This book tells the story of Ottoman Egypt’s political, social, economic, and environmental transformations between 1517 and 1882 through the history of human-animal relations. Its main contention is that changing relationships between humans and animals were central to the transformation of Egypt from an early modern society to a nineteenth-century centralizing state. Egypt in this period moved from being an early modern world characterized primarily by intense human-animal interactions to one in which this relationship was no longer constitutive of commercial and social life. The results were a fundamental reordering of political, economic, and ecological power. This book thus explains one of the most important historical transitions of the last 500 years through the history of changes to one of the most consequential of human relationships—those with animals. Three classes of animals take center stage: livestock, dogs, and charismatic megafauna. The history of human relations with each group illuminates different aspects of Ottoman Egypt’s transformations. Livestock explain changes in the nature of rural labor; dogs elucidate changes in understandings of urban sanitation, health, and the human body; and charismatic megafauna index changes in global trade and economic modes of exchange. As nearly all early modern agrarian societies between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries experienced some form of intense transformation involving the commercialization and modernization of their economies, the Egyptian example thus offers a robust template for understanding how changes in human-animal relations impacted the global transition of early modern societies to more modern forms of governance, economy, and society.

The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the deep intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where premodern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged their creations in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts, from works of philosophy and ethics to marketplace manuals, to locate its subjects in a nuanced cultural landscape where the material, visual, and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, it develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arts of Allusion makes a powerful case for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament. Simultaneously, it argues for the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.

Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms known as the Tanzimat, which spanned the years 1839–1876 and legally emancipated the non-Muslims of the empire. Throughout this period, Jews remained little more than an afterthought in imperial politics. Four decades later the situation was difficult to recognize. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslims and Jews alike regularly referred to Jews as a model community, or millet—as a group whose leaders and members knew how to serve their state and were deeply engaged in Ottoman politics. This book charts this dramatic reversal, following the changing position of Jews in the empire over the course of half a century.

Between the Ottomans and the Entente is the first social history of the First World War written from the perspective of the Arab diasporas in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. The war between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente Powers placed the half million Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian migrants living abroad in a complicated geopolitical predicament. As Ottoman citizens living in a pro-Entente hemisphere, Arab migrants faced new demands for loyalty by their host societies; simultaneously, they confronted a multiplying legal regime of migration restriction, passport control, and nationality disputes designed to claim Syrian migrants while also controlling their movements. This work tracks the politics and activism of Syrian migrants from the 1908 Young Turk Revolution through the early French Mandate period in the 1920s. It argues that Syrian migrant activists opposed Ottoman rule from the diaspora, collaborating with the Entente powers because they believed this war work would bolster the cause of Syria’s liberation from Unionist rule. Instead, the Entente Powers used support from Syrian migrant communities to bolster colonial claims on a post-Ottoman Levant. This work captures a series of state projects to claim Syrian migrants for the purposes of nation-building in the Arab Middle East, and the efforts of Syrian migrants to resist the categorical schema of the homogenous nation-state and policies of partition and displacement.

Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. 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, Egypt’s counterinsurgency, and one of the first large-scale uses of poison gas since World War I. 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. Rather, during the 1960s Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict whose ensuing chaos tore down the walls of centuries of religious rule and isolation and laid the groundwork for the next half century of Yemeni history. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Egyptian President Nasser’s Arab nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces. The legacy of the eventual northern tribal defeat and the compromised establishment of a weak and decentralized republic are at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.

This book reconstructs the history of Britain’s presence in the deserts of the interwar Middle East, making the case for its significance to scholars of imperialism and of the region’s past. It tells the story of what happened when the British Empire and Bedouin communities met on the desert frontiers between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, and traces the workings of the resulting practices of ‘desert administration’, from their origins in the wake of one world war to their eclipse after the next, as British officials, Bedouin shaykhs, and nationalist politicians jostled to influence desert affairs. Drawn to the commanding heights of political society in the region’s towns and cities, historians have tended to afford frontier ‘margins’ merely marginal treatment. Instead, this book combines the study of imperialism, nomads, and the desert itself to reveal the centrality of ‘desert administration’ and tribal control to the working of Britain’s empire, repositioning neglected frontier areas as nerve centres of imperial activity. It was out on the frontier that key political bargains had to be struck; British control even deepened here as it retreated from Middle Eastern cities. To take the pulse of imperial rule, and to gauge the prospects of nationalism, this book leads the shift in historians’ attentions from the familiar, urban seats of power to the desert ‘hinterlands’ that state-centric approaches have long obscured.

This book focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration — a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. The book's research reveals clear links to colonial practice in India, Sudan, and Cyprus amongst other places. It argues that land officials’ views on sound land management were derived from their own experiences of rural England, and that this was far more influential on the shaping of land policies than the promise of a Jewish National Home. The book reveals how the British were intent on preserving the status quo of Ottoman land law, which (when few Britons could read Ottoman or were well grounded in its legal codes) led to a series of translations, interpretations, and hence new applications of land law. The sense of importance the British attributed to their work surveying and registering properties and transactions is captured in the efforts of British officials to microfilm all of their records at the height of the Second World War. Despite this, however, land policies remained in flux.

The role of women in Iran has commonly been viewed solely through the lens of religion, symbolized by veiled females subordinated by society. This book aims to explain how the role of women has been central to national political debates in Iran. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book examines issues impacting women's lives under successive regimes, including hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; conflicts between religion and secularism; the politics of dress; and government policies on contraception and population control. Among the topics the book examines is the development of a women's movement in Iran, perhaps most publicly expressed by Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. The narrative comes up to the present, looking at reproductive rights, the spread of AIDS, and fashion since the Iranian Revolution.

Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History contains 16 essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and premodern Islamic social history. The essays bring together arguments regarding slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (music, poetry, and dance), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time. They range over nearly 1,000 years of Islamic history—from the early, formative period (7th–10th century CE) to the late Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal eras (16th–18th century CE)—and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread joining the essays is an effort to account for the lives, careers, and representations of female slaves and freed women participating in and contributing to elite urban society of the Islamic realm. Interest in a gendered approach to Islamic history, society, and religion has, by now, deep roots in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The shared aim of the essays collected here is to get at the wealth of these topics and to underscore their centrality to a firm grasp on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.

Eighteenth-century Iran is of central significance to the modern history of the country, but as a field of study it has been neglected. It was a century of revolt, war, political disorder, anarchy and lawlessness, disruption of trade, economic collapse, famine, emigration, and general misery. It has been estimated that the population of the country fell from around 9 million at the beginning of the century to perhaps 6 million at the end. In the 1720s it seemed likely that Iran would disappear altogether, partitioned between her neighbours. Within a few years the country surged back to make a bid for regional dominance under the military genius Nader Shah, but lapsed again into civil war after his untimely death in 1747. The civil wars lasted almost until the end of the century, albeit with an interlude of relative calm and good governance under Karim Khan Zand. In 1796, after more civil wars, Agha Mohammad Shah had himself crowned as the first monarch of the Qajar dynasty, which would last until 1925. This book brings together the best scholarship available on many disputed and controversial aspects of this crucially formative period of Iranian history.

This book uses the climatic year of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate, to explore a clash of civilizations — between the Jews, Christendom, and Islam, as well as that between the New World and the Old. In the same year that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, the book reminds us, the Spanish monarchy captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, and also expelled the Jews. It uses these three epochal events to explore the nature of the European-Islamic conflict, placing the voyages of discovery in a new context. It traces Christian Europe's path from being a primitive backwater on the edges of the vast, cosmopolitan Caliphate, through the heightening rivalry of the two religions, to the triumph of the West over Islam, examining the factors behind their changing fortunes and cultural qualities. The book provides a new understanding of the distant events that gave shape to the modern world.

This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress. Her unpublished “Family History” (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India — thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. Cornelia Sorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahnashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhian nationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, Sunlight on Broken Column, represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offering insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.

Educating Palestine tells the story of an emergent educational and historical discourse in Mandate Palestine as a space of negotiation between colonial administrators, pedagogues, teachers and students, one of essential importance to the formation of the Palestinian and Zionist (imagined) national self-portrait. It traces and delineates a genealogy of Palestinian pedagogic and historical knowledge through a combination of oral history, students’ journals and extensive archival work in the Zionist, Israeli State and Hagana archives. It intimately portrays its protagonists, teachers and students, emphasizing the encounter between them and the written text and the encounter between them and the national Other.Through an analysis of history textbooks, history syllabi and the history lesson, Educating Palestine investigates the way in which the old-new politics of identity in turbulent Palestine wrote itself into the past and literally change history. The incorporation of Arabic and Hebrew sources and a juxtaposition of the two education systems allows to highlight the reciprocal relations between the two. The book explores the continuous scrutiny and imagination of the national Other of both Hebrew and Palestinian pedagogues and its role in the crystallization of their national pedagogy. It argues that the evolution of education in Palestine stems from this interdependency.

When the young Republic of Turkey claimed the Sanjak of Alexandretta in 1936, France resisted, insisting that the province was part of the French mandate for Syria. The contest over territory pitted Turkey and her irredentist claims against both the French colonial regime and the government of Syria that was engaging in its own efforts to construct a political community that conformed to European notions of nationalism. The League of Nations was called in to broker an agreement between the contending parties that would be consistent with the spirit of the ideology of self-determination. But self-determination was predicated on the existence of a dominant collective self, and efforts to implement the League’s solution led to violence as Turkish and Syrian activists struggled against each other to demonstrate the predominance of their own group. In the end, however, self-determination gave way to the needs of outside powers as Europe’s crisis of democracy deepened during the late 1930s. The struggle over the Sanjak reverberated far beyond the chambers of the League of Nations, encouraging the irredentist and revisionist movements that threatened the stability of post World War I Europe, forcing France to reconsider her commitments in the eastern Mediterranean, and introducing new kinds of identity politics into the Middle East.

The Future of Iran's Past: Nizam al-Mulk Remembered is a critical study of the life and afterlife of Nizam al-Mulk (1018-92), celebrated Persian vizier and stalwart figure of power and authority in medieval Islamic society. He became the de facto ruler of a vast empire, with a final apotheosis as Islamic history's archetypal good vizier. So exalted was his standing among the glitterati of his era that he was considered an ideal replacement for the Abbasid caliph himself. As well as the outstanding figure in a long run of great viziers and administrators who dominated premodern Islamic politics, Nizam al-Mulk is remembered as the most astute statesman of the period, able to perceive new beginnings and radical departures. This study offers a close reading of Nizam al-Mulk's many legacies, revealing a complex imbrication of political and religious authority, as well as pre-Islamic and Islamic influences that have together shaped modern Iran. The author shows that the new Iran of Nizam al-Mulk's singular vision, rather than a tale of uninterrupted Iranization, is imbued with an extensive interplay of residual and emergent tendencies.

This book addresses the origins, development, and aftermath of the Armenian genocide in a reappraisal based on primary and secondary sources from all the major parties involved. Rejecting the determinism of many influential studies, and discarding polemics on all sides, it founds its interpretation of the genocide in the interaction between the Ottoman empire in its decades of terminal decline, the self-interested policies of the European imperial powers, and the agenda of some Armenian nationalists in and beyond Ottoman territory. Particular attention is paid to the international context of the process of ethnic polarization that culminated in the massive destruction of 1912–23, and especially the obliteration of the Armenian community in 1915–16. The book examines the relationship between the great power politics of the ‘eastern question’ from 1774, the narrower politics of the ‘Armenian question’ from the mid-19th century, and the internal Ottoman questions regarding reform of the complex social and ethnic order under intense external pressure. It presents detailed case studies of the role of Imperial Germany during the First World War (reaching conclusions markedly different to the prevailing orthodoxy of German complicity in the genocide); the wartime Entente and then the uncomfortable postwar Anglo-French axis; and American political interest in the Middle East in the interwar period which led to a policy of refusing to recognize the genocide.

This book offers an alternative vision of Islamic governance through the history and promise of The Hijaz, the first state of Islam. The Hijaz, in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia, was the first Islamic state in Mecca and Medina. This new interpretative international legal history examines two formative historical passages, a millennium apart, of Islamic statehood during the 7^th century and, the other, goes back to the origins of Arab Self-Determination in the aftermath of the 1916 Arab Revolt where The Hijaz enjoyed autonomy as well as founding membership of the League of Nations. Book argues for Islamic institutionalization in The Hijaz and integrative internationalization as a positive force for political reform and integration in the Middle East and beyond. Applying key Islamic principles of public good to contemporary life, in addition to deliberative democracy, the book challenges two dominant narratives. It reclaims the development of Islamic statecraft as the wellspring of collective identity and statesmanship in the Arab world, simultaneously influenced and disrupted by Westphalian statehood models and Enlightenment notions of self-determination. It equally rejects the appropriation of Islamic governance and the Caliphate concept by both the post-modern, non-territorial Al-Qaeda and the neo-medievalist ISIS into a “negative space”. Celebrating the history and untapped potential of a region where institutions and laws built the ideological foundations of an emerging polity, The Hijaz is a compelling alternative analysis, “a positive space”, of governance in the Arabian Peninsula and the global Islamic community, and of its interaction with the wider world.

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is about Jewish religious approaches to law and politics in the State of Israel. It uncovers the forgotten history of religious Zionists who tried to create a “halakhic state” by making traditional Jewish law (halakha) into Israel’s official law. This endeavour brought about a conflict over Israel’s legal framework with the majority of Israeli Jews who wanted Israel to be a secular democracy. This struggle over legal authority became the backdrop for a pervasive culture war, whose consequences are felt throughout Israeli society until today. It has also shaped religious attitudes to many aspects of Israeli society and politics, created an ongoing antagonism with the state’s civil courts, and led to the creation of a new and increasingly powerful state rabbinate. The book uncovers the surprising truth, which runs counter to the common understanding, that the religious Zionist ideology of legal supremacy emerged no earlier than the middle of the twentieth century. Even more notably, the book shows that, far from being endemic to Jewish religious tradition as its proponents claim, the idea of the halakhic state borrows heavily from modern European jurisprudence.

For over sixty years, the state of Israel has proved adept at practising clandestine diplomacy—about which little is known, as one might expect. These hitherto undisclosed episodes in Israel’s diplomatic history are revealed in this book, where chapters explore how relations based upon patronage and personal friendships, as well as ties born from kinship and realpolitik both informed the creation of the state and later defined Israel’s relations with a host of actors, both state and non-state. The chapters in this book focus on the extent to which Israel’s clandestine diplomacies have indeed been regarded as purely functional and subordinate to a realist quest for security amid the perceived hostility of a predominantly Muslim-Arab world, or have in fact proved to be manifestations of a wider acceptance—political, social, and cultural—of a Jewish sovereign state as an intrinsic part of the Middle East. They also discuss whether clandestine diplomacy has been more effective in securing Israeli objectives than reliance upon more formal diplomatic ties constrained by international legal obligations and how this often complex and at times contradictory matrix of clandestine relationships continues to influence perceptions of Israel’s foreign policy.