Responding to challenges presented by the likes of Benedict Anderson, Edward Said, and Benjamin Braude, scholars have authored critical revisions of the relationship between religion and communal boundaries in the Middle East and North Africa over the past three decades. In particular, they have generated debates on a variety of topics that highlight the contingent nature of communities and communal boundaries and, in the process, challenged an older body of scholarship that prioritized stable, fixed identities, and immutable differences. Social and cultural histories have thoroughly deconstructed older categories of analysis and, in their stead, uncovered the rich diversity and internal incoherence that marked communities circumscribed legally and politically by confessional membership.
Interrogating the salience of religious communities or their boundaries does not, however, mean abolishing either as a subject of historical inquiry. This panel therefore seeks to understand how actors from a variety of backgrounds deployed religion and community as fluid categories to make claims on politics and society. In the course of doing so, actors made and unmade communal boundaries through social and political action. These communal boundaries were formed, transgressed, and challenged in response to different stimuli. Actors implicit in the making and unmaking of communal boundaries thus engaged a rich, multivalent cultural field; such engagement thus produced artifacts that belong to multiple genres and are deposited in archives and libraries that sometimes betray their provenance.
This panel therefore brings together an array of disciplinary and intellectual traditions, as well as archives, to think about how actors engaged boundaries to inscribe communal identity in the Middle East and North Africa from the nineteenth century until the interwar period. The papers observe and analyze these dynamics across a diverse range of geographic and temporal settings, including gender and sports clubs in late Ottoman Istanbul; popular music, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism in the Maghreb during the inter-war period; legal pluralism and family law in post-Lausanne Turkey; and Sufi-Armenian interactions in the Ottoman borderlands during the second half of the nineteenth century. Collectively, these papers contribute to an ongoing historical investigation of the malleability of communal boundaries across time and space.
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Dr. Richard Antaramian
The Ottoman nineteenth century—the empire’s “longest century,” to borrow one historian’s phrasing—witnessed a series of seemingly unending upheavals. These included rebellion, famine, war, and massacres. The reform projects that aimed to resolve the myriad challenges produced by these upheavals transformed how Ottoman subjects interacted both with one another and with the imperial state. This paper will look at Armenian-Kurdish relations at the empire’s eastern edge as part of an effort to explore those transformations in the context of a larger contentious imperial politics. In so doing it will uncover points of inter-communal competition and cooperation that the source base is loath to concede.
As is well known, religious confession mediated imperial subjects’ interactions with official bodies of the Ottoman state. The series of arrangements that facilitated those state-subject interactions was once called the millet system. Less acknowledged, however, is that the religious institutions of confessional communities embedded subjects in a larger politics of difference. Communities ultimately wove one another into the fabric of the imperial polity through the ensuing relationships between that this system promoted. As part of its effort to reorganize the empire during the reform period, Istanbul bid to unmake many of the connections that had stitched together an earlier iteration of imperial society. Actors on the ground responded by attempting to forge new networks into which they could integrate their communities and institutions.
This paper therefore analyzes how Naqshbandi Sufi networks proliferated throughout the Kurdish periphery, displaced Qadiris and, in the process, redrew the communal boundaries between Kurds and the Armenians with whom they shared eastern Anatolia. The paper brings together a multilingual and multilocal archive, culled from Armenian, Ottoman, American, and British sources, that describes the changing contours of inter-communal interactions without ever articulating it as such. The web of connections these documents unwittingly illuminate will help us think beyond the state or the local when investigating inter-communal relations in the nineteenth century.
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Dr. Murat C. Yildiz
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Istanbul’s multiethnic and multiconfessional denizens developed a common sports culture in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This culture centered around the belief that the regular performance of physical exercise, gymnastics, and team sports, namely soccer, was the most effective means to forming robust young men, modern communities, and a civilized empire. As a result, both shared civic and exclusive ethno-religious bonds undergirded sports during the period. This paper investigates the dialectic relationship between these bonds in order to highlight the similar (and dissimilar) ways in which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Istanbulites engaged sports as a means to simultaneously breakdown “traditional” and reinscribe new communal boundaries. Specifically, it analyzes the institutional and discursive trajectory of Muslim, Jewish, Armenian, and Greek sports clubs and the competitions and exhibitions that they organized from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War. Established along ethnic and confessional lines, sports clubs were spaces where young men built ethnic-based solidarity and experimented with new ideas about the self, body, gender, and community while they trained their bodies, lifted weights, competed, as well as socialized, read books, and attended conferences. While these ideas were worked out in clubs, athletic competitions and gymnastics exhibitions in newly constructed venues around the city, such as gardens, theatres, and outdoor stadiums, served as more public forums from which Turkish and Jewish members, administrators, as well as non-affiliated supporters of fitness clubs performed, displayed, and reconfigured the building blocks and boundaries of the community. Drawing from a diverse array of multilingual unpublished reports, surveys, newspapers, government reports, and vernacular photographs, this paper builds on a growing body of literature on communal identities, popular culture, and leisure in the broader Middle East. The paper is part of a broader book manuscript project, which examines the refashioning of communal boundaries in late Ottoman Istanbul.
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Dr. Sinem Adar
In the last two decades or so, legal pluralism in family law has been at the center of scholarly attention. The literature is compartmentalized into two regional foci between postcolonial and post-imperial societies, on the one hand, and Western liberal democracies, on the other. Such regional clustering is often undergirded by a normative bias around the incompatibility of plural family law systems governing members of different religious communities with the legally unified and secular character of modern nation-states. This paper is an invitation to reconsider the relationship between plural family law systems and the modern nation-state in terms of a certain form of population politics that is driven by the idea of cultural homogeneity. Drawing on the minutes of the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1922/23 and secondary sources, the paper suggests that legal pluralism in family law is not an historical anomaly or deviation, but instead an unintentional outcome of the international diplomacy that shaped population politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Plural family law systems have completed their transformation in the aftermath of the World War II into institutional mechanisms for religious “unmixing” within the borders of a sovereign nation-state.
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Dr. Chris Silver
In the aftermath of the shocking murder of Tunisian superstar Habiba Messika in 1930, demand for the musician’s records skyrocketed across the Maghrib. Her music––Andalusian, popular, nationalist, and Egyptian––not only crossed borders of genre and geography but so too, brought together a coalescing, cross-class Jewish and Muslim public in Tunisia and as far west as Morocco, who increasingly understood themselves in national terms. Messika’s cosmopolitan nationalism may have been without a political program but it certainly had a prominent stage. Alongside Messika, other North African musicians produced similarly diverse audiences during the interwar period. In Tunisia, for example, an observer described the spectators at one such concert in the capital as representing nothing less than “a complete fusion of all of the native social classes.” That Arabic-language music, both live and recorded, could have such an effect made the French colonial authorities ever more apprehensive about this sonic variant of anti-colonial nationalism. And while the Residents General in Morocco and Tunisia and Governor General in Algeria had initially celebrated the commercial music industry, their patience wore thin as efforts to stem the flow of border-crossing music proved near impossible.
This paper follows the trajectories of a number of interwar Maghribi musicians, the paths of their records, and the contours of their audiences in order to rethink cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the greater Middle East. Indeed, if Middle Eastern historiography has tended to frame cosmopolitanism and nationalism as near opposites, then music as performed and consumed in North Africa surfaces a contesting vision of the nation in which the two were intertwined. In fact, while a number of scholars have suggested that cosmopolitanism in the region was solely a practice of the elite and one which was rarely expressed in Arabic, the reach of non-elite musicians like Messika and the range of her repertoire offer a critical rejoinder. Finally, this paper, which employs a varied archival and linguistic source base, engages with Will Hanley’s notion of “vulgar cosmopolitanism” or “ordinary cosmopolitanism” in order probe its applicability beyond Egypt while considering what Maghribi cosmopolitanism might have to offer scholars of the Mashriq.
