By the second half of the nineteenth century a significant number of Iranian dissidents, literary figures and men of letters considered the Ottoman Empire, and specifically its capital Istanbul, their home and the seat of their socio-intellectual base. This community formed a highly active opposition base involved in Iranian politics from abroad. Although the significance of Ottoman reforms on Qajar Iran have been acknowledged in the literature by a range of scholars, no more than a certain amount of background material can be found concerning the network of Iranians residing in nineteenth-century Istanbul, and no significant work has yet been carried out on the impact of this community on political, social and literary reform in Iran. From disparate sites such as Istanbul, Bursa and Mosul the likes of men such as Mirza Habib Isfahani, Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, Malkum Khan and Zaynolabedin Maragha’i produced and published much of the dissent literature that two decades later would be hailed as being amongst the most important texts circulated prior to the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1907). Notable is that although these men spent considerable proportions of their careers in the Ottoman Empire, very little information on their ‘Ottoman’ lives is available, primarily because the Ottoman Archives as a depository for Qajar history has been overlooked. Drawing on material from the Ottoman Archives, this paper will discus the chains of interconnectedness that made possible the formation of expansive intellectual and social networks within and across the late Ottoman Empire. In an attempt to recover the distinct and variant perspectives from within this Iranian community, the paper will focus on personal exchange and circumstance, travel, and the diffusion and reception of ideas to highlight that social context, as well as economic and political power relations determined the nature of one’s intellectual labor.

In What is Islam? Shahab Ahmed argues that the Orientalist equation of Islam with legalism has not only impoverished Western scholarship on Islam by relegating other modes of Islamic expression to the discipline’s margins, but, that this colonial reduction of Islam to law also limited the scope of Muslim thinkers’ responses to colonial conditions. He notes: “It is striking that so much of the discourse of modern reformist Muslims—who have, for the most part, received the norms of modernity…by the force of arms and coercive administration of European colonialism—about (what is) Islam has been about rethinking the Islamic state by rethinking Islamic law, and not about rethinking theology, philosophy, ethics, poetics, and Sufism as a hermeneutical means to modern Islamic norms.” This paper follows Talal Asad’s observation that the equation of humanity to the legal identity conferred upon subjects by the nation-state is distinctly modern by presenting a reading of a Sufi treatise on knowledge and ethics composed during the Nāsirī period (1848-1896). It uses Safī ‘Alī Shāh’s Mīzān al-Ma’rifah to propose that Iranian Sufism was just as concerned as legal scholarship with modeling “the human” in light of the nation-state and along simultaneously modern and Islamic lines. It posits that this text stages Sufism as “a hermeneutical means to modern Islamic norms,” the ethical injunctions of which model Sufi subjectivity in order to accommodate it to the disciplinary powers of the modern state and modern epistemic norms. Nile Green has noted that Safī ‘Alī Shāh’s ethical writing illustrates “the moral interface between the Sufi adept and the Persian ‘gentleman’ more generally;” it endorses a behavioral code that “echoes normative Iranian rules of social etiquette.” This code, though, does not merely reflect conventional manners for their own sake; ethical cultivation is a necessary condition both for subjects’ access to knowledge and their becoming fully human. To possess “humanity” (ādamīyat) is both to be a subject of knowledge and an object of ethical assessment. In demanding that would-be Sufis conduct themselves in a manner becoming a nineteenth-century gentleman, these texts bind moral formation, and the knowledge it yields, to class and gender norms that took shape in the Nāsirī period (1848-1896). Safī ‘Alī Shāh’s Mīzān al-Ma‘rifah (The Scale of Knowledge) positions Sufism as a discipline capable of yielding knowledge by staging its injunctions as displays of modern respectability and rationality.

Jean Schopfer (1868-1931), born in Switzerland, was a tennis player competing for France but also a writer with a penname of Claude Anet. He wrote some novels as well as some books on the Russian Revolution and Iran. His novel, "Ariane, jeune fille russe" [Ariane, Young Russian Girl] (1920), was adapted into several films. In 1905, Anet travelled to Iran through Russia and Caucasus. He was accompanied by six other friends – four men and two women- and three mechanics. They voyaged by three cars: two Mercedes and a Fiat and five cameras: three Kodaks and two panoramas. The final destination was Isfahan which was reached through Russia. Anet wrote down his itinerary and his observation in a book: "Les roses d’Ispahan: la Perse en automobile à travers la Russie et le Caucase" [Isfahan Roses: through Russia and Caucasus to Persia by automobile] (1907). The trip in its nature is interesting and audacious at the time but more importantly are the descriptions and the details Anet gives about the societies: people, houses, food, climate, agriculture, trades, roads and cultures. The photos they took during their trip were also remarkable. Having original and comprehensive descriptions of the Iranian, Russian and Caucasian societies per se, and being immediately translated into English (trans. Ryley 1908), the book has been very little studied since. 1905, the turning point of the century when Iran and Russia were both developing decisive events under skin, is a noteworthy time to be in and to report about these countries. Russia was caught in the turmoil of Russo-Japanese war and the Revolution of 1905, while Iran was taking the first steps towards the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. This paper re-reads the book with a socio-historical approach and focuses on the daily life of people of Russia, Caucasus and Iran. The notions Anet and his companies had and received about these countries is as worthwhile to study as the reactions and attitudes of the local people towards these "foreigners" and their cars. This article is an introduction to a broader project on Anet’s works and photography over the region. For its analytical approach, the paper employs an array of supplementary material such as archival documents from Iran, France and Britain; and Anet’s two other books: "Les Feuilles Persanes" [Persian Leaves/Papers] (1924) and "La Perse et l’Esprit Persan" [Persia and Persian Mind] (1925).

Caricatures produced for Egyptian audiences during the first four decades of the twentieth century tell a great deal about how their artists, most of whom were foreigners, immigrants, and members of longstanding minority communities in Egypt, perceived themselves as foreign locals. By the 1930s the caricature that entered the Egyptian public sphere as a print medium, established its inseparability from the development of Egyptian modern print culture. Discussing mainly the British occupation, the impotence of Egyptian politicians throughout the national struggle, and the implications of the East-West encounter on Egyptian society, these images were traditionally labeled in postcolonial research as "Egyptian nationalist iconography". Analyzing Egyptian caricatures from late nineteenth century through the first four decades of the twentieth, I seek to reveal a somewhat different perspective. Cosmopolitan entrepreneurs, who were part of the thriving cosmopolitan society based in Cairo and Alexandria, initiated the processes of cultural transfer whereby the caricature was imported, adapted, and assimilated into the consolidating Egyptian press. These foreigners, immigrants, and minority residents had arrived in Egypt during an extended period of immigration that attracted Ottoman subjects and foreigners seeking economic opportunity, thus helping to transform Cairo into a hub of cultural activity. Although many of them neither integrated into Egyptian Arab society, nor sought Egyptian nationality, they settled in Egypt's major urban centers and turned them into cosmopolitan sites wherein "native" and "foreign" were intertwined. These cosmopolitan subjects were deeply involved in the cultural enterprise of the Egyptian nahḍa, and with regard to the satirical genre their involvement was highly prominent: the first two illustrated satirical journals to be distributed in Egypt were ventures published in Paris and Vienna by Egyptian cosmopolitan immigrants; followed afterwards by local ventures, which served as platforms for the work of artists from Europe and the United States. The images they designed emerged from their cosmopolitan experience and identity, and although they reflected identification with the place (Egypt) and the collective (the Egyptians), in my opinion they cannot be labeled as simply 'Eastern' or 'Egyptian' (nor 'Western'). By analyzing images from the prominent satirical periodical of what can be termed "Egypt's cosmopolitan era", I seek to demonstrate how these images, although produced in Egyptian vernacular for consumption first and foremost by an Egyptian audience, resist the "native/foreign", "us/them", binaries to create an in-between visual sphere.