During Ottoman Palestine’s finalizing decades, the first Zionist Aliyot (1881-1914) introduced labor-focused and self-sufficient settlements emphasizing land and agricultural ownership. Distinct from the previous Old Yishuv, Zionist migrations comparatively lacked religious motivations and generally rejected economic co-dependencies developed from cohabitation with native populations, conveying Zionist migrations’ economically and politically independent approaches and goals. This analysis strives to provide primary sources presenting subaltern Palestinian responses to the emergence of the New Yishuv and secondary sources surveying these first-hand accounts as well as other material pertaining to this topic. Particularly focusing on sources related to petitions submitted by the Fellahin and Bedu to Istanbul, this paper will showcase the changing relationships between rural Palestinian communities and Zionist settlers of the First and Second Aliyot as well as Jews generally. A part of numerous disputes between the two respective parties, these petitions also offer insights into the interpersonal and communal conflicts that would greatly shift from inter-community resource clashes to rising binational struggles. Providing an approach that situates rural intercommunal conflict and the burgeoning nationalization of Arab and Palestinian identity among Arab elites as codependent events in the formation of Palestinian awareness, fear, and rejection of Zionism. In addition to reexamining scholarly prevalent conclusions that place early Arabist thought among Palestinian largely urban elite and intellectual communities as virtually the earliest clear indications of an anti-Zionist movement despite the preceding early Arab rural encounters against Zionism.

This paper examines the analytical viability of the concept of hegemonic masculinity in the historical studies of men and masculinities in modern Iran. I intend to argue that Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity despite its explanatory value may not be able to fully capture the complexity of material and social realities that determined the terms of the debate around masculinity in early-twentieth-century Iran. In the scholarship on Iranian masculinities, hegemonic masculinity is often reducible to the ideas and practices of a group of Western-educated elite, who utilized the Western standards of manliness exclusively to distinguish themselves from the masses. Such assertions are premised upon the assumption that there was a homogeneity of lifestyle and opinion among a diverse group of Iranian elites and therefore it could lead us to the wrong conclusion that these men can be clearly delineated from their rather traditional compatriots. I intend to show that a sharp delineation between a small group of Iranian elites and the rest of the populace does not reflect the fluidity of persons and ideas scattered along the axes of modernism and traditionalism. Moreover, informed by Tani E. Barlow’s analysis of conditions of “colonial modernity” in semi-colonial contexts, I argue for deconstruction of the Iranian/Western binary, seeking to open up new discussions of plurality versus shared patterns in both categories. While engaging with recent theoretical debates in the field of masculinity studies, I argue that to achieve a deeper historicisation of masculinities in Iran, instead of focusing on abstract discourses that are responsible for rise and demise of a hegemonic mode of masculinity, one should pay attention to the interpretive labor that individual men as particular knowers undertook to negotiate the hegemonic norms of their time. This shift in focus, I believe, allows historians to explore more adequately the complexity with which mechanisms of change and continuity operate within and outside the bounds of existing periodization.

In this project, I document the United Mission in Mesopotamia’s (later Iraq) approach to race and politics in region between the mission’s founding in 1921 and it’s deportation by the Baathists in 1969. I rely on the mission’s archives housed at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I first situate its history against the broader history of American missions in the Middle East. Its story is rather conventional in this regard with respect to other scholars who have worked on American missions in the broader Middle East. I then turn toward the discourse of “civilization” and how the mission’s approached was raced, even if “race” did not explicitly figure in the way they present themselves. We glean such a discourse from their letters, annual publications, and other written documents preserved in their archive. And I lastly conclude with the politics of the mission: how race intersects with their approach to nationalism and domestic political issues, beneath the discourse of “civilization.” The United Mission in Iraq, an all-white American organization, synthesized British colonial tropes with American optimism about modernity, styling themselves bearers of modernity under the guise of evangelizing Christianity.

On April 29, 1911, key Egyptian government officials as well as political and Muslim religious figures convened in a Cairo suburb to discuss their visions of the Egyptian nation. The Egyptian Congress (which the conveners initially called the Islamic congress) is typically seen as a response to the Coptic congress, which was held in Asyut in the previous month. The Egyptian congress, after all, revoked all Coptic demands presented in the Asyut congress and advocated Islam as the official religion of the state. Lumped together, the two congresses are often glossed over in Egyptian and mainstream historiography as expressions of an internal strife—primarily based on the editorializing of contemporary papers—that was fueled by colonialism and that was eventually subsumed in the subsequent national unity resolutions. Against this backdrop, this paper argues that the Egyptian congress expresses a key moment in the development of the Egyptian national imagination, particularly among the Muslim intelligentsia. The Egyptian congress furthered the state consolidation process so as to transcend religious differences, thereby subjugating all Egyptians to the central authority of the state. In this vein, the congress constituted an attempt to revoke the Ottoman confessional heritage of the millet system and the ṭāʾifah-based demands characteristic of Coptic claims to self-governance as expressed in the Asyut congress, and to establish a modern Western-like nation-state upholding Islam as the official state religion. This study rests primarily on an examination of the 1911 published proceedings of the congress, as well as a wide array of contemporary Egyptian publications from the period of inquiry including newspapers and magazines (e.g. al-Manār, al-Waṭan, Firʿawn, etc.)

Arabization, broadly defined as the replacement of French with Standard Arabic in schools, administrations, and courts, has been a core element of nation-building in Morocco after its independence in 1956. As a decolonial language policy, Arabization symbolized not only cultural independence, but also a Moroccan renaissance project through the modernization of Standard Arabic, making Arabization resonate with an endogenous modernity project. Yet, the association of Arabization with decolonization has been slowly replaced by serious doubts regarding its suitability as a language policy. In the education sector specifically, Arabization has been widely identified as the main culprit for the deterioration in the performance of schools. Whereas there was in the 1950s and 1960s a consensus on—or at least a consensual non-opposition to—the need for Arabization as a policy of national unification, there has been since the 2010s a general agreement across the political spectrum on the ‘failure of Arabization.’ Most recently, in 2019, the Ministry of Education decided to revert to French as a language of instruction of science subjects, acknowledging the ‘failure’ of Arabization to deliver in the education sector. While the discourse bracketing Arabization with failure has entrenched itself in the public sphere, including in academia, no formal evaluation of the policy has been ever conducted. How has the discourse on the ‘failure of Arabization’ become dominant in Morocco and what implications does it have for nation-building? Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I investigate language entrepreneurs’ discourses on languages generally and Arabization specifically from the late nineteenth until the early twenty-first century in four corpora representing four Bourdieusian fields: the political (state, political parties, labor unions, and student unions’ documents), the social/cultural (civil society language advocacy, especially associations promoting Amazigh (Berber), Darija (Arabic vernacular), and Standard Arabic), the expert/academic (academic literature on languages), and the artistic (music and literature). Based on six months of fieldwork consisting of interviews and archival research (newspapers, magazines, and conference proceedings), I contend that the discourse on ‘the failure of Arabization’ constitutes an ideal lens through which to approach nation-building in Morocco. The paper argues that this discourse, far from discrediting the state for an unsuccessful policy, has been used by the monarchy as a tool to forge alliances, disparage its competitors, and gain leverage in redefining ‘Moroccanness’ away from ‘Arabness’ in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings.

Despite the importance of the Persian Gulf as a theatre of war during World War II, few scholarly works have examined the impact of the war on lives of the inhabitants of the northern littoral of the Persian Gulf during this period (1939-1945). However, control of Iran was of strategic importance to the Allied forces (the Soviet Union, the U.K., the United States and China). The Southern (especially the southwestern) coastline of Iran was not only the site of important oil fields, but also served as an entrepôt for supply routes to the Soviet Union via the Gulf and a site of struggle with the Axis forces, particularly the Germans. Using archival sources this dissertation offers a glimpse into how the local populations of southern Iran lived under Allied (American, British and Soviet) occupation. It attempts to answer the following research questions: What impact did the occupation of Allied forces have on life for Iranians in the Persian Gulf littoral during WWII? Did they collaborate, resist or simply live alongside the Allied forces? The archives include the National Library and Archives of Tehran, the Moassess-e-Bushehr Shenasi (The Institute for Bushehr Studies) in Bushehr, Iran, the National Archives of the United States in College Park, Maryland, and the British Library in London, England. These sources are primarily qualitative and include consular reports, correspondence, journals, dairies, letters, government (Persian Gulf Command) reports and newspaper articles. The argument is that — although the Allied powers (particularly the British and American governments in the Gulf region) preferred a stable government that could control the population, the removal of Reza Shah in 1941 and the subordination of local institutions for the war effort paradoxically opened a space for people in the south to formulate political ideas that would chart a path for the country’s future. In that sense, the paper adds to national, regional and global historiography.