In the 1830s, plague, which was all but forgotten by most Europeans, was on everyone’s lips again. Following devastating outbreaks of plague in the Levant and the Nile Delta, the Ottoman and Egyptian governments instituted their first permanent quarantines, adopting the quarantine model long practiced in the western parts of the Mediterranean. The global medical community anxiously watched whether the new quarantines would be able to contain plague, as well as cholera, within the Eastern Mediterranean. By tracing two tsarist medical expeditions from the Black Sea port of Odessa to the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in the 1840s, this paper examines the little-known world of European doctors and quarantine specialists, residing or traveling in Ottoman and Egyptian domains, who engaged in vigorous debates about plague and its prevention. Did plague have a birthplace somewhere in the Middle East? Did plague spread through contact with plague victims, or was the contagion omnipresent in the bad air? Russian, French, British, Austrian, and other medics questioned old assumptions about plague, while testing out their hypotheses in Middle Eastern environments. This paper demonstrates that, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Middle East became a global focus for epidemiological research, driving the internationalization of anti-epidemic prevention. Meanwhile, the efficiency of Egyptian and Ottoman quarantines, and with it the nature of plague, were engrossed with European political ambitions and commercial interests in the Middle East.

On 6 February 1887, readers of the Istanbul newspapers came across a shocking story: Besir Fuad, former military officer, and frequent contributor to newspapers on subjects pertaining to modern science, had committed suicide. Moreover, Fuad had apparently attempted to serve science even with his suicide by taking notes about his sensations during the last moments of his life, and leaving a letter stating that he donated his body to the Medical Academy. Fuad’s death was represented in the press as an illustration of the harmful effects of materialist thought on Muslim Ottomans, and the consequences of straying away from religion and tradition. Not only was Fuad explicitly or implicitly referred to in many late Ottoman texts on science, religion, materialism, and morality, his story continues to be used to enliven accounts on the relations between science and religion in contemporary Turkey. Be it as a symbol of "misguided Westernization" or as a "martyr to science," Fuad's image plays an important role in Turkish narratives on science and religion. In this paper, I seek to describe and analyze the dimensions of this role. First, I illustrate how journalists, intellectuals and scholars constructed narratives about Besir Fuad in order to make alternative arguments about science, Islam, and morality. I argue that studying the various ways in which the myth of Fuad is constructed illustrates the political and social significance of the “science and religion” debate in Turkey. Second, I discuss how new sociological approaches to intellectual biographies and interventions insights can be used to understand both Besir Fuad, and the role of his image in the Turkish debate on science and religion.

My paper concerns how alcohol was perceived by the public in the late Ottoman Empire during the First World War and the armistice period (1912–1923). During this time, alcohol drinking, which had been largely accepted by Muslim populations, was increasingly regarded as a sign of social degeneration and traced back to the influence of Western culture. The concept of social degeneration through alcohol also served to stigmatise local Christian communities and was used as a justification for attempts seeking to make the nation ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Thus, the division in attitudes towards alcohol drinking and temperance was used to produce a ‘national’ distinction. In September 1920, alcohol ban was introduced in Turkey and revoked in 1926. With historical hermeneutical methods and discourse analysis based on the discourse theory of Michel Foucault, I analyse the publications and memoirs of the founding members of Green Crescent which was established in March 1920 to fight against alcohol in the Muslim society. I also use other articles in the local newspapers of Istanbul about alcohol. I will present my results on my study of the publication by Dr Milasl? Ismail Hakk? Bey (1870–1938), physician and author of several medical and religious books. Dr Hakk? used religious elements as well as arguments of Western origin based on eugenics and social hygiene for his statements against alcohol consumption. His understanding of the ‘alcohol problem’ in the Muslim society layers several phenomena: the West as a point of reference, and mobilisation of the nationalist independence movement alongside the construction of cultural differences and enemy images. He claims that with the birth of Islam, alcohol totally vanished from the Muslim culture, but medical books translated from Greek and Greek physicians contributed a great deal to the increase of alcohol consumption and addiction in the Muslim society. Dr Hakk? argued for the alcohol ban and based his views the two existing Weltanschauungen of his time: the religious understanding of the issue of alcohol, and scientific disputes regarding the social and moral degeneration caused by drinking. In the process of secularisation, religious leaders lost their authority in defining the norms of daily life and were replaced by a scientific community, which used elements from eugenics and social hygiene in order to establish their authority in the definition of daily life norms.

In this paper, I narrate the history of a burgeoning blood market in Iran between the 1940s and 1970s which operated semi-formally. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Iranian nation-state had widely adopted Western modes of knowledge-production and technological know-how. Within this context, the Iranian medical society had become familiarized with and depended on the practice of blood transfusion. Yet, whereas the medical expertise and transfusion infrastructure had been built up the early 30s, it was not easy to sustain the required blood for transfusion. The potential blood-givers declined to contribute their blood for the sake of transfusion. To overcome this gap, institutions tried various strategies and mobilized different channels to encourage blood donation. However, none of these strategies fully yielded success. A semi-formal market provided the main portion of the needed blood. Professional blood-sellers and blood-dealers managed and regulated the market. The institutions unwillingly, but inevitably had to rely on the commercialized blood. The blood sellers were usually poor and in need of quick cash. Newly-arrived migrants from rural areas and drug addicts in need of fast money constituted the two major groups among blood sellers. Struggling with poverty, sellers could thus turn their blood, a commodity with relative sustainability, into cash. The existing literature suggests that the modernizing Iranian state in the twentieth century successfully instituted medical regulations such as immunizations, public hygiene, and reproductive health. Nonetheless, the case of blood transfusion suggests that state efforts initially failed to establish a functional blood transfusion system. I argue that the blood transfusion project initially faced difficulties because it depended on the willing participation of the nation. The state needed its citizens to provide its medical institutions with the essential matter of blood. For almost four decades, the ordinary citizens eluded to give away their blood for free to the state institutions. My paper explains how this reluctance charged the state with desperation, while simultaneously creating an opportunity for the poor to sustain their lives through selling their blood in an informal market.

This paper analyzes the centering of the diseased body in Radwa Ashour’s Midan Tahrir memoir, Heavier than Radhwa. Ashour, an activist, academic, and writer, was diagnosed with Schwannoma shortly before the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Her memoir weaves together the illness narrative and the narrative of the revolution, without reducing her body to a nationalist allegory for a sick nation. The memoir, while fully engaged in preserving the counter-memory of the Egyptian revolution, is essentially a reclaiming of the diseased body from the margins of hegemonic socio-cultural discourses about the female body. Using insights from Abir Hamdar’s the Suffering Female Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic literature, I argue that the diseased body here, “ceases to be merely a signifier for some apparently more urgent socio-political trauma and becomes a physical, affective, and phenomenological state of being in its own right (97).” The medical precision with which Ashour details the stages and symptoms of her illness positions the cancerous body as a site of knowledge and power capable of reconstructing the activist’s personal memory as well as national memory.