Based on an analysis of data from Qatar consisting of signage written in languages of the blue-collar temporary migrant workers, this paper examines how the use of unofficial languages and scripts, largely from South and Southeast Asia, contribute to the creation of a countrepublic(s) that not only serve(s) as a system of communication alternative to the dominant Arabic-English discourse, but also offer other possibilities including solidarity and belongingness. Blue-collars form a lion’s share of the non-national labor-force in Qatar and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. According to Gulf Labor Markets and Migration (GLMM), non-nationals constituted a substantial majority in the employment sector across all GCC countries, reaching up to 95% of the total workforce in Qatar. This is reflective of the proportion of non-nationals, which is 88% of the total population of about 3 million (“GLMM,” n.d.). The data consist of official and unofficial signage gathered from shops and businesses located in Zone-57, known as the Industrial Area, which is home to 313,754 workers (“Qatar Census 2020,” 2020) who speak languages such as Bengali, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu, Singhalese, Tagalog, and Nepalese. The use of these languages assumes significance in the backdrop of Article 5 of Law-1 passed in 2012, which regulates public advertisements. According to the Law, one of the conditions for securing approval for commercial advertisements is that the content must be written in Arabic, while additional languages are allowed. The paper shows how these languages and scripts are used in Zone-57 to advertise products and services such as apartments and rooms for rent-sharing. These languages are also used for record-keeping by the owners of the businesses. They also create bonding among workers who socialize at these places and create their own identity and relate to their countrymen. I argue that the performance of the non-Arabic languages on the margins of the linguistic spaces demarcated by and for Arabic (and English) calls for re-centering the ethnography of “the streets”—those that are constituted by non-Arabic voices, which will also allow a better understanding of the Arabic voices. References Percentage of Nationals and Foreign Nationals in GCC. (n.d.). Retrieved December 18, 2021, from Gulf Labor Markets and Migration (GLMM) Program website: https://gulfmigration.grc.net/about/ Qatar Census 2020. (2020). Retrieved February 14, 2024, from Planning and Statistics Authority website: https://www.psa.gov.qa/en/statistics1/StatisticsSite/Census/Census2020/results/pages/result.aspx?rpttitle=p1_c1

In recent years, Emiratis, especially women, have taken up personal development training as a vital resource in their projects of self-improvement. This trend coincides with the state’s active dissemination of personal development as a strategy to orient its citizens and expatriate residents toward new forms of neoliberal citizenship. Through the idiom of self-improvement, these new discourses of citizenship place the onus of personal achievement on the individual, and, in so doing, acquit the state of any structural responsibility it has toward its subjects (Al Korani 2020, Brown 2019). Emirati social media lifestyle influencers have stood out as exemplars of these new citizen subjectivities. By embarking on monetized opportunities over social media, they are able to branch out into the country’s expanding neoliberal economy while using their platforms as spaces of aspiration and self-actualization (Senft 2008, 2013). Yet, as state sponsored agents of change, lifestyle social media influencers depart quite significantly from political influencers, such as those who used social media during the Arab Spring to help mobilize the “Arab Street” as a space of political dissent (Bayet 2003, 2015). Accordingly, I conceptualize social media in the United Arab Emirates as both a space of governance and governmentality, where discourses of self-actualization and social contestation intersect (Foucault 1982). In turn, I frame social media lifestyle influencers as “celebrities of the quotidian,” who exhibit their lives as didactic representations of the successes and challenges that working professionals and novel young nuclear families experience. I ask: Within their cultivated niche of aspiration and personal development, to what extent can the ostensibly apolitical Emirati lifestyle influencers be political? To explore this question, I examine how a group of Emirati lifestyle influencers use English and bilingual Arabic-English social media platforms to further reinforce and circulate discourses of self-actualization. At the same time, I show how their strategic use of English on their platforms fosters a space of indirect contestation, where they can negotiate different epistemologies of the self, question traditional and state ideologies, and raise pertinent social issues through intersubjective experiences with their network of Arab, Emirati, and international followers.

What happens when conspiracy theories turn out to be true? In this presentation, I discuss the social semiotics of suspicion in Amman, Jordan by examining discursive commentaries on new construction projects. In these street-level conversations, local construction becomes linked to distant sources of plunder that investors acquire through violence, corruption, and occult knowledge. Then, drawing from interviews with Iraqi contractors who work in Amman’s illicit building trade, I confirm that these shared suspicions are basically correct: there really are secret flows of blood money smuggled out of warzones and transformed into apartments and shopping malls. This confirmation of rumor in fact suggests that popular interactional genres can serve as collaborative methods for reaching the truth in an environment saturated with deception. Moreover, careful ethnographic attention to the sites and settings in which these stories are told shows how the very act of disclosing hidden truths in public helps transcend the divisions of Amman's legally stratified and spatially segregated plural society. To explain this phenomenon, I turn to the philosophical tradition of the MENA region, which has long asserted that ordinary people can attain direct insight into insensible processes by means of reason, sensation, and imagination. Specifically, I deploy the medieval physician and philosopher Ibn Sina’s notion of “correct guessing” [husnu hadsin] (see Guta 2012, 400) to explain both how popular consciousness draws the hidden world of war and commerce into vivid presence, as well as why these moments of disclosure register in feelings of positive affect and social solidarity. Finally, I argue that ethnographers of the MENA region should take our interlocutors' stories about current events far more seriously, because they offer a critical reading of the relationship between states, markets, and conflict that possesses far greater explanatory power for making sense of places like Amman than generic Euro-American commentaries on “neoliberalism” ever could. Citations: Gutas, Dmitri 2012. “The Empiricism of Avicenna.” In Oriens 40:391-436.

Since the conservative Islamist Justice and Development Party came to power in Turkey in 2002, the country’s Alevi community has increasingly been interpellated with the question of whether they are inside or outside of Islam. While some Alevis have considered finding a clear answer to this question to be a prerequisite for successful organization against the threat of assimilation posed by the government and its Sunni Muslim religious officials, others counter that the question itself is a distraction from the work of reforming and reviving Alevi communal rituals centered around music and the achievement of human divinity. In this paper, I examine Alevi attempts to summon a counterpublic around refusal of the debate of Alevis’ status vis-à-vis Islam. What does a counterpublic look like that is constituted through the refusal of debate, rather than participation in it? What are its modes of address, its ethical affordances and limitations, and its political implications? I approach these questions by introducing the problematic of messianism to discussions of religious (counter)publics in the Middle East. Indeed, the reason behind the debate around Alevis’ relationship to Islam is that Alevis practice a messianic form of Islam that suspends Qur’anic doctrines and laws, replacing them with a musical instrument—the long-necked lute (saz) or “stringed Qu’ran”—and an oath of initiation as the basis of a new ritual order. This oath is not a confession of faith in the one true God of monotheism, but a pact sealed by an animal sacrifice that establishes ritual criteria for ethical relations within a community based on the principle of mutual contentment, or rızalık. Yet, as many Alevis migrated from their rural ancestral homelands to Turkish and Western European industrial centers beginning in the 1960s, this oath and the mechanism of communal dispute mediation it fostered were all but abandoned in Alevis’ effort to integrate into national structures of political and economic participation. Drawing upon ethnographic examples of Alevi staged musical performances, I show how contemporary Alevis seek to articulate the memory of this oath and the trauma of its loss in the public sphere. I argue that while these performances summon a nascent counterpublic around the desire for rızalık that renders the question of inside/outside Islam irrelevant, this counterpublic remains limited in scale by an Alevi semiotic ideology that links mutual contentment to human divinity by grounding both in a particular kind of embodied copresence.