The First World War was a watershed in the history of the Middle East, but its transformations reshaped not merely political boundaries, but also the collective imaginary of the Syro-Lebanese diaspora, or mahjar. In Cairo, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and São Paulo, the major cities of the mahjar, emigrants from all sects of littoral Syria asserted new national understandings of Syria and Mount Lebanon in order to advance their careers and promote their preferred political order. While clerics and poets first articulated new ideas of Ottoman, Arab, Syrian, and Lebanese identity in nineteenth century, economic and intellectual elites from Beirut and Mount Lebanon advanced them anew in the uncertainty of war. Since then, political nationalists have inscribed teleologically ethnicity, race and nationality onto earlier history. However, this paper argues that diaspora activists fiercely contested the definitions, applicability and scope of identity politics in this dynamic period of change, as individuals and state institutions politicized belonging. In the mahjar, both in the Mediterranean and the Americas, immigrant journalists and activists remembered and redefined their homeland. The farther from Ottoman authorities and less involved in Ottoman governance, the easier it became for emigrants to imagine a post-Ottoman future. In newspapers, dramas, and political treatises, writers articulated a novel sacred-national understanding of Mount Lebanon and its place in the world. Even within families, there were divergences. The Druze notable Arslan family sent children to both the Ottoman civil service and separatist organizations; Amin, Muhammad, and Shakib Arslan deftly moved between Ottomanist, reformist, Lebanist, and Arab Nationalist camps. The Maronite Bustani and Sursock families similarly boasted both bureaucrats and dissidents. Sect was hardly the determining factor in ideology, as younger members of notable families had less incentive to preserve the Ottoman status quo. Nevertheless, the preponderance of Maronite and Orthodox Christians resident outside of the empire meant the missionary-educated Christian population formed an outsized role in dissident activist publishing in the areas beyond the reach of Ottoman press censorship. The predominantly Catholic milieu of France and Latin America and the relationship of mahjar intellectuals with conservative socio-political movements encouraged a Christian expression of Lebanese nationalism, embodied in the Classical-Biblical idea of Lebanon. Simultaneously, Islam and its relationship to the Arab homeland became an ideological battleground in the mahjar; the victory of the Allied Powers meant a victory for Lebanism and the nation-state order and a defeat for Ottomanism and Islamic Pan-Arabism.

This paper compares the divided dreams of the ardently leftist, patriotic and anti-Zionist Jews who remained in Morocco and those of the Moroccan Jews in Israel in the 1960s. These dreams became mutually constitutive and contrapuntally constructive in their visions of the place of Jews in the region and in the nation as an abstract entity deserving of allegiance. The moment of Moroccan independence in 1956 was optimistic for Jews. The Istiqlal (“Independence” in Arabic) government with King Mohammed V at its head appointed a Jewish minister, and the Muslim-Jewish unity group, al-Wifaq (“Accord”), drew the support from all segments of society. Such movements, however, coincided with the 1956 Suez crisis. Following this conflict, pre-existing tensions of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism became increasingly conflated in the Moroccan public sphere, polarizing members of the Jewish community against one another in addition to the Jewish community vis-à-vis the majority Moroccan Muslim society. The ensuing mass migration of Moroccan Jews to Israel would ebb and flow in response to domestic and international events, as well as the intermittent legality of such migration. Many Jews remained, however. Of them, a handful were ardently committed to the Moroccan nationalist cause, and with it, a patriotic rejection of Zionism. These Jews were members of the Moroccan Communist Party (PCM) and were frequently at odds with both the dominant governmental forces as well as the wider Jewish community who, for the most part, supported Israel. The Jewish members of the PCM harshly criticized those Jews who left Morocco as traitors or “dupes” of Zionism, and were suspicious of the Ashkenazi dominated state structures of Israel. Meanwhile, those Moroccan Jews who arrived in Israel enjoyed a rude welcome to their new home. Most were placed in the infamous ma’abarot (transit camps) with inadequate sanitation and cramped space. When they finally received housing, it was typically in far from desirable locations, on the borderlands of Palestinian territories. They received sub-par government education, menial labor positions, within an Ashkenazi dominated public sphere that deemed them “backward” and in need of civilizing according to modern Israeli standards. And yet, such experiences catalyzed Moroccan Jews to “double down” on their Israeli identities. Through an examination of archival sources, novels and newspapers, I argue that each community of migrants and remnants reflected their visions and dreams of Jewish and national citizenship against one another, shaping justifications for their political and cultural identities.

Although scarcely a century separates historians from their subjects, researching about twentieth century migration in the Gulf remains complicated. The obstacles to history-writing reveal that national identities and historical narratives continue to be highly contested. This presentation demonstrates that, despite centuries of migrations from within and outside the Gulf, the nationalist sentiment that citizens must belong to a particular group of people demands revisionist personal and national histories. This paper looks at the case of how Kuwaiti national identity and historical memory deals with migrants from Iran in the early twentieth century. It explores the ways in which historical moments of nearly every decade in the twentieth century (Arab nationalism, Bedouin immigration, the Iranian Revolution, the Gulf Wars and political Islamism) have produced different ways of interpreting the presence of the “Persian” migrants, both contemporaneously and at present. But the “outsiders” have not been powerless against these forces trying to diminish or erase them. This paper argues that through the production of literature, revealing and buying of documents and the construction of home museums, Iranian migrant families use the “history market” to maintain their position within the Kuwaiti national narrative and historical memory. While identity and belonging have been the subjects of many recent studies on Gulf politics and cultural production, this paper looks at a new aspect of these phenomena: the material contribution to historical narratives upon which identity and belonging are built. In addition to the contribution this paper makes to the study of migration in the Gulf, it also raises important questions about the methodology of history writing, including the need for historians to engage with the historical layers and politics that produce certain kinds of sources and understandings of them.

The systematic erasures of Iranian enslavement, particularly after the 1928 Abolition of Slavery Law, has contributed to a glaring omission in Iranian historiography. Throughout the nineteenth century, slavers forcibly brought women and men to serve as domestic slaves from East Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, but memories of these slave trades remain shadowy in the Iranian collective memory. Despite the dismantling of this institution in the early twentieth century, its highly racialized legacy has lingered in Iranian popular culture. The deliberate historical elisions surrounding slavery and forced migrations to Iran have created significant fissures in the discourse of natives and foreigners in Iran. Due to their distinctive features, East African slaves were more readily racialized and otherized than their Caucasian or Central Asian counterparts. The popular identification of Black skin as slaves did not cease with abolition, and racial and racist stereotypes undermined freedpeople’s full citizenship as native Iranians. By analyzing archival documents, photographs, museum exhibits, documentaries, maps and geographic labels, and naming practices, this paper demonstrates the role of race and geography in narrating or obscuring the histories of forced migrations to Iran. More specifically, this paper considers the history of enslavement in two particular port cities along the Persian Gulf coast: Bandar Abbas and Bushehr. Both cities served as major cities for trading slaves from East Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continue to have visible Black communities today. Bandaris and Bushehris largely accepted Iran as a homeland, but had a complex relationship with East Africa. Despite knowing of their forced migrations and their non-native status in Iran, their relationship with East Africa remains understated for two significant reasons. First, despite speaking Swahili and maintaining region-specific beliefs and practices, their exact homeland remains unknown. Second, outward expressions of longing for a foreign homeland could undermine their already-vulnerable position in Iranian society. With special attention to the geography of migrations and settlement, this paper argues that race largely determined a precarious relationship between racialized individuals and their adopted homeland in twentieth century Iran.