The proposed paper links nature and its destruction to identity politics in the context of the Saudi nation state and oil industry. It is based on field research in 2012 and 2013 as well as on a study of archival documents, local historiography, artistic productions and social media. The case study focusses on the natural environment of the oasis of Qatif in the oil rich Eastern province, with whom the local communities interact in different ways, including cultivating, extracting from, defending against, and giving meaning to. The paper echoes the notion of nature as “ethnoscape”, i.e. “understandings of nature as a lived-in landscape of labor and as a reservoir of cultural, religious, and historical meanings.” It will be argued that, in the sense of Manuel Castells' seminal classic "The Power of Identity" (1997), the construction of a collective identity by the local communities draws on – amongst others – locality, and especially on the forfeit oasis environment. In the times preceding the present Saudi state and oil industrialization, the natural bounty of the oasis stood metaphorically for the ancient civilizing culture of Qatif. Past local discourse contrasted the paradisal oasis environment with the scarce and hostile desert that surrounds it. This changed in the course of the 20th century, when encroachment by the Saudi state and by oil modernization projects led to profound changes in local land regimes and in the physical appearance of the oasis. In the process, local nature increasingly gained meaning as resource which needed to be preserved and defended against economic and political interests from the outside. Thus, the implicit notion of belonging gained an important new aspect besides cultural attachment by birth, descent, tradition and economic dependency: the aspect of rightful ownership. Today, local activists and artists perceive the destruction of the oasis as irrecoverable loss of their homeland and as their gradual erasure from the political and cultural maps of the Saudi state. Nature’s attributions of purity and morality furthermore point at an intellectual tradition which adds a religious connotation to collective identity in Qatif.

This paper examines the relationship between environmental destruction and narrative form in Arabic literature through an analysis of Egyptian author Ahmed Naji’s 2014 novel Using Life (illustrated by Ayman al-Zorkany). The novel offers a speculative environmental history of Cairo through a catastrophic scenario of geoengineering that wreaks havoc on the city. It critiques environmentalist discourses and urban development projects that have radically transformed Egypt’s landscape since 1970s but failed to address environmental issues plaguing the citizens. Analyzing the causes of the Arab Spring, commentators often accentuate political and economic causes with little mention of environmental issues that factored into protestors’ demands for change. On the one hand, Using Life’s bleak depiction of urban Cairo as a decadent and stifling environment serves as an allegory for the decades-long political oppression that impelled Egyptians to take to the streets in 2011. On the other hand, Naji’s references to issues such as urban sprawl, pollution, climate change, desertification, and natural disasters point to actual environmental concerns that continue to affect Egyptians’ daily lives. Adopting a postcolonial ecocritical lens, this paper examines the novel’s critique of the co-optation of environmentalist discourse within global capitalism. Firstly, I demonstrate how the novel traces the continuity of environmental gentrification in Egypt from colonial Orientalist fantasies of settling the desert to green capitalism’s engineering of high-tech desert utopias. Secondly, I examine how the text’s concern with urban degradation affects narrative form. Using Life blends a wide variety of genres, ranging from memoir, epistle, philosophical treatise, literary criticism, news reportage, song, and comics to historiography. I demonstrate that this engagement with literary form and genre is foundational to the book’s discussion on environmental history. I argue that Using Life’s generic hybridity and allusions to classical forms of Arabic literature link this contemporary text to medieval definitions of “adab” (literature; urbanity; civility) that complicate modern disciplinary and formal boundaries. Using Life’s attention to form does not so much reflect the transformation of a particular literary genre but of literature itself—that is, literature in the face of global ecological crises. This research contributes to contemporary discussions in environmental humanities on the role of literature in exposing the intertwined histories of environmental violence, colonialism, and global capitalism. Returning to this organic connection between “adab” and urbanity opens up new venues of ecocritical inquiry in the field of Middle East Studies for investigating the relationship between literary aesthetics, humanism, and urban ecology.

Between 1828 and 1832, a series of environmental catastrophes struck Ottoman Baghdad. Baghdad witnessed a plague epidemic, the flooding of the Euphrates, and a military siege, culminating in a famine. Chief among the victims of these events was Davud Pasha, the governor of Baghdad and leader of the local Mamluk dynasty. While the plague epidemic devastated his army, floods and famines prevented him from paying his tribute to the central state. Far from viewing Baghdad’s environmental and fiscal collapse as a disaster, centralizing reformers in Istanbul saw the unfolding crisis as an opportunity to remove the semi-autonomous Mamluk dynasty from power by decapitating its weakened leadership. Following Istanbul’s calls for his execution, Davud Pasha was captured in his Baghdad palace. Owing to his own network of connections in the imperial center, Davud Pasha was eventually able to get his sentence reduced to exile and the confiscation of his vast properties. However, despite escaping his own death, Davud Pasha’s removal from office signaled the end of the Mamluk regime in Baghdad. As this paper argues, Istanbul’s campaign to eliminate the rule of local notables was not always the product of direct state planning or violence. In more distant frontier territories like Iraq, centralization remained a contingent negotiation between various actors, human and non-human. This paper will demonstrate how this deeply contingent confluence of environmental catastrophes represented a moment of opportunity for Istanbul’s centralizing reformers, ultimately paving the way for state violence as a viable alternative to older forms of negotiated power and layered sovereignty in Baghdad. It also demonstrates that disasters were not devastating for all existing power groups. The contingent occurrence of environmental disasters changed the nature of the reciprocal relationship between the center and Baghdad and allowed the former for increasing its bureaucratic power in the region.

This is my anthropology MA thesis exploring explores the particularly lively rooftops of Cairo through which interspecies intimacies unfold. On these rooftops, various animals (such as chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, goats, and rabbits) are raised to be later eaten and consumed for sustenance. I try and expose the various patterned modalities, terms, and codes bringing these different species together in their sustained long-term relationships. I follow these interspecies relations as they narrate wonders of life-and-death, collaborations, various instantiations of home, social gift exchanges, marital rituals, and grieving patterns. These relations involve different tasks, requiring a very specific and complex gendered division of labor, further embedded in broader understandings of home, labor, subsistence, making a living, and growing as properly gendered beings. Rooftop recipes for relating slowly cook these human-nonhuman relations as uniquely embedded in a socio-ecological intricate awareness of surrounding environments of neighbors, families, but also of trees, waste, changing seasons, aging species, and growing parents.

In recent years there has been an important turn within the study of religion towards the study of body, matter, and practice. Scholars call this growing subfield “material religion.” Its origins derive from a recognition that the discipline of religious studies inherited from Protestant Christianity biases against the role of material things in religion and, as a result, privileged belief, meaning, and symbol over body, matter, and practice in analyses of religion. While the material turn has gained traction in religious studies, it has not received sufficient attention within the study of Islam. With some exceptions, including the work of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, the role of material disciplines in the formation of religion and religious subjects remains undertheorized within Islamic studies. To address this lacuna, this paper deploys a material religion framework to analyze contemporary Islamic economic thought. It foregrounds the significant role Muslim thinkers attribute to material forms, practices, and experiences in enabling knowledge of God in their economic writings and, further, highlights how within these writings they endow material things with agency in the realization of Islamic belief. By showing this, it does two things. First, it reorients the study of Islamic economic discourses beyond the notion that they should be understood as symbols mobilized for identity politics and, instead, draws attention to the work sensuous experiences, material practices, and human engagement with the natural world perform in the formation of Muslim subjects. Second, it challenges the notion that Islamic economic thought—and modern Islamic politics, more broadly—presume the disenchantment of the world. Indeed, by adopting a material religion framework, it shows that the material world within Islamic economic discourses appears not as disenchanted—that is lifeless and devoid of agency—but rather invested with meaning, life, and vibrancy. To make these claims, it analyzes key Arabic texts published in mid-twentieth century Egypt by Muslim Brotherhood affiliates, including Muhammad al-Ghazali, al-Sayyid Sabiq, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It focuses on the early postcolonial years because during this period Egyptians were especially concerned with Egypt’s material and economic conditions. Furthermore, these years were also crucial in the development of contemporary Islamic politics. As such, an analysis of writings from this period affords ample opportunity to deploy a material religion framework to the study of Islam and reconsider the relationship between Islamic politics and disenchantment.