This panel considers the history and multiple manifestations of crime, criminality, and criminalization across the Middle East throughout the twentieth century. It highlights the continuities and discontinuities of criminal justice policies and practices as colonial and post-colonial lawmakers applied greater measures of state consolidation, punishment, containment, and governmentality in order to transform and strengthen national development and sovereignty. In particular, this panel explores the incongruity of crime: criminality can be a form of individual or group agency and opposition to authority, while criminalization serves as a form of control and expression of sovereignty. The authors highlight the local and global paradigms imbedded within colonial and post-colonial structuring and legacies of criminality.
The first two papers address cross-border articulations of criminality. The first panelist juxtaposes British and Iraqi border enforcement policies in Iraq that criminalized “being Iranian” in the 1920s and 1980s. The second panelist explores the crime of crossing the Jordanian-Israeli border in the 1950s, with a particular focus on the Hebron district in the Jordanian West Bank. The second portion of this panel shifts focus to domestic categorizations of offenders. Here, the third panelist delves into the microhistory of a political murder and its prosecution in the context of new forms of working class mobilization in Syria. The paper contextualizes this microhistory within the changing dynamics of urban socio-political networks connecting the politics of the traditional notables with new forms of mass politics. The fourth paper turns toward the evolving concept of juvenile delinquency by addressing Hashemite Iraq’s categorization of problematic youth. It provides a nuanced portrait of governmentality and social engineering showcasing the complex relationship between national visions and articulations of citizenship. The final paper in the panel traces new forms of incarceration in national-colonial Egypt as represented by a combination of a quasi-military juvenile prisons and vocational schools, which served to enforce the middle-class values of the nascent nationalist movement.
Collectively, by investigating the fluidity of criminal categorization in the region, this panel asserts the importance of using crime and criminalization as a lens through which we can obtain a more nuanced understanding of the modern Middle East. More specifically, this panel suggests that by examining the evolving definitions of crime, we might be able to point to the limits, vulnerabilities, and blind spots of national projects and borders.
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Mr. Pelle Valentin Olsen
This paper examines state policies and responses towards problematic and unruly youth and the concomitant development of the category of juvenile delinquency in Hashemite Iraq (1921-1958). It argues that so-called delinquent youth gained the interest of state officials when their revolutionary potential was recognized in the aftermath of large scales protests in the 1940s and 1950s against perceived undemocratic features of the Iraqi state. In other words, as the Hashemite Iraqi state recognized the revolutionary and defiant potential of its lumpenproletariat, it began to clearly define social, medical, and legal counter-policies which were incorporated into its larger social-engineering projects at a time when increased social unrest threatened the hegemony of the state and its ruling elite. With regards to juvenile delinquency, these policies manifested in separate and novel legal categories as well as in a quasi-separate prison system with a heavy focus on re-education and rehabilitation. Weaved out of moralism and governmentality, policies towards the management of juvenile delinquents coincided with nation-building, social engineering, and reformation endeavours that attempted to impact and mold all aspects of daily life in Iraq, specifically among the youth. The implementation of these new categories and measures was seen by those in power as well as by British observers as a sign of Iraqi modernity and progress.
By engaging with sources ranging from Iraqi and British newspapers, memoirs, travel accounts, medical journals, legal texts, and Iraqi prose, this paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship on youth and criminality, civil society, governmentality, and welfare state formation in the Middle East. Simultaneously, it covers new ground by zooming in on a segment of the Iraqi population, namely the uneducated and mostly politically unaffiliated criminal youth from the lowest echelons of Iraqi society. These actors have often been overlooked or overshadowed by the dominant focus on the Iraqi effendiyya and other stakeholders in the modern Iraqi state project. Put differently, in telling the story of iraq’s problematic youth, this paper draws on Fanon’s notion of the lumpenproletariat to showcase an understudied and overlooked segment of the Iraq’s population in the first half of the twentieth century.
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The origins and effects of anti-Iranian sentiment on and within Iraqi politics, citizenship laws, and nationalisms is a well-studied subject in modern Iraqi studies. So too the long history of border conflicts between Iraq and Iran. However, there is currently no study of the link between how that border functions as a state institution and broader anti-Iranian (and anti-Shi?a) sentiment. If we take this connection for granted, we risk, on the one hand, granting racist or sectarian narratives too much influence over a multitude of governmental actions, and on the other hand, we will fail to account for the highly contingent nature of boundary enforcement processes over time and from place to place.
To address this gap in the historiography of nationalism, sectarianism, and border studies in Iraq, this paper focuses on the criminalization of Iranian nationals (or those of alleged Iranian background) through the process of boundary enforcement. In other words, this paper asks, What is the relationship between codified laws, enforcement policies, and pre-existing or concomitant popular or official Iraqi nationalisms? Using British and Iraqi archival documents (including those of the Iraqi Baath Party) and press records stretching from the period of colonial Mandate rule after World War I, to the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, I show that the day-to-day administration of the boundary during war-time and peace-time was used, when expedient, to effectively criminalize being Iranian in Iraq at key moments in Iraqi political history.
I approach these sources, and the Iraq-Iran borderland in general, as the manifestation of a revealing discourse between bureaucratic, legalistic practices and fundamentally subjective national-territorial narratives of “us” and “them.” In the early 1920s, British and Iraqi government forces sought to discredit and defeat localized revolts contiguous to, and overlapping, the border between Iraq and Iran. Likewise, in the 1980s, the ruling Iraqi Baath Party sought to maintain hegemonic control in northern Iraq amidst Iranian invasions and more local rebellions within the borderland. In both cases, the threat of the Iranian “other,” as a sympathetic and violent “fifth column” within Iraq, drew state attention to the Iraq-Iran border and its enforcement. Iranians were subsequently made “illegal” in Iraq, subjecting them to state violence, societal stigmatization, and further normalizing Iranian and Shi?a “otherness” in Iraq, and elsewhere in the Arab world.
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Dr. Kimberly B. Katz
This paper, part of a larger historical study of the application of Jordanian law in the Hebron district during the early 1950s, examines the crime of border crossings. The time period reflects the tumultuous 1951-1953 period in Jordan’s history, which witnessed the reign of three kings due to assassination and health deficiencies, along with a Regency Council that ruled until the young Hussein reached his majority and the onset of his reign. Following the 1948 War, many Palestinians found themselves on the Jordanian side, and their homes and fields on the Israeli side, of the 1949 Jordan-Israel Armistice line. As Palestinians adapted to life as Jordanian citizens and, often, also as refugees, the place of home took precedence over the legalities of armistice lines and local/international laws and agreements. Some Palestinians crossed the border from their new to their old homes and returned back, while others crossed the border to and from the Egyptian-controlled territory of Gaza.
The crossings were oftentimes labeled “infiltration” by scholars and politicians, but the 1936 Penal Code used in post-independence Jordan until October 1951 did not include an article specifying border crossings as a crime. What did Jordanian law say about border crossings? The article in the Penal Code that Palestinians violated by crossing the border speaks only of “violating a lawful order.” For many, the law, the order, and the location of the border, may have been unclear or unknown. Nevertheless, many Palestinians did not view the border, or the law, as an obstacle to returning to their former homes and fields. Some who crossed engaged in additional unlawful practices including theft, trafficking with the enemy, or possession of foreign (Israeli) currency. The temporary Penal Code of 1951 replaced the 1936 Penal Code of the British mandate-era government, which prevailed in both Palestine and Transjordan. While the 1951 Penal Code lasted only 9 years before it was again replaced in 1960, border crossings received new attention in the 1951 Jordanian legal code and, contrary to political claims at the time and current scholarship, suggests that the Jordanian government took the issue of border crossings seriously. Jordanian law, cases of Palestinian arrests in the Hebron district, and records of the Jordan-Israel Mixed Armistice Commission will be examined in their socio-historical context in order to analyze the meaning of Jordanian law and its application regarding border crossings to and from the West Bank.
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Ms. Samar Nour
Some of the changes in the construction and perception of children and childhood in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were in response to and a part of the modernization process that had started even before the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Efforts to create colonial or national cultures commonly involved legislations, educational projects and health care policies in which it is imagined that the identities of children may be formed and which in turn institutionalized and sustained a certain perception and discourse on childhood. Furthermore, modernizers tended to regard, at least discursively, the handling of children by society, in the broadest sense, as a benchmark in the progress of modernization and civilization. Therefore, while they were striving to invent/define the normal, or rather ideal, child, they were also preoccupied with the abnormal, the anomaly: the juvenile delinquent.
Towards the end of the 19th century, as the Egyptian state became the parens patriae, juvenile delinquency became one of the problems faced by the modern state and the colonial administration. Placing children in special institutions was part of an effort to ensure the cohesion of the community in new and changing circumstances. The result was a conceptual integration of delinquent and deprived children and extending the jurisdiction of the courts to include destitute, neglected or uncontrollable children. Using the Foucauldian notions of discipline, bio-power and governmentality, my presentation aims at tracing the new form of incarcerating institution as represented by the Islahiyya, the borstal, which was a mix of a quasi-military juvenile prison and vocational/ industrial school. Assessment of the success or failure of such an institution to produce governable citizens/ subjects is irrelevant. What is relevant here is how it served to enforce the middle-class values of the nascent nationalist movement, and used simultaneously as an example of “law and order”, serving the colonial propaganda.
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Dr. Peter Wien
The paper situates the 1940 murder of the Syrian nationalist politician ‘Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar within the changing dynamics of urban socio-political networks at the intersection of traditional politics of notables and new forms of working class mobilization. Shahbandar, who had participated in the Syrian Revolt of the 1920s, returned from exile in 1937 and fell victim to political infighting with the dominant nationalist bourgeois elite politicians of the National Bloc party. His assassins were urban roughs, who thus did not belong to the – well researched – Young Effendiyya middle class formation with its secular leanings. Instead, they were organized in a Sufi brotherhood that attracted working class people. In addition, members of the bourgeois National Bloc party most likely instigated Shahbandar's murder in the context of an urban patron-client relationship. The incident therefore provides multiple and conflicting perspectives on youth and class mobilization during a period of transition from elite to mass politics.
The presentation is based on primary documents collected in archives and libraries in Lebanon, France, Italy, the UK and the USA. They offer microhistoric detail about the prosecution and trial that followed the crime, as well as detail about the historical context of French Mandate justice and the anxieties and pressures of World War II that influenced all participating actors.
The research of which this paper is a part therefore offers deep insights into the social context of political violence. It presents this social context as it emerges out of the proceedings of a criminal investigation and a court case, which is a tested methodology in microhistory, but not one that has been used a lot in Middle East history. Finally, the particular timing of the crime and its investigation and prosecution overlaps with the period of Vichy rule in Mandate Syria. There is therefore a great potential for multicontextual research that throws light on an event from local, regional and global perspectives.
