Photographs straddle the boundary between an everyday technology, a medium, a commodity form, and a cultural practice. This paper will focus on the ways in which photographs were understood, and how photography was practiced and used by a broad spectrum of middling social groups in Egypt between the late 19th century and through the first half of the 20th. My sources include tens of thousands of photographs housed in private collections in Egypt, textual sources and oral history interviews. My overall preoccupation is what does paying attention to photographs not just as underused sources but rather as historiographical drivers has to offer to histories of modernity in the region and beyond. As most technologies, photographs did what those who wielded them wanted them to do, realising a set of often deeply modern preoccupations and desires. The main argument of my paper is that photography represented one of the key rituals of modernity. To demonstrate this, I will focus on a set of practices that evolved around personal photographs and their specific social effects. These include: 1) the affinities between photographs and novel writing practices which worked to crystalise modern forms of selfhood by mediating the relationship between an observing (and writing) self and the world, newly understood as a set of objective phenomena ready to be examined, observed, and analysed; 2) how the intense exchange of photographs as tokens of affection (dependent on the concomitant expansion of the postal service and novel practices of letter writing) worked to cement social ties among relatives thus crystalizing what we know today as the ‘Arab family’; 3) and how photographic practices and rituals helped to normalize a distinctly modern sense of time as linear, chronological, and progressive. Photographs have a strong ontological relationship to time, however, and I will conclude by arguing that paying closer attention to the temporalities caught in, and realised by, everyday personal photography tells us a great deal about the nature of time under capitalist modernity. The vast corpus of Egyptian personal photographs clearly shows that the regimented and ordered linear temporality of modernity could only work by simultaneously creating, or allowing, discrete pockets of liminal, meandering time. Such temporal pockets of unstructured freedom produced an illusion of agency which allowed temporal and other forms of discipline and power to thrive, an illusion of agency on which the logic of capitalism is based.

For the Israeli military’s office of public relations, charged with generating propaganda (hasbara) for the security services, the era of proliferating mobile technologies generated considerable anxiety. At issue was the growing number of cameras in the hands of Palestinian civilians and activists in the occupied Palestinian territories, threateningly well-versed in the emerging media economy, with a composite digital literacy was far outstripping that of the military’s PR division. This paper draws on ethnography conducted with this military division in years well before the military’s surveillance infrastructure had been tethered to a drone arsenal, to consider their dream of a field of total visibility and synoptic seeing, of a camera arsenal covering the political theater of military occupation, and therein able to manage every PR threat with the appropriate military-generated image. I particularly am interested in the failures that emerged from military blueprints and trials in their efforts to bring synoptic seeing to reality. Using ethnographic methods to take seriously the everyday limits, stumbles and lapses in Israeli military media capacity, this paper studies the anti-colonial potential of (what I call) an analytics of failure at the dawn of the age of surveillance militarism.

The world’s first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby was born in England in 1978. Only two years later in 1980, the first pro-IVF fatwa was issued by the Grand Shaykh of Al Azhar University in Cairo. Since then, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have been widely practiced across the Muslim world, reflecting both Islamic pronatalism (i.e., the creation of an Islamic “multitude”) and explicit encouragement of medical and scientific advancements to overcome human suffering. Of the three Abrahamic faith traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—Islam and Judaism have been the most “ART permissive,” especially when compared to some forms of Christianity. For example, Catholicism disallows all forms of reproductive technology, from birth control to assisted conception. Still, as a faith tradition, Islam prioritizes reproduction within the bounds of marriage, meaning that single women and men are not encouraged to become parents out of wedlock. Within this Islamic moral world, single women facing the threat of permanent childlessness because of medical disorders or age-related fertility decline might be inclined to preserve their fertility through the newest ART called “oocyte cryopreservation” (or egg freezing). Since the new millennium, oocyte cryopreservation via a flash-freezing technology called “vitrification” has allowed young cancer patients to preserve their fertility prior to sterility-inducing chemotherapy. However, over the past decade, egg freezing is increasingly being used by thousands of otherwise healthy single women in countries ranging from Brazil to India to South Korea. In September 2019, Egypt’s Dar Al-Ifta issued a fatwa declaring that egg freezing among single women is “permissible” under certain conditions. In light of this declaration, egg freezing is now taking off in Middle Eastern countries, including Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. This paper examines why single Muslim women—most of whom are highly educated, “thirty-something” professionals—are freezing their eggs. Facing a serious “mating gap” in which equally educated partners are hard to find, egg freezing offers women a way to extend their reproductive timelines and reduce their anxieties while still hoping for marriage and a family. Ultimately, this paper argues that in today’s world, egg freezing is a costly technological concession to the growing state of “reproductive waithood” now facing educated Muslim women in the Middle East and beyond.

During the height of the Cold War and postcolonial challenges to that new order, the Egyptian state built the Aswan High Dam (1960-1971) using a combination of U.S., European, Soviet, and Arab technology and engineering, a process that produced in a new cadre of experts who have been documented by scholars (Waterbury, Mitchell, Bishop, Shokr, Mosallam). Less examined are the various technologies employed in dam construction and the ways in which the dam as a massive technological artifact existed and changed over time as a collection of discrete but articulated technologies: from turbines to grout to the giant billboards that counted down the days remaining to milestones in construction. Scaling these different technologies for use by engineers, builders, and the public remained a central challenge of building such a massive structure throughout the 1960s. A key technology in this effort was a cross-sectional view of the dam that accompanied most reports of the progress of construction and that represented different levels of detail about the composition and structure of the High Dam in order to make engineering details legible to wider publics. This paper focuses on one core technology of the dam: a grout curtain developed to anchor the structure to the Nile riverbed, which contained unexpectedly deep layers of unstable material above the underlying bedrock—a design flaw in the original siting of the dam. Engineers across the cold-war political divide contested the specific structure of the grout curtain and its potential to safely stabilize the dam. Tracking changing representations of the grout curtain through the three prisms of the blueprint, the cross-section, and actual construction brings into view the politics of spectacle and oversight that were central to construction. Using state archives, construction plans and records, memoirs, newspaper coverage, filmic and literary sources, among other primary sources, this paper draws together a critical biography of the contested grout curtain to argue that debates over the safety of the dam structure were not hidden from public view, in contrast to popular conceptions of the lack of transparency of authoritarian states in sharing vital knowledge to its subjects. As such, this paper joins scholarly debates largely outside the Middle East about the role of technology in “scratching” rather than seaming together political communities (Mrazek; see also Abraham, Hecht), especially in the construction of hydraulic infrastructures (e.g., Teisch, Pritchard, Mukerji, Tischler, Miescher, Pietz, Carse).

What may a seemingly obsolete technology teach us about a now omnipotent one? How may the social life of audiocassettes shed new light on the Internet and its impact? And in what ways may the stories told by everyday technologies enhance our understanding of the modern Middle East? Scholars have spilt no shortage of ink on social media and its significance in relation to the mass uprisings that shook the Middle East nearly a decade ago. Indeed, a quick survey of recent publications reveals that Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms have supplanted al-Jazeera as the subject of choice for many studies on the region’s media. Although offering key insights into the intersections of activism, authoritarianism, and contemporary politics, these works unanimously lend the impression that only the most recent media matter in Middle East studies. In the spirit of expanding this scholarship, I will place the Internet into conversation with a second technology that decentralized state-controlled Egyptian media, challenged local gatekeepers, and enabled an unprecedented number of people to participate in the creation of culture and the circulation of information decades earlier. To make sense of these long forgotten developments, I will focus on a single artist, a blind singer by the name of Shaykh Imam whose informal cassette recordings unsettle Egypt’s historical record. I will pay particular attention to the writing and re-writing of one historic event: Richard Nixon’s visit to Cairo in the summer of 1974. I will begin by unpacking this “sonorous spectacle,” before exploring how one contemporary song, Nixon Baba, countered the Egyptian government’s “official story” of the occasion. After elucidating Imam’s historical trajectory and the centrality of audiocassettes to his career, I will chart the movement and lasting resonance of Nixon Baba, which witnessed a resurgence during the “Arab Spring.” In so doing, I will consider what media histories may offer to Middle East studies and will demonstrate how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.