In this paper I will discuss the linguistic pluralities of the Ottoman past by juxtaposing the oral traditions of the Slavic-speaking people in the northern Balkans and narratives written in Ottoman Turkish. The purpose is to show that discussion on both the slavic oral tradition and the Ottoman textual narratives may point at the interdependence of oral and textual histories in the creation of the knowledge about the past. I will also analyze the incorporation of an Ottoman dynastic tradition into the oral traditions of the slavic-speaking people in the northern Balkans. My discussion on a "folk" song recorded in the slavic language spoken in the Balkans, which shows a remarkable similarity with the events taking place in the 1470s of which we know from the Ottoman documents, will demonstrate one of the many ways of how knowledge about the past was produced and used in the Ottoman Balkans. The comparison of both "oral histories" and documentary sources may serve us to counter the claim of the nationalistic historiographies in the Balkans, which regard the Ottoman period as a rupture in the historical experience of the people in the region. I will argue that when oral and textual sources are discussed in a single effort to understand the creation of historical knowledge, the Ottoman political and military elite and the Slavic people in the Balkans, supposedly two alienated groups, appear not to have constructed their ideas about the past in hermetically sealed spaces. Rather, the ways in which they both narrated about each other resembles a dialog or an exchange of ideas within a community in which identities and visions of the past were not always determined by religious and linguistic bounds. I will also analyze the introduction of a new vocabulary in the Ottoman textual accounts and the south-slavic oral tradition. The introduction of slavic words and phrases into the Ottoman historical narratives as well as the proliferation of Ottoman vocabulary in the south-slavic oral traditions created temporal distancing between the times of narration and the events from the past. I will also show that the slavic language spoken in the Balkans, especially in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, was frequently incorporated in narratives about the Ottoman past and I will discuss the cultural context of those occurrences.

This project concerns the devotional song genre of tarat?l, the most prevalent non-liturgical folk music performed by Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt. Specifically, it examines their integral role during the Sunday School movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and their importance to contemporary Coptic identity. Historically, this movement was initiated to resist American Protestant missionary efforts, and drawing on the rising nationalism for Egypt's independence from Britain in the early 1920s, organized classes that celebrated Coptic culture, heritage, and national identity. Tarat?l's contemporary folk and popular music idioms, embedded oral histories, and indigenous metaphors made them especially emblematic as sites of resistance and Coptic pride against British imperialism and missionary encroachment. Thanks to the Sunday School movement, the Coptic community continues to experience a vibrant cultural renaissance and a religious revival in Egypt and in diasporic communities all over the world. With a growing pan-Arab movement and the Islamicized rhetoric of a newly declared Arab Republic of Egypt beginning the 1950s, this renaissance has increasingly depended on an autochthonic perspective of Coptic Christian identity. Drawing from western and indigenous scholarship, this post-revival privileges a traditionalist, "authentic," and "pure" representation of Coptic culture. Early Church history, the antiquated Coptic language, and the Coptic liturgical hymnody known as alh?n, have become especially coveted as a direct link to an Ancient Egyptian heritage. Folk genres such as tarat?l, however, have been slowly devalued for incorporating 'outside' influences, including the Arabic language, folk and popular music idioms, and borrowed elements from a missionary legacy. In many cases, tarat?l and their accompanying oral narratives are not only left out of the Coptic discourse about identity, but also further neglected in contemporary scholarship by both Western and indigenous scholars. By investigating the changing values surrounding the genres of alh?n and tarat?l, I address the influence of Egyptian nationalism on an emerging sense of Copticity, and the Sunday School reform movement on the dissemination of tarat?l and the forging of contemporary Coptic identity through music. Through the analysis of the changing discourse surrounding Coptic music culture, I examine the emerging nativistic movement that continues to shape today's Coptic renaissance and religious revival. Specifically, I consider how this movement utilizes Western scholarship, to fuel the present predilection with a 'pure' ancient Egyptian heritage and the desire for its revival. This study is based on ethnographic research conducted in Toronto, Canada as well as Cairo, Egypt.

Drama as a literary genre was treated as an instrument of modernity, not different from other modern instruments of discourse, such as autobiography, novels, poetical free verse, reporting, and journalism and mass media. Drama played a big role in creating and maintaining what Anderson calls “the imagined community”. As the idea of nation was materializing itself through a variety of discourses, Arab theatre was deeply involved in what Anderson calls “transformation of fatality into continuity and contingency into meaning.” In this study I will focus on the dramatic verse in the Arab world (known in Arabic as al-masra? al shi’ri) as a historiographical account of modernity and tradition. I will first give a brief review of the narrative written on the early beginnings of Arab poetic drama and its eventual evolution into different dramatic genre parallel to what happened to the English Renaissance dramatic verse falling out of favor and replaced by the conversational and vernacular style. With regard to modernity I will look at modern Arab theatre’s origin as the performance of the cultural nationalist movement even if mixed with a call to preserve the cultural literary tradition through the use of the traditional metered Arabic classical poem or qasidah. The dramatic verse becomes a stage of negotiation between modernity and tradition in both form and content. I will highlight examples of the poetic drama as a tool for re-imagining the nation when faced with political, economic, or societal crisis. I will also analyze the re-writing or dramatizing of tradition by the tendency of Arab poetic drama to bring to life cultural icons and heroes in a lyrical poetical verse for the purpose of taking up societal problems. This study will also focus on the institutional role of theatre by looking at the companies who performed them emphasizing how theatre relates to historical and cultural moments of a nation. I will introduce brief samples of the following playwrights/poets, arranged chronologically: Ahmad Shawqi, Khaled al-Shawwaf, Abdulrahman al-Sharqawi, Salah Abdulsubur, Muin Bsiso, Izzedin Isma’il, Mohammad Ali al-Khafagi, and Ali Kana’an.

The puppet play Afsane-ye afarinesh (The Myth of Creation) is among the earliest satirical works of the Iranian modernist writer Sadeq Hedayat (1903--1951). Written in 1930, in Paris, and featuring a cast of puppet characters with names like Khaleqoff (“Creatov”), Jebra’il-pasha (“Gabriel –pasha”) and Monsieur Shaytan (“Monsieur Satan”), it appears to have pushed past the boundary between the irreverent and the blasphemous, which Hedayat’s writings do approach at times, but never cross. Perhaps for that reason, this parody of the Creation story has been quietly circumvented by publishers and critics alike: After its first publication in Paris in 1946, in 106 copies marked “Not for Sale,” it has never been published in Iran, and only recently was published in Persian and in Englisbn in the West. Is Hedayat aiming his satirical barbs at religion as such? The present paper offers an alternative reading of this controversial work. It takes a close look at Afsane-ye afarinesh and the cultural context of the period between the two world wars, and contends, that The Myth of Creation is Hedayat’s tongue-in-cheek commentary on the furious DEBATES over the roles of religion and science in modern society, which in the 1920s dominated the public discourse both in his native country, and in France where he was residing at the time.

My work asserts that modern theater was integral to shaping a uniquely Egyptian modernity. It parts from other studies which claim that stage theater in the Middle East was simply an unmediated European import or a forced colonial imposition. Rather, I claim that its development in Egypt in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was born of complex interactions between Egyptian, Ottoman, French and Italian performative practices and of artists who both shaped and responded to indigenous aesthetic preferences, social concerns, and political agendas. The period was one of dramatic transition for Egypt as it moved between various identities, stemming from its long membership in and subjugation to the Ottoman and British Empires, to political independence and nationhood in the 1920s. In this period of transition, the new, Western-educated effendi emerged. Their unique pedigree of indigenous rural roots and secular, urban, Western education produced a group of young men who found themselves in a cultural and intellectual middle-ground, estranged from their homes but also unaccepted by urban elites. They used this position to claim responsibility for leading Egypt to political, economic, and cultural independence. The effendiyya—as playwrights, translators, performers and audiences—participated in new spaces, like theaters, where they defined and propagated a self-reflective “modern” Egyptian national identity. The effendiyya engaged in modern Egyptian theaters which mixed European-style vaudeville and local folk themes and presented them to a wide, mostly urban, Arabic-speaking audience. Performances took place in new venues, particularly along ‘Emad al-Din Street, and served to entertain as well as reflect upon society at large. Such reflection included critiquing those in power and promulgating visions of an “Egyptian” modernity. Thus, using rare newspapers, memoirs, and plays, I argue that Cairene theaters of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were not simply emulations of elite Western cultural forms. Instead, they stood at the heart of a new effendi culture and critical debates over Egyptian identity and modernity.

Over the last ten years, an increasing number of high profile performances featuring the music of classical Arab musical legends such as Oum Kalthoum, Mohammad Abdul Wahab, and Farid Al-Atrash have packed prestigious Israeli concert halls for diverse Israeli audiences. Such musical developments represent a historical shift in Israeli cultural politics, for in spite of the country’s large Mizrahi and Arab populations, Middle Eastern musical traditions were marginalized and almost entirely excluded from dominant musical media for several decades. While Palestinian-Israelis are glad that Israelis have finally begun to embrace Arab music and their performance of it, they are not always pleased with how their promoters require that they present it. The Arab Orchestra of Nazareth (comprised almost entirely of Palestinian-Israelis) is managed by a staunchly left-wing Israeli Ashkenazi Jew, one of Israel’s biggest promoters of Arab music. He often “persuades” the orchestra—sometimes against their will—to collaborate with well-known Jewish Mizrahi singers in performances of music by classical Arab composers. These performances are then celebrated in festivals such as “The Culture of Peace” or others promoting peace and coexistence. In this paper, I will discuss the recent Israeli interest in Arab classical music and the ways in which many of these performances have concomitantly taken on multiple and divergent meanings in Israel for Palestinian-Israelis, Mizrahim, and peace activists. I will describe Israeli culture brokers’ successful and not so successful attempts to balance these sometimes incongruous audiences and performers, and will theorize on the meaning of such performances amidst the highly explosive political environment in Israel today.