How do we understand the workings of modernity in the Middle East beyond the integration of the region into the world economy and the onset of modern governmentality? The last decade of scholarship has featured an explosion of theories and narratives that have attempted to tackle this question. While historians had previously acknowledged the uneven onset of modernity, or rather the incorporation of the Middle East and North Africa into the modern world system, they have nevertheless discussed the process in finite terms and as eventually being complete. Steering away from paradigms that privilege what one historian called the “on-switch of modernity,” this panel adopts a historical and comparative perspective that examines the multiple, on-going, and dynamic productions and assertions of modernity. The papers comprising this panel highlight the ways in which “modernity” was a temporal concept that was asserted and reproduced in a variety of ways beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing throughout the twentieth century. As such, this panel represents the increasing turn toward focusing on particular sites of modern practices, modern discourses, and the performance of modernity. It examines a variety of sociopolitical developments in four different Middle Eastern spaces and periods during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the late Ottoman Empire, interwar Morocco, early independence Lebanon, and post-1979 Iran.
Collectively, these papers contribute to our understanding of both the material and discursive production of modernity as simultaneously a set of practices and set of assertions. More specifically, the analyses advanced in this panel show that “being modern,” to borrow from another historian, is a continuously asserted, invoked, and practiced concept across an incredibly broad spectrum of ideological constructs and forms of social organization, ranging from Ottoman athletic associations, Moroccan Jewish groups, Lebanese advocates of state-led economic development, and the Iranian revolutionary regime. Such approaches contrast sharply with much of the literature that has either taken “modernity” for granted or simply dismissed how certain historical actors were themselves implicated in modernity—defined to be comprised of discrete and isolated practices. The papers argue that not only are these practices interrelated and contingent on one another, but that their analytical separation does the political work of obscuring the ways in which a fundamental aspect of modernity is the consistent assertion of being modern across time and context. Together, the papers offer a comparative perspective that is simultaneously attentive to specificities across time and space while advancing broader understandings of modernity.
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By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ottoman citizens of a plethora of backgrounds had created a common physical culture. This culture, based in Istanbul, centered around the belief that the regular performance of physical exercise, gymnastics, and team sports was the most effective means of forming robust young men, modern communities, and a civilized empire. The individual and the community, after all, were not separate, but mutually constitutive. According to early-twentieth-century biological understandings of society espoused in Istanbul and other cities around the world, the rejuvenation of the community was contingent upon the physical, moral, and spiritual regeneration of the individual. While all three realms were important, sports enthusiasts in the late Ottoman Empire highlighted man’s corporeal dimension and treated the male body as the main site in which the strength, development, and progress of the community should be measured and exhibited. Turkish, Armenian, Jewish, and Greek denizens of Istanbul “worked out” these ideas in schools, on the soccer field, at the sports club, and in the pages of Istanbul’s multilingual press.
This paper examines this understudied phenomenon by focusing on the ways in which Ottomans exhibited the physical dexterity of the individual, community, and empire through male bodies competing and performing in newly constructed urban spaces in Istanbul and beyond. Football matches in Istanbul’s new spacious outdoor stadiums, gymnastic exhibitions in theaters and gardens, and athletic events in international competitions abroad served as the spaces in which Ottoman citizens simultaneously negotiated their modern identities, experimented with novel activities, embraced shared civic values, and projected exclusive ethno-religious ties.
Drawing from a diverse array of journals, newspapers, memoirs, club records, and government reports written in Ottoman, Turkish, Armenian, French, German, and English, this paper expands understandings of both the practices that constituted modernity and the actors who ushered them in. By exercising, playing team sports and attending these events, Ottoman citizens, not just state actors and government institutions, objectified the male body and performed the nation. The staging of athletic events in newly constructed urban spaces in Istanbul and abroad and the creation of a shared sports culture serve as vantage points to observe the ways in which the population participated in the making of modernity in the Ottoman Empire.
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Ms. Alma Heckman
During the interwar period, Moroccan Jews found themselves in the crosshairs of several competing visions of modernity. A multitude of voices across French and Spanish Protectorate Morocco claimed Jews for their particular political and social platforms. These voices included Moroccan nationalists of various stripes, Zionists, Communists and assimilationists and those arguing for French naturalization. Focusing on Jews in large urban centers such as Casablanca, Tangier, and Fez, this paper argues that Moroccan Jews both embraced and rejected aspects of each of these visions of modernity (and with them, aspirations for Morocco’s future) to affect change in their local communities as well as nationally. Prevailing historiography of Moroccan Jews has often treated them as inert, swept up in subsequent waves of political and social cause and effect. Through an exploration of the interwar Moroccan press, police surveillance reports and Protectorate documents, this paper repositions Moroccan Jews as active agents with high stakes in Morocco’s increasingly vibrant political consciousness and visions of both colonial and independent modernity.
Following the First World War, Moroccans, like so many colonized peoples around the globe, became more acutely aware of themselves in a broader, international sphere with claims to sovereignty. This atmosphere gave rise to several Moroccan nationalist groups predicated on an Arabo-Muslim Moroccan identity which sought, to varying degrees, the participation of Jews in the national liberation project. Zionist also outposts grew during the interwar period. European Zionists entered the country and spread propaganda, newspapers and organized meetings even though the Protectorate authorities thoroughly forbade it. The Alliance Israelite Universelle – a French Jewish philanthropic organization with the goal of preparing Jews for citizenship in their countries of origin – represents yet another political factor. Through its expansive network of schools, Alliance propaganda argued for assimilation in the French model, and its students often sought French naturalization. Finally, Moroccan Jews embraced more universalist models of modernity: the interwar period witnessed a flourishing of leftist movements, leagues for human rights and most notably, the International League Against anti-Semitism (LICA), another French Jewish organizations that Moroccan Jews supported and used to voice indigenous concerns. As this paper will demonstrate, all of these factors underline how Jews were both active agents as well as subjects in a wider international and nationalist debate on Moroccan modernity
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Dr. Ziad M. Abu-Rish
Much of the scholarship on the history of Lebanon implicitly or explicitly claims that individuals, social groups, and the political process in the country were not sufficiently in line with those patterns and dynamics that constitute historical modernity. Central to these narratives are two phenomena, which historians often point to but rarely interrogate. In the past fifteen years, historians and other scholars have effectively challenged the notion that sectarianism is a “traditional” phenomenon. Instead, they have analyzed the ways in which it is fundamentally implicated in the experience of modernity. More specifically, for these scholars, sectarianism is a modern phenomenon rather than a pre-modern holdover. Yet the notion of a minimalist or non-existent state in Lebanon has received little challenge, even among those scholars that have argued for the fundamental modernity of sectarianism.
This paper challenges narratives of the state in modern Lebanon by attending to the bureaucratic expansion of public institutions during the early independence period (1946-1955). It highlights the antecedents in the French colonial and even late Ottoman periods vis-à-vis the introduction of instruments of modern governance. The paper also posits an alternative to the formulation of the early independence period as one of a Merchant Republic, in which the political economy of Lebanon was defined by an open economy and lazes-faire state. On the contrary, I argue that this period was marked by an extensive quantitative, qualitative, and geographic expansion in the bureaucratic reach of state institutions. Yet such bureaucratic expansion was characterized by contentious debates and mobilizations on the part of elite and non-elite groups. At issue were competing notions of how to organize political representation, economic development, and relationships between various social groups. The pivot of differences was not modernity itself, but rather how to come to terms with the experience of modernity. Drawing on a diverse array of Arabic, French, and English primary sources, such as the local and foreign press, legal codes, ministerial reports, diplomatic communications, political party and labor union documents, and oral histories, the paper demonstrates that multiple sides in the struggles over political representation or economic development laid claim to the concept of modernity in advancing their particular vision for the political economy of Lebanon.
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At the heart of the 1979 Iranian revolution lay a central dilemma: how to adopt new technologies, often developed in Europe and the United States, without succumbing to the social and cultural dynamics that accompanied them. The roots of this dilemma lay in the decades after the Second World War when intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad voiced discontent with the pace and shape of the modernization efforts of the Pahlavi state.
Historians have pointed to the role of economic polarization, the shifting social practices of women, and the ubiquity of ideas of constitutionalism and democracy in the formation of revolutionary discontent. Yet neglected thus far are the discourses and practices surrounding the increased presence of modern technology in Iranian society. Developments such as the mechanization of the countryside and the introduction of technologies like radio, film, and the automobile were intrinsic to the social dislocations that helped bring about the necessary conditions for revolutionary unrest. Left unexplored are how would-be revolutionaries proposed to accommodate Iran to such technological developments. This paper explores the public articulations of the above dilemma in the revolutionary and wartime periods of the early Islamic Republic, 1979-1988, as well as the potential solutions offered. To do so it employs an underutilized primary source, the political posters issued during the 1980s by organs of the Islamic Republic and those parties closely identified with it. These posters serve as a lens to explore ideas of how Iranian society should or should not embrace modern technology, an understudied yet central component of the asserted modernity and imagined future of the Islamic Republic.
Depictions of military equipment, factories, and consumer goods articulated a vision of society that saw Iranians living and thriving in the modern world by laying aside some technologies and embracing others. These posters thus demonstrate the ways in which government officials and revolutionary supporters sought to steer society away from what was seen as Western and toward something understood as being both modern and authentically Iranian. This paper thus engages broader questions related to Iranian modernity. Namely, how did Iranians in the early Islamic Republic distinguish between modernization and westernization as transformative processes and what was the relationship between these two dynamics and assertions of modernity? This paper therefore identifies and analyzes ways that political art in the early Islamic Republic simultaneously reflected an accommodation with and opposition to distinct visions of modernity in Iranian society.
