The Armenian schools that were founded with the personal initiatives of the notables in the Ottoman Empire continue their task of providing education for the Armenian community with a special status of minority schools in Turkey. The objective of this paper is to scrutinize how the Turkish state governs the Armenian schools by the means of legality. To answer this question, I chose interview-based ethnography as my main methodology. After studying the laws and regulations binding the minority schools, I conducted interviews with school principals and teachers of the Armenian schools, parents, journalists covering Armenian community affairs, legal experts working on the particular subject, board members of the school foundations, and paid visits 7 of the total 16 Armeninan schools in Turkey to comprehend how the laws and regulations are implemented at the practical level. Against the general surmise that there is a nation state which is actively involved in the control of the minorities or their schools, this paper hunts down the governmentality around the Armenian schools, which is historically shaped by Turko-Islamic precepts reigning the political and socio-cultural context from the later periods of the Ottoman Empire to today, and argues that the relationship between the state and the Armenian schools is not as straightforward as it is claimed. Although it is largely overtold that the Armenian schools in Turkey have been governed strategically by an evil raison d’état, this chapter asserts that this explanation is rather insufficient in addressing the issue comprehensively and is not quite supported by the empirical data in the sense that it is rather possible to find contrary examples to this argument. While reshaping itself on different occasions and yet presenting its image as a comprehensive and all-encompassing whole, the Turkish state actually governs its minority schools by preserving legal ambiguities and instrumentalizing these ambiguities as spaces of manoeuvre while presenting ad hoc solutions in accordance with its political agenda. That is why instead of resorting to an explanation of a meddling state which controls and rules over every detail regarding the Armenian schools, I assert the Turkish state as a meandering state whose actions are not so straightforward but rather meandering with reforms and improvements, although its desire to subdue the minorities perseveres.

For almost two decades, the Moroccan state has increasingly sought ways of shaping the country’s religious discourse, even as King Mohammed VI tries to uphold his image as liberal reformer and guide the liberalization or “opening” (infitah) of the country’s political and economic spheres. Following the 2003 Casablanca bombings carried out by members of the Salafiyya Jihadiyya, much of this intervention has evoked protecting a “moderate” Maliki- and Sufi-inspired “Moroccan” form of Islam from “foreign” influences. In the aftermath of the U.S.-led “War on Terror,” moreover, and amidst the rise of ISIS, this state project has taken on global meaning as well. In 2014, then, the state’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs took a striking new step in this interventionist project by founding the Mohammed VI Institute for the Cultivation of Imams (Ma‘had Mohammed al-Sadis l-takwin al-a’imma), which aims more at recruiting students from Europe and other African nations than from within Morocco. As part of a larger project examining the Institute’s contemporary resonance, this paper examines some of its promotional materials and other elite discourse surrounding its founding and mission, while also putting this discourse in historical perspective. I suggest that in the most basic sense the Institute turns the state’s otherwise-protectionist stance regarding “Moroccan” Islam into a neo-imperial project of Islamic knowledge production, one that Morocco lays claim to through a heritage of Maliki jurisprudence that it shares with West African nations from which it recruits students. If we consider regional histories of Qur’an recitation practice alongside jurisprudence, however, the stakes of such a project become much clearer. Today, the Moroccan state has made promotion of a lesser known “Moroccan” recitational variant called riwayat Warsh a cornerstone of its local religious activities. At the same time, a brief survey of relevant Islamic manuscript archives reveals that the adoption of riwayat Warsh across West Africa coincided with the Moroccan Saidiyyan dynasty’s defeat of the Songhay and territorial expansion into the region. I argue, therefore, that the Institute embodies an attempt by the monarchy to reclaim its authoritative status over the geographical expanse of this “Warsh zone,” and thus the fullest extent of an earlier, Moroccan empire. I conclude by considering some of the ramifications of this type of educational neo-imperialism within the broader context of Morocco’s expanding trade relations with other African nations, and its continued occupation of the Western Sahara.

Sundry studies have been carried out on the intersection of religion and state in Egypt and the central role played in politics by the official religious establishment, Al-Azhar. Ever since its incorporation into the state apparatus in the 1960s, Al-Azhar has given the consecutive political authorities in Egypt a monopoly over the religious interpretation where it can find a religious justification and lend moral purpose and legitimacy to its actions. One of the major lacunas of the existing literature on Al-Azhar and its relationship to politics is that most studies are anchored in national methodological frameworks, overlooking the transnational phenomena and the contemporary rapid social changes that transcend the parochial nature of the nationally bounded perspective. None of the literature tackles either the role that al-Azhar has been playing in the global political domain in the last few decades or the impact of the accelerated and intensified global phenomenon on the religious institution itself. Thus, this paper takes an epistemological and methodological shift and seeks to explore the relationship between Al-Azhar and the dynamics of politics from a global perspective. It traces the evolution of al-Azhar’s global political role and explores the factors that have been conducive to the formation of the religious institution’s stature within the global political domain. The paper argues that subsuming al-Azhar’s role to domestic political functions is not quite apposite, as the religious institution has been increasingly interacting with global politics since 9/11. More specifically, the paper argues that there are two factors that have been conducive to the formulation of al-Azhar’s global political influence: 1) the global war on terrorism; and 2) the increasingly important role of religion in Egypt’s foreign policy.

The Turkish Grand National Assembly was debating on the foundation of the first theology faculty at Ankara University when a representative warns the minister of education about the decision and states “the struggle between mektep (school) and madrasa (Muslim religious school) and the conflict between science and religion have caused bloody stages of history not only in the history of our country but also in the history of humankind…”(T.B.M.M., 1949, 20-3, pp. 279-280). As the quote sets forth, religious education is a long-standing issue in Turkey, starting from the mektep-madrasa conflict in the late Ottoman Empire to the foundation of theology faculty in the early years of the Turkish Republic. This issue is closely related to the predicament of modernity and Islam in Turkey; it involves the role and place of Islam in political and social life that continues to be at the center of heated debates even today. The recent revival of academic Islamic studies with its diverse scholarship and Islam’s increasing presence in political and social discourse in contemporary Turkey requires a reconsideration of the history of the origin of these debates. This paper discusses this controversial character of higher religious education in Turkey, problematizing the mektep-madrasa conflict in the late Ottoman Empire and the historico-political developments in the early republican era that led to the foundation of the first theology faculty in 1949. Based on a textual analysis of historical texts, governmental documents, and an examination of institutional organization of A.U. Divinity School, this study analyzes the significance of the faculty and locates the faculty’s scholarly approach to Islamic studies in Turkish socio-political history.

What is the “International Relations (IR) of the Arab world”? How should it be taught? What place should be assigned to the League of Arab States (LAS) in such a focused course? These are the three interrelated questions this paper seeks to address, theoretically and methodologically informed by Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education and by IR scholarship concerned with worlding beyond the West and regional worlds. Fundamentally, this paper argues that the advancement of knowledge on how states, institutions and social movements deemed to be “Arab” interact with each other, and with their non-Arab counterparts, both at the regional and global levels demands a course of its own at the postgraduate level. This is due to the fact that a course focused on the IR of the Arab world enables the study of a whole set of political, economic and cultural dynamics that simply cannot be properly addressed when subsumed under the wider umbrella of IR of the Middle East. This study is anchored by the following qualitative methods: discourse analysis of syllabi of IR of the Middle East and related courses; active participant observation in the classroom and semi-structured interviews with graduate students enrolled in the IR of the Arab world course at a federal university in Brazil during the 2019 and 2020 academic years; and dialogues (in Freirean terms) with Arab scholars, intellectuals, activists and diplomats. The study reaches the conclusion that such a focused postgraduate course should assign a significant but not central role to the functioning of the LAS and its several related institutions. Therefore, International Relations of the Arab world should comprise a discussion of the role of regions in world politics and how the Arab world constitutes one of these regions, as well as a critical assessment of the meanings historically and currently attached to the signifier “Arab” and its implications for how Arab states and non-state actors relate to each other, their immediate neighbors, and the Global North and South. Likewise this proposed course should encompass the characteristics of Arab political economy, the historical and political evolution of the LAS, Arab migrations and diasporas, Arab knowledge production in IR, the role the Arab media plays in regional and global politics, and how Arab cinema and literature propagates a sense of Arab identity – that is radically plural, just like the Arab world itself.