The scholarship on Muslim women vernacular rituals has delineated some of the connections between women’s collective religious performances and larger socio-cultural or gender related issues, as well as the relationship between women’s practices with the more male-dominated orthodox teachings of Islam. Women’s gatherings such as Sofreh (votive meals), Mowludi (religious celebrations), Rowze (mourning rituals), and Quran reading groups, among others, have been studied as a space for women to assume religious agency (Mahmoud 2005, Torab 1996), to form a community away from household tasks and responsibilities and to come in contact with new people and situations (Betteridge 2002, Shirazi 2005, 2015), to engage in symbolic commentary on social issues (Kalinock 2003, Mills & Jamzade 1986), or to express political affiliation in a politically diverse context (Kalinock 2003, 2004, Torab 2002). In the majority of such studies, especially those focusing on Iranian women, the sense of agency or community is considered to be ensuing from a unifying religious experience that brings women together in a form of Turnerian communitas. With a few exceptions (Kalinock 2003, Torab 2002, Mills & Jamzade 1986), these studies often depict women’s collective religious performances as circles of like-minded individuals who, while strengthening their communal ties, can practice their religious devotions in a private, less orthodox atmosphere. What such works tend to ignore is that first, not all participants take part in these gathering for religious purposes, and second, there can be differences among participants in terms of their socio-economic status, age, education, political orientation, and beliefs that cannot simply get flattened by the virtue of being in the same space. In this paper, I use the case of domestic urban Rowze in Iran as a counter-example to such depictions. What I argue is that rituals like Rowze do not necessarily consist of a harmonious community of devout Muslim women who share similar sets of beliefs and viewpoints. On the contrary, the sense of community often needs to be consciously constructed by members’ performances and behavior based on certain codes of deference and demeanor (Goffman 1967) that apply to such intra-communal relationships. In other words, what makes Rowze a more-or-less congenial setting is not a romantic communitas of individuals whose differences get diminished in the context of a shared religious experience, but the harmonious setting is rather collectively created by observing certain unspoken principles that allow the community to stay together without tension or strife.

As a catalyst and communicative vehicle in activism, the language of food and food sharing carries moral weight and common ground. This paper, which is part of a larger ethnographic project on food activism and utopias in Turkey, focuses on the Yeryüzü Sofrası (Earth Tables), Ramadan iftars of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims of Istanbul. The Yeryüzü Sofrası gained visibility during the Gezi protests of 2013, which coincided with the month of Ramadan. Street “tables” occupied great lengths of Istanbul’s Istiklal Caddesi, bringing together what Nilüfer Göle described as the “divine and the cool.” With the ground as tabletop, participants sat cross-legged across each other to reach for bread, olives, and other foods brought for the meal. These iftars were defined by their stance against neoliberal incursions into public space, and by their stance of modesty against the opulent meals held in five star hotels. Most importantly, the meals were heralded as uniting secular Turks with pious Turks in an innovative habitus. Since 2013, the “tables” have become itinerant public solidarity events between the Anticapitalist Muslims and various other urban social movements and minority groups. The term, yeryüzü sofrası has also been co-opted by other groups outside of the Ramadan month. The organization of iftars in the ensuing years offers an opportunity to examine the fluid performance of moral positioning around the meals. In particular I focus on the improvisational nature of the Yeryüzü Sofrası and on the way the rules of visible adjacency become formulated differently in settings such as endangered urban gardens, Alevi neighborhoods, and central public squares. Setting up of meals involved both emulation and dismissal of traditional categories like hospitality, and leisure practices such as picnics. Indeed, the role that food has played in protest has been noted before. In her study of the Occupy Wall street kitchen, Maggie Dickinson pointed out the way in which “food structured a set of social relationships that constituted the movement.” She describes the manner in which daily activities were shaped by what food showed up and which volunteers were available. Just as food was offered as a gift in Zucotti Park, so the organizers of the Yeryüzü Sofrası invited participants and viewers to a modest, equalizing, floor table to call attention to extravagance, inequality and asymmetry.

Although Tunisia is hailed as the sole democratic success story to emerge from the Arab revolutionary uprisings that began in 2010-2011, many residents in low-income neighborhoods of the capital argue that the conditions that fueled the uprising have not improved: rising prices, worsening unemployment and continuing police repression. During the same period, internet use has also soared in these neighborhoods. Analysis of Tunisia’s revolutionary uprising points to social media as providing opportunities for mobilization in an authoritarian context in which organized political opposition had been fiercely repressed. It is thus important to consider the politics that may emerge from incipient internet use among low-income Tunisians. My early dissertation research (2015) in a low-income area of Tunis has found that nearly all children and youth now access the internet to some degree, using mobile phones when they do not own tablets and computers. Area internet café users range from ages 3 to over 50 years old, and nearly half of them are girls and women. Research on political dissent in Arab-majority countries has argued that politics may not always take the form of social movements found in less repressive contexts. Additionally, anthropologists and other researchers have sought to identify forms of popular politics that do not conform to either the formal politics of elections or even the resistance narratives commonly attributed to social movements. Although my research focuses on an area where revolutionary protests first erupted in the capital of Tunis – the popular neighborhoods of Hay Ettadhamon – the study of quotidian internet use allows for empirical assessment of the overall impact of the medium rather than focusing on actors who are fluent in circulating political language. The paper explores the popular politics that emerge in various kinds of relationships on Facebook and Skype, the two most popular social media sites in Tunisia. At issue are three main political arenas: (1) forms of local associational life that are both strengthened and undermined by social media; (2) the nationalist dynamics of Tunisian dialect written in both Latin and Arabic script; and (3) the politics of encounter with strangers abroad, often sought out in pursuit of migration, and facilitated by Google Translate. Analysis for this paper draws upon interviews with over 100 residents; in-depth interviews with 40 key participants; research in internet cafes and computer science classes in area public schools; and online participant observation on Facebook.