What is the relationship between the law and the revolution? Are they opposites or do they share common spaces? Has the relationship between law and revolution changed historically? And finally, do all systems of law share the same relationship with revolution? These are the questions that stand at the center of this paper and to answer them, it examines the space of violence that revolutionary actors and the law shared during two moments in the nineteenth century, one in Ottoman Palestine (The Naqib al-Ashraf Revolution) and another in Khedival/Colonial Egypt (The ‘Urabi Rebellion). Rather than focus on the revolutionary acts themselves, the paper follows the entry of rebels into their respective juridical fields. The main objective is to examine how the law—modern colonial law in Egypt and shari’a law in Palestine—evaluated the violence of the revolutionaries, participated with it, or responded to it by distinguishing it from law’s own violence, or by punishing it. To address these questions, the paper offers a reading of the court records documenting the trials of the rebels. In addition, the paper examines other legal writings that justified the revolution on legal or theological grounds, or participated in the revolution. The paper develops an argument about two sets of relationalities. The first concerns the relationship between shari’a law and modern law in their legal response to violent revolutionary acts: Was there a difference between the ways in which these two systems of law respond to revolutionary acts and what were the differing positions within each legal tradition? The second concerns the relationship between revolutionary and juridical violence, whether it is the violence of colonial law or the violence enabled by shari’a law: How was the violence of the revolution different from the violence of law? What was the space of violence that revolutionary acts shared with the law and what were the positions that each actor occupied? By considering the competitive and complementary relationship between law and revolution, this paper opens up the space of sovereignty to plural formations, while investigating the fate of this plurality during the consolidation of the nation-state.

My paper examines two documents from the Ottoman archive written by a “Malayali-Arab” in the nineteenth century, which adumbrate a hybrid notion of state grounded in old and new conceptions of space, time, and sovereignty. The paper forms part of a larger project investigating the Indian Ocean peregrinations of one family of Ba-Alawi Hadhrami sayyids (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad), who made the Malabar Coast of the present Indian state of Kerala their home from the eighteenth century until their exile by the British in 1852 on the charge of incitement to violence. I read the documents authored by Sayyid Fadl bin Alawi—the Pukoyya Thangal in Malayalam—two decades into his exile as maps of a shifting ground on which the very axes of space and time are thrown into a confused spiral as he is forced to reconceptualize sovereignty under new conditions of Empire, which I term colonial modernity. These are analyzed against the backdrop of Fadl’s life, which as form I argue was constitutive of an ancient politics. The documents are also examined in relation to his works of mysticism, which as performative texts illuminate a heterogeneous domain of humans, non-humans, and the supernatural. The paper follows Engseng Ho’s study of the Hadhrami sayyids in regarding their long history as structured by a particular intercalation of genealogy and Diaspora while also departing from it in order to grasp the specific 19th century transformations in arrangements of space, time, and sovereignty that the emergence of the modern state predicated. Viewed as arresting of movement and as site of license, the new state presented a paradox to an Indian Ocean world that had formed through largely unregulated flows enabling the coexistence of multiple languages of power. In these documents and through the life of Sayyid Fadl, one is afforded a rare glimpse at an effort to reconcile the state paradox with a prior world of movement in which angels, spirits, and baraka were contiguous with zamorins, rajas, and caliphs. The paper concludes by probing the implications of the futures-past that are pregnant in these reflections.

Lebanon bore catastrophic human and material losses during its civil war (1975-1990). Estimates of the number of civilians killed range from 130,000 to more than 300,000. Despite the shocking loss of life and moments of intense, even grotesque, violence there were often long periods of relative calm because of ceasefire or because the fighting shifted to some other part of the country. As a result countless newspaper headlines from that decade and a half proclaimed “the return of ordinary life” after the conclusion of some bloody episode or another that many assumed was “surely the end of it all.” Inevitably, pictures of smiling children eating ice cream, families strolling on the Corniche, sunbathers at the St George hotel or shoppers jamming street markets adorned the front pages of these newspapers. My paper offers a glimpse into the lives of some of these “ordinary people” shopping, strolling, sunbathing, and working over the course of the Civil War. A series of questions about everyday life animates this paper: How did people manage their lives and realize some sense of normalcy even during times of intense fighting and near anarchy? How were the routines of work and home maintained and/or disrupted by the war? What kinds of social, economic and physical/spatial compromises were people obliged to make? What kinds of collective efforts—outside the purview of the state and the many militias—did “ordinary” people undertake to overcome the difficulties posed by the war? My paper examines the war years in Lebanese through micro-histories of lived experience in two neighborhoods, one in Beirut and the other in the northern city of Tripoli. My paper critically examine notions of sovereignty by highlighting informal modes of organizing daily life undertaken by “ordinary people ” in urban settings over the course of the war years. Many of these informal and somewhat ad hoc practices such as street cleaning, rubbish removal and neighborhood charitable collections sometimes colluded, and/or came into conflict, with extant “state” structures (however compromised they were by the war) and also with militia-organized “popular committees” or “civil administrations.” Questions of sovereignty and sovereign domain lay at the heart of these interactions. I make the case that by looking at these “idiosyncratic” nodes of conflict, negotiation, compromise and sometimes violence we can gain new insights into the history of the war that we might take to other cases both inside and outside the region.

My paper, “Informal Markets and Political Violence in Relation to State Formation and State Collapse in Sudan and Somalia,” explains why structurally similar relationships to the international economy produce very different domestic political outcomes. Sudan and Somalia are major labor exporters that witnessed a boom in expatriate remittances in the 1970s and early 1980s. By the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, remittances declined dramatically, generating severe recessions and economic austerity policies. These capital inflows produced similar macro-institutional responses: in the boom, they circumvented official financial institutions and had the unintended consequences of undercutting the state’s fiscal and regulatory capacities while simultaneously fueling the expansion of informal markets in foreign currency trade. In the prosperous 1970s, these informal financial markets came to be “regulated” by indigenous Islamic and ethnic networks which provided cohesion, shared norms, and an economic infrastructure outside the formal economic and political system. In the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, however, the material links between formal and informal institutions eroded with the result that identity politics transmuted again, producing two different outcomes in Sudan and Somalia: consolidation and violence in the former and disintegration and violence in the latter. Through an historical analysis of comparable informal institutional arrangements across cases, my paper demonstrates when, and under what conditions, informal social networks have oriented social and economic relations around religious networks in Sudan, and ethnic affiliations in Somalia. I locate the rise of an Islamist-authoritarian regime in Sudan and state disintegration in Somalia in the way that informal financial markets were captured by segments of the state and social groups. My central hypothesis is that the form that collective action evolved in the two cases was largely dependent on whether Islamist or kinship groups were successful in establishing a monopoly over informal markets and relatively more proficient in utilizing their newly formed political coalition to control competition, albeit through highly coercive means.