“Redeeming the Wilderness: Desert Monks, Bedouin and the Civilizing Mission in Nineteenth Century Egypt” The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of profound transformation in the Egyptian lands of Northeast Africa, which was dramatically illustrated in the efforts of Ottoman provincial governor Mehmet ‘Ali to extend the influence and reach of his rule. This paper focuses on one field of this kind of intervention, namely the deserts. As the ruling regime attempted to turn the province into a regional powerhouse, the sparsely populated Eastern and Western deserts assumed heightened significance, both as critical thoroughfares for its regional ambitions and as potential sources of mineral wealth for the industrialization of the country. In the paper, I will draw attention to two broadly defined communities that have inhabited these regions – namely Coptic monks and “desert Bedouin.” In the existing literature, a number of recurring tropes have been used to describe these respective communities, including one that pictures the Bedouin as an ever-present threat to their monastic neighbors. I argue that many of these ideas are rooted not in the “objective” realities of desert life but in the imaginations of outsiders – including settled riverine populations, Western travelers and colonial and state actors. I offer a very different appraisal of these “desert communities” and the rich tapestry of relationships that constituted them, while contemplating the threats that acquisitive “outsiders” posed to their very way of life, and in particular those working in the service of the centralizing regime of Mehmet ‘Ali. This shift in focus to the “desert margins” shows how monks and Bedouin alike became the objects of a modern civilizing mission, one that assumed the charge of domesticating the desert’s brutish denizens even as it aspired to redeem the wastelands that they inhabited. The paper will draw on traveler, missionary and consular reports, the records of the French Occupation, Egyptian government circulars, the Chronicles of the Coptic Church and the manuscripts of Hekekyan Bey, an Armenian engineer who led an expedition to the Eastern Desert in the service of Mehmet ‘Ali.

Gilan is an isolated and mountainous region in northern Iran. Because of its geography and location, in the medieval and early modern era Gilan came to be identified by historians as a land of refuge and dissent. Generally speaking, Gilan has remained less celebrated for its contribution to the medieval and early modern production of knowledge in the Islamicate world. However, Gilanis did not remain isolated and secluded in their own lands. They ventured outside their homeland and came to positions of power and prominence in other locales, including at the Deccan and Mughal courts in India. While the general migration of Iranians to India has received scholarly attention, the migration of Gilanis, and more specifically Gilani physicians, has secured less consideration. One such physician is Hakim Masih al-Din Abu al-Fath Gilani (1547-1589), son of the Kiyayi vizier Mowlana Abd al-Razzaq Gilani. Mowlana Abd al-Razzaq was executed by the Safavid Shah Tahmasb I, and this event encouraged Hakim Abu al-Fath Gilani to migrate to India along with two of his brothers. Hakim Abu al-Fath came to serve the court of Akbar (r.1556-1605). An extant collection of letters attributed to Hakim Abu al-Fath, Roqa‘at-e Hakim Abu al-Fath Gilani, is a valuable source that illuminates the importance of his personal and professional networks. While Gilani’s letters have been studied for their significance related to important Mughal political developments, less attention has been paid to their importance in enriching our understanding of inter- and intraregional intellectual and material exchanges among scholars, poets, and physicians. During his lifetime, Hakim Abu al-Fath was instrumental in establishing a nexus enabling important exchanges of a material and intellectual nature among scholars.

During the Great War, Ottoman soldiers fought on a front that did not border on the Ottoman Empire and did not carry immediate strategic importance for them. For the reasons quoted, the Galician and Romanian fronts remain understudied in the field of Ottoman participation in the First World War. In this paper, I aim to look at how the Ottoman state legitimized the presence of the Ottoman soldier on the Galician front. By analyzing a propaganda booklet, “Anavatandan Selam: Galiçya’daki Askerlerimize”(Greetings from Homeland: to Our Soldiers in Galicia), particularly aimed at the soldier on the Galician front, I will argue that the authors of the propaganda pieces depicted Galicia foremost to be an ex-Ottoman land, conquered by courageous ancestors. Russians were enemies from that time on, whereas the local population viewed the Ottomans favorably. A general and vague Turkish nationalist message is also apparent in the booklet, whereas religion and the German factor make very rare appearances. As a counterpoint to that state-sponsored narrative, I will use the memoirs of soldiers who fought on the Galician front. The soldiers’ own articulation of their war experiences reflects to a certain extent that propaganda narrative: they were rephrasing the themes of valiant ancestors and Russian nemeses. Yet to their understanding it was very clear that they were aiding the Austro-Hungarian and German forces. In addition, the Galician front was more agreeable for the Ottoman soldiers in terms of food, clothing and shelter compared to other Ottoman fronts. By looking at the propaganda discourse in conjuncture with the accounts of soldiers, I aim to piece together a part of the complex Ottoman war experience.

In this paper, I investigate how interviewers (IR) employ repeats of their interviewees’ (IEs’) prior turns to further their (IEs’) agenda and stance in Arabic broadcast news interviews. This study illustrates the use of questioning repeats as a conversational strategy for constructing alignments (and disalignments) in a specific socio-cultural context of political interviewing, and shows how such alignments are interactionally achieved phenomena – they are jointly oriented to by the participants involved. The data come from Aljazeera’s al-itijaah al-mu’akis (‘The Opposite Direction’, hereafter). Twenty fifty minute episodes were studied and transcribed following Conversation Analysis as my analytic method. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views, who are pitted against each other in a heated discussion as they represent and defend their own political and institutional affiliation. This paper argues that the IR uses a specific questioning practice with those interviewees (IEs) with whom he agrees, allowing them to further their agenda against the other’s. I call them interviewees in the favorable position (IEFs, hereafter). This paper will particularly focus on how the IR’s actions of agenda furthering is achieved by repeating his IEFs’ previous turns in a question format which allows IEFs an opportunity to confirm and highlight a previous turn for the overhearing audience. The import of this study is that, among other things, it brings into question the neutrality and impartiality claims of the IR of ‘The Opposite Direction’ and one of the most well-known IRs on Aljazeera. Unlike its Western counterpart, research on Arabic question-response in both institutional and everyday talk is still lacking, at the time of writing this paper. Therefore, the paper and the implication of its findings make a much needed contribution to the Arabic Conversation Analytic literature on political discourse and more specifically on broadcast news interviews. The findings in this paper have implications that are important for cross-cultural mediated communication, Conversation Analysis, Arabic linguistics, and Arabic media studies.