Current literature on Islamic reform in the 19th and 20th century emphasizes intellectual history, often focusing on how Muslim writers responded to the pervasive and violent phenomenon of European colonialism and to the influence of ideas originating in Europe. This article shows how Islamic reform followed other dynamics at a major institution, the Zaytuna Mosque-University, the center of Muslim higher education in Tunisia and eastern Algeria. Under the French protectorate in Tunisia (1881-1956), the residences for Zaytuna students in the medina of Tunis became crucial sites for the reform movement. These overcrowded buildings sheltering thousands of students were a basic infrastructure requiring urgent repairs as well as a hub for student activism. The student housing example reveals Islamic reform to be a praxis-oriented phenomenon reliant on petitions and protest actions, rather than a matter of Islamic law, theology, or social and political thought to be studied by historians using printed magazines, books, or fatwas-—the main materials in existing scholarship on Islamic reform in the modern period. During the colonial period, student housing became an intra-Zaytuna matter dividing the broad reformist constituency into two camps: students and faculty, some of whom were also high-level administrators at the Zaytuna. When the French withdrew from the Zaytuna housing sector in the interwar years, student activists trying to reform housing continued to encounter draconian management tactics from their own teachers who policed the student residences and used evictions to break strikes. It insufficient, I argue, to position "conservatives" against "reformists." The Zaytuna housing case shows the internal fault lines within the second category in relation to age, class, rank, and regional background.

At the center of the paper is the puzzle of why Egypt appears to have contributed little to the global corpus of political thought. Although the country witnessed two large-scale revolutions in 1882 and 1919, there are no historical accounts of the ideas that they generated or the thought that fuelled them. Colonial observers frequently suggested that Egyptians were ‘political ciphers’ and pointed to the absence of abstract political theories as evidence for that assertion—a claim that has since been accepted by many scholars. Against those persistent claims, then, the paper asserts that what appeared as a national deficit of ideas was instead the product of some foundational assumptions on the part of the intellectual historian. These include: a dependence on a Eurocentric concept of ‘politics’, which itself emerged in the nineteenth-century; a reliance on colonial distinctions between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’; and more crucially, between political thought and political practice, with the attendant presumption that the former precedes the latter. Indeed the very dichotomy between ‘thought’ and ‘action’ upon which much intellectual history of the region has relied—and the notion that the former must be prior to the latter—is not merely a simplification or a misrepresentation of a complex social reality. Instead as I show, it itself played a critical role in justifying imperial domination and plays now an active role in obscuring the significance and contribution of anticolonial political actors. I show that in Egypt, political ideas were to be predominantly found not in the abstract speculation of political theorists, but in the everyday praxis of politicians: op-eds, speeches, court testimonials, and quotidian reflections in diaries. Drawing on these overlooked sources, the paper provides prompts for writing the history of political ideas for a place that, it is said, failed to produce any.

It was behind closed doors and with little fanfare that, in the summer of 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority handed sovereign authority to the recently elected Iraqi Interim Government. This muted act of colonial magnanimity belied the profound challenge that the occupation authority left to their inheritors. The new, ostensibly liberated Iraqi state inherited a broken and scattered security apparatus, a burgeoning and increasingly violent insurgency, and a completely eviscerated social security system. This paper tells the story of how Iraqi politicians and bureaucrats within the nascent state’s civil service ministries (Veterans Affairs, Ministry of Human Rights, The Martyrdom Foundation, Political Prisoner Foundation etc.) struggled with these realities, and amongst themselves, to build a new, post-Ba’athist Iraqi state out of the detritus of the ancien regime. The paper follows how these ministries enacted an intersecting set of governance practices, legal frameworks, each couched in impassioned narratives of nationhood rooted to varying degrees in political Islam, free-market economics, crony-capitalism, ideals of global governance, and humanitarianism. Pulling on textual and visual media produced by Iraqi ministries, legal developments, and internal debates that took place from 2004-2010 amongst civil service bureaucrats and the institutions that housed them, this paper suggests that nationalist, religious, and social service politics being enacted in Iraq at this time are not simply an effect of its occupation and the presence of proxies, but a crucible in which political theories were being reorganized and reimagined. Little attention has been paid in the scholarship to the ways in which different sectors of Iraqi society appealed to the Iraqi state in the post 2003-invasion years, and which strategies of governance, narratives of political life, and visions of society were presented to Iraqis by its political class to bolster and justify their rule. This elision has produced an image of Iraq’s political life, and the political theories and practices that animated it, as wholly or in large part dominated and enacted by external political, social, or (neo-)imperial meddling. This framing does little to help us understand the nature of domestic Iraqi politics, nor how notions of sovereignty, the nation, state, and human rights were variously put to work and reformulated in novel ways by Iraqis, and in turn what Iraqi politics can tell us about contemporary theories of state and governance.

In 1877 the Italian-Egyptian playwright, journalist, and public intellectual Yaʿqub Sanuʿ began publishing a satirical newspaper called Abu Naddara Zarqa (The Man with the Blue Glasses). It was banned within the year and its author exiled to France, but for the next thirty years, the journal was smuggled into Egypt amongst less incendiary materials and widely distributed. Sanuʿ was a vocal anti-colonial activist, and the slogans, cartoons, and polemics he published have been identified as partially responsible for the rise of revolutionary and proto-nationalist Egyptian sentiment and even the 1879 ʿUrabi Revolution itself. Yet Abu Naddara was hardly a straightforward mouthpiece for propaganda, or indeed for anything. Profoundly polyglot, its fictional “dialogues” between real and symbolic political figures were expressed in idioms from Hebrew to French to Egyptian colloquial. These satirical “dialogues,” I argue, make a mockery of the theory-praxis distinction that has thus far undergirded understandings of Arabic political activism in the period. Through close readings of a selection of the early dialogues, I suggest that it is here – in a playful linguistic praxis that models the possibilities and limits of transnational, translingual communication – that Abu Naddara’s most interesting theoretical contributions lie. The dialogue draws, among other things, on the colloquial and European-style plays Sanuʿ had also popularized earlier in the century, as well as the tradition of dialectical reasoning found in Arabic kalam and adab. Itself a cultural hybrid, it functions as a kind of laboratory for testing and performing the outcomes of imagined conversation between different figures, groups, and rhetorical traditions. Through acute observations of the period’s language wars, I find, it destroys any nostalgic notion of multilingual cosmopolitanism, turning the inequities structuring linguistic and political exchange in the colonial period to devastating or comic effect. I ask whether it also holds out the tantalizing possibility of a new ethics of the face-to-face, as the foundation for a future political community.