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This thesis examines the cultural and religious contexts behind the production of the Girona Apocalypse [Museu de la Catedral de Girona, Num. Inv. 7(11)], a tenth-century copy of Beatus of Liébana’s eighth-century Commentary on the Apocalypse. It delves into the ways in which medieval society, guided by the gendered perceptions of the Latin Church, played a pivotal role in categorizing women within a binary framework: either as pure or immoral. The focus is on the portrayal of femininity in the Apocalypse of St. John, where the contrasting figures of the Great Harlot and the Woman Clothed with the Sun are juxtaposed, and how this imagery and symbolism are transformed into feminine archetypes in the Girona manuscript, resulting in a pictorial conflict and shedding light on the nuanced dynamics of gender in medieval Iberia. The Girona Apocalypse was created at the dual monastery at San Salvador de Tábara, and apparently was illuminated by a woman, Ende. Her contribution provides a subtle layer to the understanding of womanhood in medieval Iberia, highlighting the importance of the role she played in a society where women received limited validation and recognition. The Girona Beatus not only offers a unique perspective on the conception of womanhood in the Middle Ages, but also provides valuable insights into how a woman artisan painter navigated her identity within the constraints of a malecentric Christian narrative.

This dissertation explores the role of democracy promotion in US foreign intervention with a particular focus on the weaponization of media and civil society by two important US democracy promotion institutions, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID). Focusing on these two institutions and building on scholarship that takes a critical Gramscian Marxist perspective on US democracy promotion, this study brings media imperialism and deep political scholarship into the conversation. Delimiting the study to focus on US activities, I trace historical patterns of intellectual warfare and exceptional states of violence and lawlessness pursued by the US government in case studies of foreign intervention in which democracy promotion has played an important part since 1983. I survey the evolution of elite US Cold War conceptions of managed democracy as well as transformations of covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) media and civil society operations into institutionalized, pseudo-overt US democracy promotion that became a foundational pretext and method for US interventionism post-Cold War.Case studies include the Contra War in 1980s Nicaragua, Operation Cyclone in 1980s Afghanistan, the 2000 overthrow of Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, the 2002 military coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the 2004 coup against Haitian president Bertrand Aristide, and the 2014 Euromaidan Coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. I dedicate the penultimate chapter to US-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011, demonstrating how USAID provided instrumental monetary, media, and civil society support to primarily sectarian, theocratic, Salafi rebels against the Ba’athist government. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the NED and USAID represent important engines of intellectual warfare in US foreign intervention, mobilizing communications and organizational resources to reinforce elite hegemonic narratives and facilitate neoliberal and neoconservative US foreign policy across the globe.

This dissertation focuses on the mystical monist Sufi philosophy known as the “Unity of Being”(waḥdat al-wujūd) in the early modern Ottoman and Mughal Empires. Following the death of its supposed founder, Ibn al-’Arabī (d. 1240 c.e.), this philosophy flourished and spread to all corners of the Islamicate world while gaining followers and critics alike. Especially in the 17th century, debates surrounding this system of thought can tell us much about Sufism as well as the history of empire, changing religious demographics, and contests over political and religious authority. Proponents and detractors of this philosophy have been quick to point out that the boundaries between religions become complicated by the universalizing claims of this worldview. Adherents to the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd like Şeyh Bedreddin (d.1421 c.e.) led Muslims and Christians alike in a revolution, the Mughal prince Dārā Shikūh (d. 1659 c.e.) used this philosophy to justify his pluralistic religious project, and ‘Abd al-Ghanī Nābulusī (d.1731 c.e.) rigorously defended this ideology against a puritanical faction known as the Ḳāḍīzādelis while maintaining cordial relations with non-Muslims. This study not only looks at the anti-Sufi opponents of this philosophy but also examines Aḥmad Sirhindī ’s (d. 1624 c.e.) rejection of waḥdat al-wujūd and challenges the primacy of his intervention in the Naqshbandi Sufi order. By exploring case studies where mystical monism was debated, it becomes apparent that anxieties over the demarcation between Islam and non-Muslim religions are at the crux of what makes this philosophy so controversial, and that its defenders attempt to navigate a course between the particulars of Islam and the universalizing worldview of mystical monism.

Following the large-scale migration of Syrian refugees to Europe in 2015, German music organizations and professional Syrian refugee musicians established intercultural music activities throughout the country. Ethnographic inquiry reveals that these activities develop under the pressure of a variety of social and political forces. Systemic racial inequities in Western Europe have shaped supranational and national intercultural policies, as well as the German public, to visually and sonically perceive Syrian refugees as non-European Others. Professional musicians Aeham Ahmad and the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra perform musics that defy generic classifications that categorize people by race or place of origin. Yet German media consistently ties these musicians’ performances to their refugee status and relation to the “Orient.” Within this network of intercultural activities, three amateur ensembles in Hamburg differ in choosing to be open to all refugees regardless of background, or exclude refugees based on Western perceptions of musical skill. This dissertation finds that integration through intercultural music-making in northern Germany is a process that Germans sometimes use to distinguish themselves from racialized refugees. Even so, Syrian professional musicians and amateur ensembles resist essentialized identities and model more equitable and compassionate ways to welcome refugees through intercultural music performance.

This dissertation investigates both Muslim women as well as online media users’ thoughts and opinions toward the ongoing conversational debate on hijab bans. Specifically, the aim behind this study is two-fold: It highlights explicitly raising Muslim women’s original voices by hearing their own experiencing concerning the recent hijab bans and restrictions. In addition, with the guide of framing approach, this study also centers on gauging YouTube users’ sentiments and opinions expressed in comments on news videos about hijab bans—shared by mainstream media outlets in such an uninhabited environment (YouTube). The methodological basis of this dissertation centered on carrying out mixed methods convergent parallel design by combining the results of both a thematic textual analysis of interview data and social media sentiment analysis of social media data. Combining the results of two diverse types of methods in one study helps provide fresh-holistic insights into the phenomenon and enhances the study’s overall depth and breadth. In stage one, using semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 Hijabi Muslim women, I documented several meaningful statements and stories shared by Muslim women wearing the hijab, and the following themes were emerged: Belief, Freedom of Choice, Spirituality, Happiness, and Education. In stage two, a total of 8775 comments posted by online users as they interacted with mainstream media outlets’ news reporting on Hijab bans and restrictions were collected, cleaned, and analyzed using several analytical techniques. The sentiment analysis of user comments shared on the selected ten YouTube news videos revealed that the total sentiment score expressed in the YouTube comment corpus regarding news about hijab restrictions was more negative than positive. Further, the results of both stages were integrated and interpreted in the discussion chapter.

This study explores the emergence of the standard language known today as Western Armenian. In particular, it examines the intellectual labor that led to the acceptance of this language as the dominant written medium among Ottoman Armenians by 1915. Drawing on insights from the fields of historical sociolinguistics, global intellectual history and nationalism studies as well as untapped Armenian-language primary sources, I uncover the fundamental role that beliefs about purity played in the formation of the standard language. While this focus on purity remained a constant among the intelligentsia throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I show how ideas about what was considered “pure” were shaped and reshaped by various actors and interactions with ideas that originated far beyond the Ottoman Empire. This interaction came in the form of four global intellectual movements—humanism, cultural nationalism, comparative philology and folkloristics—which created new and conflicting attitudes about how Armenian ought to be used. I argue that the impact of these global movements on the language was all the more enduring, because they coincided with a decades-long process of vernacularization and standardization. In this way, my project firmly situates Ottoman Armenians within the global circulation of ideas and shows how these movements each left a distinct imprint on the standard language. I also highlight how these movements fundamentally shaped norms about “proper” Western Armenian usage that continue to predominate in post-Ottoman Armenian diaspora communities around the world today. This study turns away from conventional philological treatments of Armenian language history and focuses instead on the social aspects of language use. In this way, it takes a socio-historical approach to the study of language, examines the people and ideologies that shaped its use and advocates for the broader application of historical sociolinguistic methods to the study of Armenian and other languages in the Ottoman Empire. Written for four distinct readerships, this study addresses topics of relevance to (1) historical sociolinguists interested in macro-sociolinguistic processes, such as purism and vernacularization; (2) social and intellectual historians of the Ottoman Empire, particularly those interested in the reception of global movements within the Empire; (3) researchers in Armenian studies; and (4) speakers and learners of Western Armenian outside academia who seek to better understand the history of the language.

Scholars have long considered how Ottoman Jews have been racialized as ethnographic subjects, but they have barely begun to examine their subjectivities and works as ethnographers themselves. Nor have they incorporated Jews’ contributions to the Ottoman project of ethnography within Ottoman and Middle East Studies. This research explores how Ottoman Sephardic travelers and teachers, rabbis and writers produced, circulated, and marshaled ethnographic and racial knowledge in service of different visions of reform. By reading ethnographic texts, it uncovers how Ottoman Sephardic Jews—who themselves could be doubly racialized as both Jews and as those deemed “Orientals”—adopted and adapted racializing discourses and how they represented themselves and Others. Drawing on Ladino, Hebrew, French, and Ottoman Turkish texts—including travelogues and memoirs, rabbinic responsa and photography, literature and the popular press—it attends to the racialized, gendered, and classed politics of cultural representation that emerge in Ottoman Sephardic ethnography.This study begins by reading anthropological notions of race and evolution that appeared in the Ottoman Sephardic press to understand what race meant to Ottoman Sephardic Jews (chapter 1). Sephardic writers translated these ideas about race, civilization, and progress into practices of racialization, enacted within the Ottoman provinces in relation to other imperial subjects, including other Jews (chapter 2). Travel accounts from Ottoman Palestine reveal how Sephardic travelers circulated newly imagined geographies of race in response to global capitalism. Yet Sephardic reformers also applied ethnographic and racial ideas within their own communities in the urban centers of the empire, which surfaces in autoethnographic works on superstition (chapter 3). Such racializing logics and discourses spread in part through the Franco-Jewish Alliance Isra�lite Universelle, which I reframe through the analytic of race (chapter 4). Finally, this study traces the afterlives of Ottoman Sephardic ethnography as it carried into the twentieth century and the global Sephardic diaspora after the collapse of the Ottoman empire (conclusion). This demonstrates how racial discourses were not just social constructs, but created political realities with material consequences for peoples’ lives long after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Saracens served as stock villains in many of the romances of the Middle Ages and informed representations of Ottoman alterity on the early modern stage. As the contrarians of the East v. West binary, Saracens are often viewed as a monolithic entity. The present study does not seek to abolish the binary but instead to nuance it. Each chapter analyzes a different type of Saracen or role that Saracens played in medieval and early modern English literature. In doing so, the study is more concerned with the function of anti-Saracenic representations than with their historical or anthropological inaccuracies.

From the Ottoman and French colonial periods, through independence, actors supporting and opposing Tunisian blasphemy prosecutions have consistently argued that blasphemy against Islam “hurts Muslims’ feelings.” These hurt feelings are framed then as dangerous because they threaten public order. This dissertation focuses on three sets of little-studied blasphemy cases in what is now modern-day Tunisia (1857, 1904, post-2011/Arab Spring), all of which occurred during transitional moments where control of the state seemed up for grabs. The dissertation begins in 1857 Ottoman Tunis, with the prosecution of a Tunisian Jewish cart-pusher for blasphemy; it then moves to 1904 Tunis under the control of French colonial authorities, and the prosecution of a young, brash Muslim reformist. In the post-Arab-Spring moment, the dissertation examines the prosecution of seven Tunisian citizens for blasphemy allegedly committed via various art forms (2011-2013); and the dissertation closes in a small coastal courthouse, with the prosecution of young Tunisian men for sabb al-jalāla, or insulting the majesty of God (2019-2022). This project leaves room for anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s contention – that there is something “particular” in Muslims’ embodied relationship with their religion that makes them particularly vulnerable to blasphemy – while bringing in blasphemous acts’ political and historical underpinnings (which Judith Butler has criticized Mahmood for neglecting). It argues that the repeating affective framing of blasphemy – as a crime that wounds Muslims’ feelings – enables actors, who lack religious authority or training, to intervene in the name of preventing social disorder. By naturalizing a public order that they are in fact bringing into being, these actors then claim to rightly sit at the helm of the state whose people (and feelings) they are allegedly protecting. This recourse to the affective sidelines – or reconstitutes – the political, allowing plaintiffs to disavow the political work these prosecutions do for them, while evacuating the alternate visions of the Tunisian public sphere contained within said blasphemous acts. It also points to a prevailing vision of the caretaker State as responsible for protecting its citizens from some (though not all) bad feelings, by the curbing of others’ personal freedoms. In this sense, then, blasphemy prosecutions allow the state to reassert itself as properly “state-like,” particularly during transitional moments in which its “stateness” has been put into question. Finally, this project lays the groundwork for a new comparative project on hurtful speech more broadly, as hate speech legislation has emerged over the past thirty years as blasphemy laws in Europe have declined in use or been repealed. Like blasphemy prosecutions, hate speech prosecutions draw upon affective articulations of the crime and its consequences.

The Middle East has historically been a region of the world where peace has been hard to achieve. Nations and populations, such as Israel, Syria, and Palestinians, have been at odds since the end of the Second World War. The United States showed great interest in the Middle East following the Second World War, making them an important part of the historical narrative there as well.This thesis looks primarily at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically through the career of Arlen Specter, a former United States Senator from Pennsylvania who served from 1981 to 2011. Facilitated mainly by primary source material from Senator Specter’s career, this thesis illuminates the work of an often-forgotten politician who was very active in Middle Eastern politics. Specter saw Syria as an integral part of any prospect of peace between Israel and Palestine, and this thesis analyzes his personal efforts to develop relations with Syrian and Palestinian leaders in the hopes of achieving peace between Israel and Palestine, as well as between Israel and Syria. Overall, Specter’s perspectives and actions work together to reveal a unique and nuanced approach to the Middle East that saw the importance of Syria, a nation that has been ostracized from the United States since 1979, in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.The project begins with a historical narrative of Israel, Palestine, and Syria. Specter then becomes the focus, and his actions and work in and pertaining to the Middle East are examined, revealing Specter’s uniqueness.

This thesis examines the effects of the colonial period on state administration in rural areas in southern Morocco. It argues that this period saw the emergence of a new type of administration resulting from the interaction between French administrators, Moroccan officials and the rural population. The colonial state tried to superpose a colonial administrative structure upon the preexisting Moroccan state apparatus: the Makhzan. In theory, this approach was to gradually introduce the French administrative culture and norms into the country at minimal costs. In practice however, the dual French-Moroccan administration created a new situation that did not comply to either French norms or Moroccan history. In fact, the protracted process of military and administrative penetration upended the prevailing political structures in southern Morocco. Before the colonization, the region’s fragmented political system was based on a constant renegotiation of the power equilibrium between governors and governed. Intermediary corps such as the tribe balanced or complemented the power of the state as well as that of local potentates. By contrast, the colonial state introduced a vertical approach to power through the technical improvements it brought to local administration. However, the paucity of colonial resources prevented a fully bureaucratic and hierarchical administration from emerging. In that context, the power equilibrium logic remained a key characteristic of Moroccan administration. Nonetheless, in the new vertical system, this equilibrium tilted towards the state and the notables associated with it at the expense of individuals and intermediary corps such as the tribe.

Yemen’s total coffee production has remained relatively stable over more than four centuries—1690 to present— and averages about 10,000 metric tonnes per year, plus or minus about 5,000 metric tonnes. The uncertainty in total output—5,000 to 15,000 metric tonnes—is uncertainty not just in the historical record, but uncertainty that exists even today. In 2019, the latest year in which the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and International Coffee Organization (ICO) publish coffee output totals for Yemen, the estimates differ nearly fourfold. For the twentieth and twenty-first century I interrogate FAO and ICO coffee production data and find that production totals are deeply imprecise over the last one-hundred years but do seem within the range given. This contrasts with claims of Yemen’s declining production and faltering industry, often noted in international development reports and casual Yemen coffee news articles. For the historic record—eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—I refine definitions of pre-colonial coffee trading terms such as bahar, bale, farda and himl, and I apply these more precise definitions to historic records. I find production totals of about 10,000 metric tonnes in both centuries.

Triangulating the material and cultural forces that connected the French Revolution, the French occupation of Egypt (1798-1801), and the Ottoman Empire’s New Order reforms (1792-1807) during the global Age of Revolutions (1760s-1820s), this dissertation examines portraiture’s varied and complex roles in the production of modern French and Ottoman subjectivities. As a genre of representation common to both early modern European and Ottoman pictorial traditions, portraiture emerges at this historical juncture as a vital mechanism for articulating new political subjectivities coordinated between French and Ottoman worlds. The pressures exerted on representation by the transcultural dialectics of social upheaval and empire-building that defined the global Age of Revolutions compelled portraiture across Cairo, Paris, and Istanbul to undergo radical adaptations of materials, meanings, and modalities to accommodate the demands of modern depiction. This dissertation argues that French and Ottoman portraits in this period functioned as border regimes, systems essential to calibrating, classifying, and demarcating difference and affiliation. Oriented precisely against the understanding of these artworks as “hybridized” or “cross-cultural,” which sees in them the alloy of essentially distinct cultures, the border regime takes seriously portraiture’s unique capacities to produce and inscribe cultural contours, political aspirations, and social identities across inherited borders. Most importantly, the border regime acknowledges that any transgression of established cultural, political, or social barriers necessarily entails the erection of new ones. This dissertation demonstrates that the ostensibly cosmopolitan incorporations of “others” in portraiture’s production of new “selves” in French and Ottoman portraiture primarily served the inscription of new modes of hierarchical differentiation, transimperial competition, and chauvinist ideologies.The account begins in French-occupied Cairo (1798-1801) with an examination of the ways French artists in the colony adapted subgenres of Revolutionary portraiture to represent the French and Ottoman-Egyptian subjects of the new Republican colony. The chapter focuses on a collection of painted and drawn portraits by the academic painter and draftsman André Dutertre. Dutertre came to Egypt as part of a large corps of French scientists, engineers, and artists who assisted the Revolutionary army in building France’s first sister republic in the Ottoman world. The French regime deployed portraiture alongside other colonial technologies, especially Orientalist philology, to interpellate Ottoman Egyptians and their Republican colonizers into new political and cultural affiliations serviceable to the ideology of the French colonial regime. This chapter also examines the local political and social terms on which colonized Egyptians engaged with Dutertre’s portraiture. Close analysis of Dutertre’s portraits and their Arabic inscriptions reveals that Egyptians sat for French artists to further indigenous political and social agendas. By centering the Ottoman conditions of possibility for French portraiture in Egypt, this chapter demonstrates that Dutertre’s portraits belong as much to the history of Ottoman political modernity as they do to the history of post-Revolutionary French colonialism.Following the path of Ottoman-Egyptian refugees who immigrated to France after the collapse of the occupation in 1801, the account moves to Paris for a close analysis of Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Katchef Dahouth (1804). Girodet’s large-scale and publicly-exhibited oil portrait depicts an Ottoman-Egyptian Mamluk refugee recently retired from Napoleon’s corps of “Mamelouk” soldiers. This chapter provides an identification of Girodet’s sitter for the first time and outlines his biography in order to reconstitute the historical circumstances under which Ottoman refugees posed for French artists in the reactionary social environment of Napoleonic France. Girodet’s portrait avails itself of the conceptual and pictorial freedoms offered by portraiture during the Revolutionary period in order to transform the image of an individual Ottoman subject into a complex meditation on the Revolutionary meaning of the Egyptian occupation in the shadow of its collapse. In the process, the chapter offers a new genealogy of French Orientalist painting that not only foregrounds portraiture’s unique contributions, but illustrates Orientalism’s emergence out of discrete principles of post-Revolutionary academic painting. In examining the contributions of both artist and sitter to the portrait’s final form, the chapter recuperates the role of Ottoman refugees in the elaboration of Orientalist painting in early nineteenth-century France. The account concludes in Istanbul, where in the same year that Girodet exhibited Dahouth in Paris, the Ottoman-Greek painter Kostantin Kapıdağlı completed his elaborate oil portrait of Sultan Selim III, Portrait of Selim III in His Chamber (AH1218/1803-1804). Heavily indebted to ancien régime ambassadorial portraits produced in eighteenth-century Istanbul, Kapıdağlı’s portrait creatively combines the techniques, compositional principles, and aesthetic values of European and Ottoman portraiture to produce a new cosmopolitan image of sultanic authority. The terms for Kapıdağlı’s innovative experiments with sultanic portraiture were dictated directly by the dynamics of a fluctuating Ottoman social landscape under the New Order. This chapter highlights the Islamic justifications for and debates surrounding Selim’s New Order reforms, which provoked Ottoman reformers and the clerical establishment (ulema) into stormy debates about the permissibility of adopting technologies from Europe (whether political, scientific, or artistic). As relations with France normalized after the French evacuated Egypt, Kapıdağlı’s portrait served to reinvigorate the legitimacy of Selim’s New Order reforms against mounting threats of popular unrest in the lead up to the May 1807 revolution. Selim tapped his official portraitist Kapıdağlı to capture this new ideal of Muslim rulership, which articulated Ottoman imperial superiority through explicit adaptation and recontextualization of European artistic elements.

This dissertation examines the importance of schools to the national project, the increasing popularity and significance of girls’ education in the interwar period to that project, and the ways in which girls and women defined and acted out their citizenship as students, teachers, administrators, and alumnae, in the context of colonial occupation and nation-building in the post-Ottoman Middle East. It uses colonial, state, institutional, and school archives, press accounts, memoirs, and interviews with alumnae related to six girls’ schools with secondary programs that operated before, during, and after the French Mandate in Lebanon: the three girls’ schools of the American Mission, the Maqasid’s Kulliyat al-banat, the Greek Orthodox Zahrat al-ihsan, and the secular nationalist Ahliah.In its engagement with these sources, and with scholarship of the Mandate period in the Middle East and Lebanon, sociological conceptions and definitions of citizenship, postcolonial theory, and theoretical frameworks concerning gender, nationalism, and space, this dissertation argues that girls’ education and educational institutions served a discursive and material function in defining girls’ and women’s citizenship in interwar and early independence Lebanon. The vision of women’s citizenship articulated discursively in curricula and the press and materially in girls’ schools was a type of social citizenship, one that allowed girls and women to reconcile their multiple loyalties and drew on their experiences during the Mandate.School curricula called for girls’ education for the creation of modern wives and mothers for the nation’s men and boys, linking educated womanhood and the modern home with national uplift. The Beirut-based women’s press simultaneously bolstered and challenged such a conception through discussions of educated women’s role in political life and the home. Materially, schools served as sites through which colonial, national, and local claims were made. They also provided a space in which students, teachers, and administrators articulated their own visions—of the school, the nation, and their citizenship. When looking at Mandate Lebanon from the perspective of girls and women, one encounters a nonsectarian vision for Lebanon that looks to what Lebanon can be rather than what it is or was.

This dissertation offers a critical and in-depth analysis of forced displacement as a means of nation-state building and its consequences by concentrating on the exchange of the Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia and Thrace for the Muslims from Greece in the early 1920s. The focus is on the refugee experience in the aftermath of the exchange, which fundamentally challenges the current perception of this seminal event and its adoption as a means to resolve conflicts. Since the idea of exchanging populations came to the negotiating table in Lausanne, this method was presented as a legitimate and indispensable, albeit challenging and unpleasant, way of avoiding existing and future ethnic conflicts due to the presence of different ethnicities within the borders of a nation-state. Being the first compulsory population exchange carried out under the auspices of the League of Nations, the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange quickly became the locus classicus for such practices. It was praised for its successful consequences and presented as proof of the League of Nations’ functionality and the relevant nation-states’ state capacity.After the introductory chapter on the history of exchanging populations, Chapter 2 concentrates on the historiography of the population exchange and how historiography played a notable role in presenting exchanging populations as a legitimate method of peace-making with the scholarship’s intrinsic bias toward conflict resolution. The chapter reviews a bulk of intellectual production and problematizes the discipline of history itself. Chapter 3 is about the Turkish/Muslim refugees, who, in the existing literature, were considered to be displaced not only from their ancestral homelands but also from agency, and shows that they established their organizations to pursue their claims and collectively raised their voices. Chapter 4, “The Greek/Orthodox Christian Case,” analyzes the political strategies that the Greek refugees developed in order 1) to defend their rights, 2) to solve their pressing problems, and 3) to respond to the anti-refugee prejudices of the native population. This chapter shows how their activities reorganized the political sphere in Greece with a careful analysis of the hitherto neglected refugee publications and press. Chapter 5 deals with the refugee sub-communities/groups even more marginalized: the Grecophone Cretans, including Afro-Cretans and refugees suffering from leprosy; the Turcophone Greeks in Greece; and the Greek community of Constantinople, who were exempted from the population exchange and became a minority. In the concluding chapter, the findings of this dissertation are revisited, and based on these findings, how the current meanings of refugeehood in Greece and Turkey are negotiated, reformulated, and reproduced is discussed.

This research analyzes progressive revolutionary thought and politics in Turkey in relation to comparable movements in Egypt and Iran from 1930 to 1960. In this context, progressive intellectualism is a socially and nationally oriented paradigm that strives for a secular and egalitarian democracy, and this study examines how these subjects have been at the vanguard of revolutionism in these countries, albeit in complex and sometimes highly problematic ways. My research is located at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory, and Middle Eastern studies. It further engages in studies of modernization, gender and sexuality, social movements, ethnicity and race, development, and securitization. Extant studies of Turkey’s political streams have made important contributions to Turkish intellectual history. However, most exhibit critical flaws: they employ a rise and fall paradigm, focus on narrow interpretations of ideologies, analyze male intellectuals exclusively, and remain within national borders. In contrast, this study tracks changes and continuities in Turkey’s revolutionary ideologies, strategies, and narratives in relation to its regional context to understand the influence of regional political-economic structures and institutions on various ideological formations. It takes progressive revolutionary political expressions as a holistic yet also heterogenous tradition of political thought. It analyzes domestic and regional interpretations of two global ideologies that had dominantly represented revolutionism (namely national-liberation and socialism) through a sexually, geographically, and generationally diverse group of intellectuals. This study draws from Antonio Gramsci’s theories on consensual hegemony, organic crises, intellectuals, and Caesarism; Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on the state and social status distinctions; and Şerif Mardin’s Center-Periphery paradigm. Political thought and experiences of Middle Eastern progressives pose challenges for these theoretical paradigms for their overreliance on static models on institutions, as in the case of Gramsci, and social blocs, as in the cases of Bourdieu and Mardin. The key research question asks: how did interactions and confrontations between revolutionary intellectuals and state actors influence the trajectories of Turkish republican revolution and other nationalist revolutions in the Middle East? Accordingly, my research is built around a two-pillar mixed methods approach. The first is qualitative, analyzing ten Turkish intellectuals. This includes three women and seven men. Five describe themselves as national-liberation revolutionaries, while the other five describe themselves as socialist revolutionaries. The second methodological feature is comparative and explores Iranian and Egyptian counterparts. The research is based on the varied nature of their intellectual production, which includes scholarly works, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, journal and newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, court defenses, and literary works such as novels, short stories, poems, and plays. This dissertation argues that state elites’ securitization of progressivism since the 1930s was linked to the undoing of Turkish republican project in the 1950s as this process saw the incorporation of fascist and Islamist intellectuals and movements into the state apparatus. Moreover, regardless of political distinctions within the revolutionary camp, which in Turkey had generally been between Kemalist national-liberation and Leninist socialism, the fates of all progressive streams remained interdependent. When one tradition failed, it discredited the other. The research further shows how hegemonic processes in the twentieth-century Middle East had functioned in three interrelated areas: 1) hegemony as regime legitimacy; 2) hegemony as controlling the codes of dominant political culture; and 3) hegemony as determining the limits of legitimate politics, in other words, establishing the boundaries between “politics as usual” and “politics of securitization.”

For centuries the institutions of slavery and social dependency constituted an integral element of the strikingly diverse social landscape of the Caucasus region. Known as kul in Dagestan, kusag in Ossetia, or akhashala in Abkhazia, enslaved people could be found in virtually all regions of the Caucasus mountains. Personal status of the enslaved people was determined by eclectic oral traditions of indigenous customary law, which generally recognized them as chattel. The prevalence of slavery in the region, in turn, encouraged a flourishing transnational slave trade whose extensive networks straddled much of Eurasia. The status of the Caucasus as the single most important supplier of enslaved people in the Black Sea basin was solidified in 1783 when Russian Empire abrogated the Crimean Khanate and formally annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Russia’s annexation of the Georgian kingdom Kartli-Kakheti in 1801 marked a pivotal milestone in the gradual expansion of Russian imperial interest into the Caucasus, which portended great changes in the lives of the indigenous communities living in the region. However, rather than upending the social conventions and political institutions of the native population, the tsarist government, spurred by the tenuous nature of its rule in the region, practiced the politics of imperial co-optation. Thus, the imperial authorities often recognized the right of the indigenous ruling elites to continue managing the internal affairs within their traditional territorial domains and promised to protect the political status quo in return for loyalty to the Russian Tsar. The vacillating pendulum of hegemonic pretensions of the imperial state and the broad autonomy of its vassals translated into a policy of tacit toleration of the indigenous institutions of slavery and social dependency in the Caucasus.After decades of ambivalent policies and reluctant efforts to contain slavery and the slave trade in the Caucasus, in the 1860s the government undertook what was arguably the most transformative series of reforms aimed at delivering a decisive answer to the kholopskiĭ vopros (the slave question). However, abolition in the Caucasus arrived on the heels of the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto, which abolished the institution of serfdom in the heartland of the empire and, in turn, gave the government the green light to contemplate the legislative contours of emancipation in the Caucasus Viceroyalty. Although the abolition marked a major rupture in the history of the Caucasus, where slavery and the slave trade have had verifiable existence since the emergence of the first written records, freeing of the enslaved people in the region was eclipsed by the emancipation of Russian serfs and consequently received scant attention in the historiography of imperial Russia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.This dissertation examines the history of abolition in the Caucasus region under Russian imperial rule from 1801 to 1914. Two main arguments undergird the research and writing of this dissertation. First, using primary sources collected in the archives of Armenia, Georgia, and the Russian Federation, this project demonstrates that aside from rhetorical condemnation of slavery, abolitionism has never become a guiding principle or clearly articulated policy that accompanied Russian imperial expansion in the Caucasus. On the contrary, until the late 1860s, the imperial administration was reluctant to emancipate the enslaved people and largely turned a blind eye to the practices of slave labor in the region. Second, contrary to intuitive expectations, Russian blueprints for abolition of slavery in the Caucasus did not entail a unilateral, unconditional, and immediate emancipation. Fearful of losing the support of the slaveholding class, the imperial government invited the slaveholders to play an active role in drafting the abolitionist legislation that established the rules for emancipation in each region of the Caucasus mountains. The terms of abolition required the enslaved people to pay a redemption sum to obtain freedom. Until a redemption sum was paid in full, the formerly enslaved people entered what the imperial government termed as the temporary-obligated relations (vremenno-obiazannye otnosheniia) with their former owners and continued performing the same labor duties for a period that could last up to seven years. Various forms of anachronistic social dependency and custom-based labor obligations continued to survive in different parts of the region until the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917. In short, at every stage of the emancipation reforms in the Caucasus, the Russian imperial government prioritized the financial wellbeing of the landed nobility and slaveholders at the expense of the freedom and life chances of the enslaved and socially dependent people.Furthermore, Russian abolitionist reforms meant much more than simple liberation of the enslaved communities. The imperial government aimed to usher in the advent of modernity in the region. The chief hallmarks of this modernization effort included the introduction of rudimentary forms of capitalist production, commercial proprietorship, and promotion of a cash economy. Abolition was accompanied by a comprehensive land reform, which prioritized private landownership for the select social elites and installed communal land-tenure regime over agricultural land in the indigenous peasant communes. The reforms upended the traditional economies of subsistence, encouraged production of surplus value, and gradually linked local economies to the forces of supply and demand in the markets of the Russian Empire and the Middle East. Finally, abolition of slavery in the Caucasus also served as an important but frequently overlooked catalyst for the Muhajir (emigrant) movement, which witnessed a mass transimperial migration of Chechen, Dagestani, Ossetian, Circassian, Abkhaz, and other indigenous groups from the Caucasus into the Ottoman domains. Among the muhajirs were hundreds of slaveowners who decided to leave their native homeland because of the refusal to lose their enslaved and enserfed people. As a consequence, thousands of the enslaved and enserfed families and individuals were forced to follow their masters on a difficult journey to the foreign lands of the Ottoman Empire. These enslaved communities played an integral role in the founding of new villages and cities in Anatolia and the Levant.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an on-going battle over contested land and has been so since 1948. Claims to the land extend further back than 1948 and go beyond ethnic and racial rationales. At the forefront of the conflict, between Jews and Muslims, is the religious claim to the land which is vastly distinct from any racial or ethnic assertions of rights. While Palestinians and Israeli’s alike have continued to maintain their rights to the land, neither can sanction the presence of the other. For over millennia, Jerusalem has been ruled by enumerable groups from varying racial and religious backgrounds, all allotting a different claim or purpose for their rule. This paper will examine the periods in history when it was ruled by Muslims. As I will show, Jerusalem was not always fought over by opposing religious groups—at times, it was taken from Muslims by Muslims. These instances in history, reveal a diverse range of perceptions of the city and objectives behind governing it. I argue that the critiques made of Muslim claims to Jerusalem are often inaccurate interpretations of Qur’anic revelation on the city’s sanctity. This undermining of Muslim reverence of Jerusalem is easily debunked by their dedication to upholding the city’s foundations as well as honor of the other religious traditions in the region. This paper will unravel the methods used by Muslims in re-obtaining Jerusalem periodically and the ways they have aimed to maintain security and respect for Muslims as well as their Jewish and Christian counterparts.

This dissertation examines the Ottoman Empire's transregional role in global developments in the Mediterranean and Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emphasizes the importance of Ottoman Libya, its coastlines and hinterland, as a critical territory that connected Africa to the Middle East. Consulting primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese, it argues that Ottoman statesmen first targeted Tripolitania and Fezzan and then Cyrenaica to accomplish what I call Ottoman settlerism in North Africa. My dissertation contends that the goal of extending Ottoman sovereignty over these three North African provinces was the creation of the “Second Egypt”—a vast territory targeted to become a cultivated and profitable commercial center along the African hinterland and Mediterranean coast. These imperial efforts led to the creation of newly established settler colonies that laid the foundations for Ottoman expansionism, sovereignty, and security through refugees, migrants, and exiles. I demonstrate that Ottoman Libya was far from isolated, but was organically connected to the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Ottoman-Persian borderlands, the islands of the Mediterranean, and other regions of Africa. This investigation of Ottoman settlerism in the Second Egypt provides a crucial intervention in historiography of the Middle East and North Africa, and, more broadly, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trans-imperial rivalry over the Mediterranean Sea and Africa by focusing on the overlooked role of Ottoman imperial power in Africa.

Turkey’s Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti) dominated politics in the country from its election in 1950 until its removal by a military coup in 1960. During this decade, Turkey was integrated into the economic and security institutions of the American-led Cold War order. At the same time, domestic politics in Turkey became more contentious, polarizing society along partisan lines. I argue that this polarization was a result of Democrat Party leaders’ decision to restrict institutions like the press, opposition, and internal party dissent in order to buy themselves the time necessary to weather politically unfavorable economic conditions.This dissertation looks at the materials produced by members of the Democrat Party including speeches, newspaper columns, court records, and memoirs in order to understand how party elites justified their actions to the public, how they shifted over time from criticizing single-party rule to attempting re-establish it. I argue that two factors are essential in understanding this return to authoritarian methods of governance. The first concerns the particular individuals overseeing the process of democratization during the 1950s. The second is the Cold War order in which that democratization took place. Turkey’s transition to democracy (starting around 1945) was managed by the same people who had shaped its previous single-party system (1923-45)—this included the founders of the Democrat Party, all formerly influential figures in the single-party regime. This continuity ensured that, once in power, recourse to authoritarian solutions was never wholly unthinkable for DP leaders. Whether authoritarian methods were deemed necessary or practicable, however, depended on the changing political and economic conditions of the American-led Cold War order. As the decade progressed, this order became more authoritarian as regimes in countries ranging from France to Pakistan to Turkey took steps to constrain and de-democratize the political process.

Through the application of sociological theory to the historical study of Egypt under the British occupation (1882-1952), this dissertation argues that sport plays a significant role as a transformative element in society and politics, rather than merely a reflective one. It demonstrates that sport, and its concomitant discourse, acts as a channel to convey the ideas of intellectuals in a more accessible way. Acknowledging the role of sport restores the agency of a broader segment of the population to negotiate the meaning, and ultimate impact of, particular ideologies.The enduring nature of sporting institutions in post-revolutionary Egypt was built upon foundations laid during the preceding seven decades of British occupation. Through the use of national newspapers and magazines, supplemented by archival material from Britain and the International Olympic Committee, this case study demonstrates how sport can serve as an organizational force that is able to engender political transformations. This dissertation highlights the development of sport in Egypt from its origins as a tool used by the colonizers to reinforce their rule into a multifarious series of perspectives on what “Egyptian sport” could mean. These narratives slowly coalesced into a single ideal of a “sportsman” who transcended sectarian, ethnic, and class differences and represented his nation on the world stage at the Olympics and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. By the time of the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, sport had established itself as a potent channel for spreading ideology, and thus there was more continuity than discontinuity between British and post-revolutionary policy. It was not until the 1956 Suez Crisis that a shift occurred in which the Egyptian government abandoned its attempts to become one among the club of Europeans, instead seeking a leadership role in the Arab World.

This study identifies three tactics authoritarian leaders use to attempt to effectively coerce their citizens without losing power: 1) performance legitimacy, 2) nationalist legitimacy, and 3) institutional legitimacy. To demonstrate these tactics of what I call “coercive effectiveness,” the author employs a most-different-systems analysis on the regimes of Xi Jinping (2012 2015) and Bashar al-Assad (2000-2004). The author finds that coercion is more likely to be effective under the following conditions: 1) when leaders use economic performance and institutionalist strategies rather than nationalist tactics, 2) when an authoritarian leader climbs the ladder to power rather than inheriting leadership and 3) when a regime is structured around the party rather than those centered on an individual leader. These findings allow policy makers to make more informed decisions for interacting with leaders. For example, the more that a regime centralizes its power, the more likely they will lose their grip on coercion by making themselves the sole target for blame.

Capacity building for globally competent educators is a 21st Century imperative to address contemporary complex and constantly changing challenges. This action research project is grounded in positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, relational cultural theory, and relational leadership practices. It sought to identify adaptive challenges educators face as they try to integrate globally competent teaching practices into their curricula, demonstrate learning and growth experienced by the educators in this project, and provide guidance and solutions to the challenges globally competent educators face. Six educators participated in this three-phase project, which included focus groups, reflective journal entries, and an exit interview. Data were collected, grouped into emergent themes, and organized into cohesive categories. The data from this project supported the creation of two foundational models for educating for global competence. The first is pedagogical and the other, coaching. Both models are in developing stages and are grounded in key theoretical frameworks and the data shared by the participants. Globally competent and globally responsive pedagogy tasks educators with examining their practice through a global and cultural prism to gain clarity of perspective, build social capital, improve relationships, and meet ever-changing local and global challenges. The approaches honor and respect diversity so as to dismantle systems of oppression and fight policies and social norms rooted in cognitive biases. The model integrates theory and key findings from this study to support educators to integrate and implement global competence. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA, https://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/etd.

This dissertation explores how a modern historical consciousness developed during the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish periods (roughly between the 1840s and the 1930s). By examining the transformation of modern history writing from an imperial context to a national one, this study analyzes how institutionalization, professionalization and the gradual nationalization of Ottoman and Turkish history writing shaped historical production in this period. Existing scholarship on late nineteenth and early twentieth century history writing has long argued that the emergence of modern history writing in the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey was a mere adaptation of European historiographical trends. This dissertation, however, evaluates the role of both internal and external conditions that played a major role in the development of modern history writing. It argues that internal political and cultural dynamics, including constitutional and nationalist movements, changes in the state’s educational policies and the emergence of learned societies, as well as external factors, such as the arrival of Muslim emigre intellectuals from the Russian Empire, affected historiographical trends in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish society. Additionally, by focusing on how late Ottoman historical institutions and intellectual trends were appropriated by the newly founded Turkish Republic, this study accentuates the continuity of history writing practices between the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.

This study examines the concepts of childhood, youth, and aging in the early modernOttoman Empire from 1500-1730. It demonstrates that the early modern Ottomanintelligentsia had multiple conceptions of the period of childhood and youth that shaped their understanding of the self and their larger intellectual world. These findings help to disprove the erroneous belief that the Ottomans had no concept of childhood before the “modern” moment of the 19th century. Across texts, regardless of genre and purpose, and across time there is a firm, logical conception of childhood and youth that shapes the arguments made by Ottoman authors. These ideas on aging and childhood had their roots in classical antiquity and earlier Islamic thought; Ottoman intellectuals, however, transformed these ideas and developed them over the centuries. The Ottomans saw childhood and youth as some of the most significant periods of their lives, and both periods were seen as having a substantial impact upon the adult self. The Ottomans believed in an extended period of development lasting until the age of thirty. As a person matured, he or she proceeded through set developmental stages, with set signs and expectations; failure to reach expectations or certain milestones was seen as disastrous. The Ottomans devoted a great deal of effort to controlling, educating, and guiding children and youths towards the idealized adult self, and cautioning them about the various pitfalls that beset their young lives

Culture and society in the ancient world were shaped by the mythological beliefs of individual civilizations. The Watchers tradition, an Ancient Near Eastern myth present in the Hebrew Bible as well as in non-canonical books such as The Book of the Watchers, contains some of the least understood elements within the mythology of the Jewish people. These sources reveal myths to be dynamic reflections of changing cultural values. Between the first references to the Watchers in Hebrew mythology and their elaboration during the Hellenistic period six centuries later, the Watchers tradition developed from a reference in passing in the Book of Genesis to an in-depth exploration of Good and Evil in The Book of the Watchers. This development warrants discussion, as do its cultural and historic contexts. If the transformation of the Watchers myth was influenced by Jewish experience of Hellenistic rule, that invites further reflection on how the idea of supernatural evil entered into Judaism and would influence the later idea of fallen angels in Western civilization.

The ‘damasquinado’ is a beautiful and technical artform that is derived from one of the oldest metalworking styles in the world, dating back to ancient times, and resulting in a variety of wonderful art objects that show the evolution of the metalworking technique and design style. I will be analyzing some pieces that span this timeline of the ‘damasquinado’, defining the term itself, that will show the effects of the tourist art market on the artform, and the relationships that form therein, that has helped to keep the artform relevant in contemporary Spain.

The aim of this study is to show that Orientalism is produced by an intersection of multiple discourses, combining social, political, material and imaginative processes, and that the work of Armenian photographers, seen in proper perspective, represents not just another interesting manifestation of Orientalism, but a means with which to approach the entire issue of Orientalism anew and to amass the floating particles of untouched, yet flagrant information, towards a more satisfactory model for its understanding. Armenians, as outsiders within an Islamic world, were always outside the power structures of the communities within which they lived and worked (in this study, particularly Cairo, Jerusalem and Istanbul). Armenian photography studios, active in these major cities from the 1850s onwards, provided the images that undergirded the Orientalist production of European artists. A study of these photographers and photographs suggests the ways in which no simple binaries operated within the construction of Orientalism.

This thesis explores Ottoman-Iranian relations in the period between 1722 and 1747, with a focus on the interplay between religion and politics in the foreign policy of the Ottoman Empire. It also investigates the Ottoman claim to universal caliphate in the early modern era. The thesis aims to contribute to scholarly understanding of the complex dynamics of Ottoman decision-making with regard to three regimes in Persia in four different periods: the Shiite Safavids (1501-1722), the Sunni Afghans (1722-29), the Shiite Safavids (1729-36), and Nadir Shah, who was a self-proclaimed Sunni with the Ja‘fari legal sect (1736-47). As the Russians were actively involved in the Iranian question during that period, Russo-Ottoman relations are investigated in most of the chapters. Through a close study of primary sources, this thesis claims that the Ottomans supported the Shiite Safavids against the Sunni Afghans and Nadir Shah in their aim to reestablish the Safavid dynasty in Iran. The main argument is that the Ottoman political claim to the universal Sunni caliphate, which secured the Ottoman dynasty’s legitimacy in their vast domains, led them to adopt anti-Sunni policies in Persia. A Sunni power in Iran created a major legitimacy crisis for the sultan, whose political title of Caliph could be challenged by virtue of their new neighbors’ shared religious identity. Against them, therefore, the Porte supported the Safavids, who posed a wall at the border, protecting the sultan’s legitimacy. My study thus challenges two established views in Ottoman historiography, which suggest that (1) the sultans used their caliphal title in a political sense only in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and (2) sectarian differences were inherent sources of conflict in the Ottoman-Iranian axis. In terms of international relations, this thesis shows that the Porte followed a rational foreign policy in the first half of the eighteenth century in a continuity with early modern era, as particularly exemplified in the Russo-Ottoman relations, as well as in relations with other political powers in the wider Eurasian region.

This dissertation argues that the Anglo-German imperial struggle for North Africa during the Second World War fit the schema of “total war” far more closely than is generally understood, both in conception and in soldiers’ lived experiences. Only after 1945 did the North Africa campaign become the sanitized conflict of British and German popular memory, dominated by the story of a “desert war” waged in an empty landscape. Wartime records reveal the German war in North Africa to be no aberration from the trend toward the totalization of warfare on the Eastern Front. Radicalized and racialized violence and brutality dominated both British and German soldiers’ experience of the war, and were perpetrated against soldiers, prisoners, and civilians alike. Surveilled soldiers’ conversations reveal that the North African environment worsened the violence of warfare, rather than alleviating it.However, over the years following the war’s conclusion, the narrative of the war transformed from one of enemy soldiers locked in desperate, existential combat into one of respectable and even sympathetic opponents in a more limited struggle: a chivalric “war without hate.” Likewise, the desert environment came to signify something quite different: an enemy in and of itself in a unique “desert war.” The built environment and North Africa’s inhabitants, ubiquitous in wartime accounts, disappeared, replaced by the narrative of “empty” space. The metamorphosis of the North Africa campaign from total warfare into an edifying story of European comrades in arms required deliberate diplomatic, political, and cultural work by members of the VDAK, the Traditionsverband for former Afrika Korps soldiers, and their British allies. This work helped to cement the Cold War alliance, aided German remilitarization, shaped the mythology that continues to surround the Wehrmacht and the figure of Erwin Rommel, and enabled reconciliation with the former British enemy on the basis of a common, European, imperial past.

Scholarship on modern Egyptian history supports a narrative that depicts Egypt emerging as an independent political entity in the mid-19th century and steadily marching towards becoming a sovereign nation-state in the first decades of the 20th century. The Ottoman cultural context, within which Egypt operated at this time, is usually nowhere to be found in this story. This dissertation remedies this gap in the literature and “remembers” Egypt’s Ottoman past between 1841, when Mehmed Ali Pasha was granted the hereditary governorship of Egypt, and 1914, when Egypt’s remaining political ties to the Ottoman Empire were severed by the British Empire. Primarily based on a variety of sources produced in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, it argues that even though the political ties between Istanbul and Cairo were weakening and a more distinct Egyptian identity was on the rise at this time, the Ottoman cultural consciousness continued to provide an important framework for the ruling and intellectual elite of Egypt, as well as the wider segments of the Egyptian public, until World War I. Taking a thematic approach to the subject, the dissertation demonstrates how the Ottoman imperial court culture provided a blueprint for the ruling elite in Egypt. Moreover, it asserts that Arabic-speaking intellectuals of Egypt, both male and female, continued to self-identify as “Ottomans” in their reactions to some of the momentous events that the Ottoman Empire was facing at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Additionally, it demonstrates how these Arabic-speaking intellectuals utilized the idea of Ottoman consciousness in their efforts to resist European imperialism, which became particularly urgent after Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. Finally, my dissertation asserts that wider segments of the public in Egypt continued to demonstrate a sense of Ottoman consciousness in their reactions to the aforementioned events that the Ottoman Empire was going through at the time.

This study examines linguistic differences in a geographically divided village, Ahmad-Abad, in Lorestan, a province in Iran, that affect musical contour and tonality. Internal conflict in Iranian social politics was fundamental to the creation of alternate pronunciations of “water” between northern and southern regions of the village. This thesis focuses on the reasons for these alternate pronunciations and demonstrate how the differing versions affect the ethnic hymn and melody "Abangan" or "The Water’s Birthday" used in a celebration ceremony that is held for the blessing of and as an appeal for water.

This dissertation investigates how early modern Ottoman medical scholars viewed the concept of novelty and how it manifested itself in the socio-political domain. Appearing in the mid-seventeenth century and maintaining its substantial impact throughout the eighteenth century, ṭıbb-ı cedīd (new medicine) became a very significant concept and practice that almost all the prominent scholars of the era explored. This was the first time that discussions regarding the utilization of al/chemical ideas and practices in medical philosophy and pharmacology were introduced into the medical scholarship via a group of Ottoman scholars. In previous scholarship, this era has either been portrayed as a “transitional” period, which represented the abandonment of the “traditional medicine” for adoption of European medicine, or as a time when intriguing works were produced without yielding any substantial novelties in medical practice. Primarily by undertaking a close reading of the representative texts of the ṭıbb-ı cedīd corpus, this study demonstrates the complex interactions between the various epistemological approaches available to the Ottoman physicians as they produced the medical corpus of a new era. This study shows that the eighteenth-century scholars never disowned their Galenic heritage completely, while embracing new al/ chemical ideas. Moreover, they did not accomplish their intellectual endeavors as part of a state-sponsored Europeanization/Westernization project. This emerging corpus created fertile ground for lively discussions in Ottoman medical scholarship, which went hand in hand with the application of new curative substances, imported from various parts of the world, including, but not exclusive to the Americas. I approach these moments of critical translation and adaptation from lived aspects of medical practice, which are overlooked in current scholarship in the history of medicine that has restricted the material to the intertextual domain of books and ideas. Furthermore, this study, regards the physician as one among the artisans of the marketplace, which brings to light how their practice and profession were negotiated with the Ottoman State during the eighteenth century. Last but not least, I look at the nineteenth-century afterlife of ṭıbb-ı cedīd, when western-influenced reforms were taking place in every aspect of life and a new discourse on medicine and medical education were being introduced. I show that the Imperial Medical School (Mekteb-i Ṭıbbīyye-i Şāhāne) had an immense impact on the physicians of the era on their evaluation of their medical past, including ṭıbb-ı cedīd, and created a lineage of physician-historians who produced modernist-positivistic historiographies, which still influences medical history-writing today, especially in Turkish scholarship.

What does it mean to be a Middle Eastern immigrant in the Islamophobic and anti-immigrant context of the early twenty-first century US? How can performance help to construct and make sense of Middle Eastern immigrant identities and their belonging to US society? In “Staging Belonging: Performance, Migration, and the Middle Eastern Diaspora in the United States,” I take on these questions to interrogate facets of “belonging” for Middle Eastern immigrants in a post-9/11 US. I use ethnographic, archival, and performance analysis research methods to examine a range of performances, from the explicitly theatrical to the everyday, to argue that Middle Eastern immigrants use performance tools in aesthetic and quotidian settings to challenge xenophobic and Orientalist meanings of the Middle East while constructing nuanced understandings of Middle Eastern identity in US diaspora.In my attempt to learn about the diasporic formations of Middle Eastern identity through performance, I pay attention to a variety of performance types. In the first chapter, I engage with cultural citizenship theory to study the performance practices of Middle Eastern American theatre companies in producing civic participation opportunities for their target audiences. I focus on the notion of “home” in the second chapter to examine the complicated relationship of Middle Eastern immigrants with their host countries in Saba Zavarei’s travel performance Looking for Tehran (2013) and Mohamad Hafez and Ahmed Badr’s installation Unpacked: Refugee Baggage (2017). In the last chapter, I examine how post-9/11 US surveillance strategies shape Middle Eastern identity in everyday performances of border crossing at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, Vermont. I conclude by offering a brief analysis of Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2007) to explore how the digitization of the War on Terror leads to more violence against Middle Eastern bodies. In a time when immigrants from the Middle East encounter xenophobic policies and hostile attitudes in the US, demystifying Middle Eastern immigrant identities and highlighting their contributions to society are crucial to creating a society based in equality. This study contributes new perspectives to theatre and performance scholarship that seeks to trouble the xenophobic views of many Americans toward immigrants and the ways they do and do not belong to US society.

This dissertation evaluates a transformative period in the history of the Ottoman State in which the processes of Islamization and Turkification coincided with the expansion and imperialization of the Ottoman polity. This study focuses on an Ottoman Sufi figure, Eşrefoğlu Rumi (?-1469), who benefited form this context, embarked upon a mystical path, and authored seminal works that shaped Ottoman Sufism for generations. This dissertation discusses Eşrefoğlu Rumi’s role in the construction of Islamic orthodoxy based in his Sufi ideals which he disseminated to an Anatolian and Balkan Turkish-speaking Ottoman audience. The significance of this dissertation is that it emphasizes the agency of individual scholars and saints in the making of Ottoman Islam while challenging the dichotomous categorizations such as “orthodoxy” vs. “heterodoxy” and “popular” and “high Islam.”

In this dissertation, entitled The Radīf as Musical Syntax: Instrument Revival in Persian Traditional Music, I investigate the ways in which the radīf (canonic musical repertoire) functions as a system of melodic governance for composition and improvisation. Through ethnographic fieldwork and analytical approaches, I consider how the performance of radīf-based melodies on relegated Persian musical instruments (namely, the barbat and qanun) has facilitated their ongoing process of revival. In dialoguing with my interlocutors and surveying the scholarship, I found that this dissertation has served as the first of its kind, documenting the music performed on the instrument as the driver for its revival. Furthermore, there has been very little scholarship documenting the work of current Persian musicians. Through my dissertation, I hope to help fill this lacuna and contribute to the extant literature in ethnomusicology. Segments of this research have been presented at various national conferences, including the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, 12th Biennial Conference of the Association for Iranian Studies, and 63rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

This thesis leads to a comprehensive analysis of the historiography of the Egyptian women’s movement, but first provides a vast overview of Egyptian history. This is followed by the history of the women’s movement, from 1805 to 1952. In other words, once a broad-based overview of historical understanding of Egyptian history is developed, which includes popular protest of social movements, political parties, and economic state formation. The history of the women’s movement can be better understood as it occurs simultaneously, in the journey Egypt undergoes in acquiring its independence from the British. Therefore, this thesis challenges the legitimacy of the Egyptian women’s movement through analyzing different scholar’s narratives by focusing on four repetitive themes in scholarship. First, by examining authors who utilized biographies of prominent female figures in establishing the history of the women’s movement. Secondly, by furthering the debate in scholarship centering around questioning the origins of the women’s movement. Did the inception of the women’s movement occur at the same time during the 1919 Egyptian Revolution? Followed by, strategic changes within the women’s movement, after World War II between the classes. Lastly, the thesis questions the structure of the period 1919-1952 and different author’s historiographies. In other words, the objective of this thesis is to provide the history of Egypt’s social, political and economic structure and the women’s movement in what is coined the liberal era from 1919-1952. In order to further challenge the validity of the history of the women’s movement through analyzing the most relevant themes in the historiography of contemporary scholars.

A UNESCO-listed world heritage site located in the Syrian desert, Palmyra has been anancient global crossroads of trade and culture. It has drawn tourists and scholars from all over theworld and represented a palimpsest of eastern and western histories and cultures. In August2015, the advance of ISIS into Palmyra and its calculated destruction of ancient monuments inPalmyra shocked the global community and led to an outpouring of grief. This dissertationexamines the ways in which institutions and scholars in Europe and the United States respondedto this sense of intense loss and argues that the international effort to rescue and preservePalmyra has made Palmyra a cultural patrimony of the West. Focusing on digital and physicalrecuperations of Palmyrene monuments by various Western-based digital initiatives, I argue thatPalmyra has been appropriated into an archive of Western civilizational memory. Edward Said’sscholarship on the east/west binary and colonial discourse provides a framework for my analysisof the West’s appropriation of Palmyra as its cultural heritage and the visual colonialism that isexemplified in the recreations of Palmyrene artifacts and monuments. I engage the scholarship ofMaurice Halbwachs and Astrid Erll, among others, to explore the role of memory intransforming the significance of Palmyra and the perceived threat to Western civilizationalmemory. Virtual collaborative projects on Palmyra such as the #New Palmyra project, ThePalmyra Portrait Project, “The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra,” and the Institute for DigitalArchaeology serve as key sources in this dissertation. These efforts to reclaim Palmyra by theWest as a patrimony of the West must be juxtaposed against the reality that Palmyra’s antiquitieshave always remained present in the lives of Syrians and people living in the region. Therefore,the real Palmyra that once stood majestically in the Syrian desert is lost in translation andtransference.

In response to the beginning of the Egyptian-Israeli peace process, Algeria, Libya, Syria, South Yemen, and the PLO formed the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front at Tripoli in December 1977. This group sought to oppose the peace process—they were essentially a radical rejectionist spoiler movement. Scholars have paid little attention to the group as a whole, and certainly haven’t examined its relations with the United States. On the one hand, this is unsurprising, given that the Front failed to attain its initial objectives. On the other hand, the countries comprising the Front each played a role in the strategic shift away from the Arab-Israeli conflict and toward the Persian Gulf region, making this absence rather confusing.This thesis examines American relations with the Front, a subject that has hitherto received no serious, focused scholarly treatment.I present several arguments throughout this study. First, the United States did not engage with the Front as such, but instead lumped all the “radicals” and “rejectionists” together. This was mostly due to Egyptian President Sadat’s dismissive attitude toward the rejectionists. Second, the United States largely refrained from engaging bilaterally with the Front’s members, and when it did, it was often in ways divorced from the peace process. Relatedly, this general lack of engagement resulted in strained relations between the United States and the rejectionists. This is clearest in the cases of Libya and—especially—Syria, both of which the Reagan administration came into significant conflict.Above all, this study shows that the peace process and the coming of the Second Cold War were intimately connected. Most accounts of Carter’s Middle East policy split it between Carter the Peacemaker from 1977 through the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in March 1979, and Carter the Cold Warrior from mid-1979 through 1981, and never the twain shall meet. I show how these were intimately connected, and how the rejectionists—especially the Front—played a role in that connection.A subtheme of this thesis is Sadat’s intransigence. Most accounts highlight how Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin caused headaches for Carter in his attempts to bring peace to the region. I show how, while Begin was certainly a real source of frustration for Carter, the sympathetic portrayal of Sadat found in nearly every major English language work on the peace process is misguided, as it ignores the trouble Sadat himself caused by antagonizing his fellow Arabs, despite Carter’s pleas to refrain from doing so.

This dissertation concerns how Jewish-Muslim and Israel-Palestine grassroots activism can persist in the face of threats to the safety, freedom, lives, or even simply the income and employment of those engaged in acts of sustained resistance. At the heart of the study are the experiences of participants in the Hashlamah Project, an inter-religious collaboration project, involving Jews and Muslims. Across chapters and even nations, chapters of this organization faced similar threats and found universally-applicable solutions emerging for confronting those threats and persisting in the face of them. This raised the question of whether revolutionaries and activists in general can persevere with such work in the face of this sort of menacing. The study found answers to this in determining what methods were most widely employed and which had the best results. The results of the study showed an array of widely-employed methods for navigating threats in high risk activism, and persevering with such work in the face of these threats. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

My dissertation investigates how Syriac-speakers conceptualized their communal subjectivities within a Roman imperial context. I argue that Syriac literature from the Roman empire, and especially Syriac historiography and Syriac liturgical texts, provided Syriac-speakers with the discursive tools with which they could interpret recent history and formulate conceptions of the self within a Roman context. I argue that Syriac identity prior to the formation of the Syriac Orthodox Church was articulated through a dialectic with contemporary Roman imaginaries of ethnicity and citizenship. In doing so, I problematize scholarship that supposes `Syriacness’ and `Romanness’ were antithetical in the late Roman period. Instead, I contend that Syriac-speaking communities adopted, manipulated, and redefined discourses of Romanness in order to create their own Syriac-speaking Roman subjectivities.

This dissertation examines the history of Islamic legal pluralism and hadith scholarship in the Indian Ocean from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. In conceptual terms, it integrates the debates within sociolegal studies on legal pluralism (or the multiplicity of legal orders within a social field) with the intellectual history of the Islamic schools of law (madhhab). In so doing, it systematically reconstructs for the first time a history of madhhab-centered legal pluralism that connected Sunni scholars from different schools of law in the Mughal, Ottoman, and British empires, as well as other Indian Ocean polities. Within this context, it uncovers the historical processes by which Indian members of the Hanafi madhhab from Sindh and Delhi maneuvered across school lines and shifting imperial geographies to pursue hadith scholarship and construct legal authority in the Indian Ocean. By analyzing a wide array of sources, including fatwas, legal treatises, hadith commentaries, hagiographies, travelogues, and imperial records in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, this dissertation breaks from state-centered histories of Islamic law and one-sided models of transregional intellectual diffusion. Instead, it argues that Indian Islamic law was transformed through sustained intellectual exchange with multiple legal schools and scholarly networks in the Indian Ocean. These exchanges catapulted the hadith sciences to the center of Indian Hanafi juristic discourse, fueling immense debate in the eighteenth century on the authority of the Hanafi school in particular and the madhhabs altogether, as mediated by the imperatives of taqlīd (legal conformity), taḥqīq (verification), and ijtihād (independent reasoning). As this hadith-based legal discourse expanded beyond scholarly circles across emerging publics of manuscript and print in the early nineteenth century, it fragmented the authority of the madhhabs to serve as the basis of Sunni legal pluralism in the Indian Ocean, leading to the formation of new Islamic legal institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This dissertation analyzes the early modern global luxury commodity trade of diamonds and gems conducted between the Indian Subcontinent and the Mediterranean during 1670s and 1730s. It examines the involvement of the Armenian mercantile network of merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan in this global trade by focusing on the previously unpublished and unstudied body of archival documents from state and private archives in Italy, the UK, Armenia, Iran and beyond. By focusing on a single family firm of professional gem merchants, the Minasians, their network of agents and business activities, this dissertation argues against the previously presumed idea by economic historians that early modern Asian merchants and family firms were merely peddlers in the face of the European chartered joint-stock companies. Operating from Isfahan and Livorno all the way to the Russian, Ottoman and Mughal Empires, the previously little-studied Minasian archival documents demonstrate that these gem merchants’ business ventures covered vast distances and included all three “gunpowder empires” of the early modern period.This dissertation also sheds light on the specifics of decision making, as well as the role of social capital in the long-distance business operations of this family firm. It argues that the systematic circulation of information and market knowledge played a key role in the business and decision-making culture of this family firm. Moreover, their detailed knowledge of early modern gem markets and the efficient information circulation through correspondence provided the most accurate, combined use of the caravan and maritime trade routes, whichever was cheaper and safer at any one moment. By offering a new narrative on the agency of the Minasian family firm in the early modern Eurasian long-distance trade, this dissertation makes an argument that the above-mentioned practices could be representative of a bigger body of Asian family firms operating in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Eurasia.

“Long Live the Arab Worker: A Transnational History of Labor and Empire in the Yemeni Diaspora,” examines how Yemeni workers and activists in their struggle to live and make a living highlighted the connections between local challenges in the diaspora with global politics of empire. By foregrounding experiences of Yemeni diasporic communities throughout the 20th century, this project interrogates the intersections of labor and empire while also highlighting the complicated, multifaceted, and often messy realities within histories of activism and community organizing. It analyzes how labor and labor activism in the diaspora became an ideological arena in which politics of empire were obscured, accommodated, exposed, and challenged. In 1839, the establishment of the British Protectorate in Aden and the presence of the British East India Company in Yemen consolidated the colonial, political, and economic connections that would draw Yemeni labor and immigrants to Britain and later the United States. The ceaseless desire for cheap labor in both countries would lead to continued labor migration from Yemen throughout the 20th century. Classified as British subjects, some of the first Yemeni migrant workers were recruited from the ports of Aden to work on British ships. While some remained in the shipping industry as sailors, many eventually settled in cities in England and found work in the steel industry. By the 1960s and 1970s, more significant numbers of Yemenis immigrated to the United States and toiled in California’s fields as farm workers as well as auto workers in Detroit’s booming auto industry. Both British and U.S. imperialism in Yemen and the Middle East not only enforced labor migration, but continuously shaped the experiences of Yemeni workers and families in the diaspora.Through an exploration of archival sources and original oral histories, this project tells the stories of these workers who provided labor throughout the “diaspora of empire.” Kobena Mercer theorized the “diaspora of empire” as a “reminder and a remainder of the nation’s historical past.” I borrow from Nadine Naber’s development of diaspora of empire which emphasizes how because of contemporary U.S. neocolonial and imperial formations, Arab diasporas cannot be understood simply within a postcolonial timeline in which people reside in the countries that formerly colonized them. Rather, diaspora of empire refers to the “moment in which empire and its subjects exist in a transnational and contemporaneous frame.” In other words, diaspora of empire points to the ongoing impacts of both formal and informal empire. This research explores how Yemeni workers and activists through their labor and activism experienced and resisted politics of empire in the diaspora throughout the 20th century. By unpacking these stories, we can come closer to understanding the current precarities facing Yemeni diasporic communities today.

This is a work of cultural history, mainly because it had to be, because I realized that such a history would most enable my writing a dissertation length work about a cultural industry scarcely documented in primary sources and restrictively written about since. As for my conceiving the early cinema on the Nile as a cultural industry, that was because I found the conception of Egyptian cinema presumptive. Egypt gained its status as a (nominally) independent modern nation-state in 1922, so that for much of the cinema’s early existence in Egypt it and the people who interacted with it were governed according to systems in good part delineated centuries earlier. Moreover, at no time during this study was the most dominant governmental power in Egypt headed by “native” Egyptians.Egyptian cinema foreclosed people and institutions qualified as non-Egyptian. As it turned out, the most influential, most capitalized practitioners in Egypt’s cinema into the mid-1930s were not of Egyptian origin, though some may have “naturalized.” I also learned that of the totality of activity we may qualify as cinema, most was not in production of films, but in their exhibition, an industrial subsector that directly engaged far more people than did filmmaking in Egypt’s urban and rural locals. As I learned, exhibition was industrially linked to distribution by the most powerful institutions of what I came to describe as the early cinema industry, 1896-1934. Egyptian cinema had methodologically restricted studies past, produced within Egypt and without, in delimiting the seemingly non-Egyptian, whether people or institutions. The term had also relatively promoted the study of textual production within the cinema, often as a facet of cultural creation and commodification overseen if not undertaken by the state. A study of the early Egyptian cinema would be limited materially and restrictive conceptually. I would study the cinema in Egypt as a collective activity that organized overtime and was propelled by exchange among people and institutions, Egyptian or not, regardless of points of origination or conclusion to instances or patterns of exchange. By examining complex power relations of the political economy of Egypt’s early cinema industry I move to justify the noted methodological shift declared in the title of the first chapter. “How the Cinema in Egypt Egyptianized” is framed as a reflexive investigative journey into such modern history of relevant power relations centered in Egypt and affecting its cinema. I interrogate the concept of national cinema in the second chapter and bespeak Egyptianizing (tamassur), two addresses on which I elaborate theoretically and historically. I follow this discussion with two illustrative case studies of Egyptianizing of cineastes and their institutions in tow, from the operative era. The third chapter attends to the intersecting histories of film pioneer Mohammed Bayoumi and the Misr Company for Acting and Cinema, later Studio Misr, the first bona fide film studio in the Middle East, as led by Tal`at Harb. Both men avowed nationalism and both contributed to the development of the cinema in Egypt in the name of the nation. Chapter three integrates analysis of Bayoumi’s nonfiction films, among those survived silent productions noted, an examination that situates their texts within their cultural and historical contexts. The final chapter makes the case for the significance of the interaction between the theater and cinema industries in Egypt in the studied era. It does so by charting the generic interlinks between stage and screen, specific as they had been to Egypt: (melo)drama, comedy, and singing. In keeping with previous chapters that have instrumentally elaborated on domains of cinematic activity other than production—distribution, exhibition, and press—productions and practitioners are linked to audiences, playhouses, and movie houses. This final chapter also complements or augments discussions from the earlier chapters in each of its three genre-bound segments. In the end, this work is intended to critically assess nationalism as it relates to the cinema, while drawing attention to a cinema underserved by media histories.

Image construction in translation has recently attracted the interest of scholars in Translation Studies (Doorslaer, Flynn & Leerssen 2016). Much of the discussion, however, has been on the target culture’s construction of the image of the Other. Rarely discussed is the construction and projection of self-images (auto images) through translation. The Cold War was perhaps the single most important period in contemporary history in which this self-image construction manifested itself. Both the United States and the Soviet Union initiated massive translation programs in the developing world to boost their images and reputations, often referred to as “soft diplomacy.” The goal was to present themselves as the exemplary models for modernity and in the process “win the hearts and minds” of the newly independent nations of the developing world. The non-governmental Franklin Books Program (1952–1979) marks one important and highly visible attempt to increase the political and cultural cachet of the US in the Arab World during this period. The books chosen for translation appear to propagate and reinforce the self-proclaimed image of the US as a “shining city on a hill,” as well as, on a more profound level, a developmental model of history. The Franklin Books Program operated at a time when the US information and cultural agencies in the region were actively seeking to discredit and dismiss the USSR as the antithesis of modernity, liberty and progress. By drawing mainly on notions of image construction, this dissertation examines whether and—if so—how FBP participated in this image-building campaign. The dissertation relies primarily on two sets of archival paratextual material: 1) FBP’s archival records, and 2) the prefaces, introductions to and covers of the translated titles themselves. The former sheds light on FBP’s selection process as well as on how those in charge viewed the program’s mission. The latter illuminates whether and—if so, how—these materials emphasized notions of American exceptionalism, built on a developmental model of history. In both cases, the dissertation aims to uncover traces of any alignment with US foreign policy and image-building objectives in the region.

This content analysis of attributed sources in the 1996, 2000, and 2006 news coverage of Israel’s military actions in Lebanon shows a “Late Breaking Foreign Policy” effect Warren P. Strobel cites in his work, wherein media “Push” forward with reliance on government sources and allies in conflicts, but “Pull” back after setbacks. Israel dominated news sources in The New York Times and Washington Post, but there was significant increase in attributions to Lebanese sources due to rising civilian casualties in each conflict.

This study investigated how curriculum can develop students’ ability to critically engage with cultural difference, specifically with regard to learning about Islam and Muslims. The significance of this study lies in its synthesis of both academic and practitioner perspectives on this subject. The study built upon several areas of scholarship: critical global education, critical multicultural curriculum, decolonial and decolonizing approaches (countering Eurocentrism), anti-oppressive education, and critical pedagogy (see “Defining Critical Global Curriculum” in Chapter 2). All these approaches were viewed through the lens of Islamophobia as I analyzed curricular practices for teaching critically about Islam and Muslims. The core finding was that teachers countered Islamophobia by pushing their students’ boundaries, or their conceptual biases, with regard to Muslim identity, and their own cultural identities. They often did this in ways intended to disrupt conceptualizations of self/Other. Teachers pushed student boundaries of self/Other by countering Eurocentric bias, acknowledging current and past forms of imperialism and oppression, and asking students to reflect on themselves before judging the Other. For many of the teachers in my study, this meant including Palestinian, indigenous, feminist, and other critical perspectives in their curriculum. Teachers acknowledged several key challenges: complicity with Eurocentric narratives, speaking the truth about war and racism, students’ internalized racism and Islamophobia, and dilemmas for teaching about women’s rights without perpetuating stereotypes about Muslim-majority countries and communities.

This dissertation comparatively analyzes the role of Islam, secularism and reform in the development of feminism in Egypt and Turkey in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Based on two years of archival research in Turkey, Egypt, and the United Kingdom, my work establishes a dialogue between Turkish and Egyptian feminisms, compares secular and Islamic trends within them, and takes stock of their interactions with and resistances to western feminisms. As the modern period opened, what are now Turkey and Egypt were still parts of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. The main center of Turkish-language cultural production was Istanbul, and the main center of Arabic-language cultural production was Cairo. The feminist movements of the region developed accordingly. I argue that in Turkey, feminist endeavors gradually carved out a congenial secular space—bypassing religion, or at least loosening the rigid understandings of Islam—where older traditions and more modern structures continued to coexist but with little connection between them. In contrast, Egyptian feminists’ modes of approach and analysis tended to conform to traditional and legalistic norms that governed the discussion of the women’s role in society. Although Egyptian feminist thought expanded with concepts like humanism and secularism, these concepts were constantly and carefully modulated with a native, vernacular, Islamic discourse. The material that I present in this dissertation suggests that in societies with a strong heritage of secular liberal reform, wherein progressive tradition is engineered by intellectual and official cadres, such as in the Ottoman center and in the Turkish Republic, feminism becomes a state-centric political project and an intellectual exercise in which more conservative manifestations of feminism are side-lined for the sake of a swift rate of progress. But in societies with a strong heritage of Islamically grounded modernization and social advances, such as in Egypt, feminism is rooted in, nourished by, and highly responsive to social, cultural, and religious norms, fostering social mobilization at a broader stratum, yet at a much slower, or more gradual, rate of progress.Although historiography in Middle Eastern women’s history has developed rapidly during the last decades, scholarship on the comparative history of feminism in the Middle East has been severely limited. Just as important, there is a century-long lacuna in the history of the women’s movements in Turkey, with relatively few studies examining the period 1880-1980. As I hope to prove, comparative research on Turkey and Egypt, whose feminist movements had common origins and constantly influenced each other, will yield richer, more nuanced results than an individual history of each movement could potentially offer. By means of a comparative analysis, I wish to discover both the unique and the shared socio-historical configurations of each feminist movement, and to prevent one-dimensional narratives focusing on other issues—particularly nationalism—from dominating our reading of these feminist movements, which responded to many issues. This approach counteracts the homogenization of the histories of feminists whose needs and interests differed as vastly as those articulated by the Turkophone and Arabophone movements, especially during the era of colonialism. By comparing what have been considered as two different feminist movements, detached regionally from each other and globally from western feminist movements, this dissertation illuminates the significance of Middle Eastern women’s movements that have never yet been understood in their full historical context.

This thesis places the Iraq War and its aftermath (2003-2014) within the framework of borderlands scholarship. The interdisciplinary approach used in this work makes new connections between borderlands history, particularly in the context of North America, and places it within the context of the modern Middle East. By expanding upon abstract notions ofpower in the frontier, this work explores the different perspectives, experiences, and goals of Iraq’s tribal community in al-Anbar Province, the U.S.-led Coalition, and al-Qaʿida in Iraq and its successor organizations to argue that these groups failed to fill the vacuum of authority thatemerged in Iraq after 2003 with their own respective visions for the country’s future. This workutilizes Richard Whites concept of “the middle ground” to explore how these groups negotiatedand competed with one another for hegemony, creating the political realities of post-2003 Iraq.