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ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL

Call for Submissions

2/23/2021

General Call for Submissions: Arab Studies Journal

Arab Studies Journal (ASJ) is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal of Middle Eastern and North African studies.
ASJ welcomes article manuscript submissions on a rolling basis. We seek submissions that focus on the regions, communities, and peoples comprising the Middle East and North Africa, from the seventh century to the present. Articles on communities or politics in other regions of the world that had or have strong Middle Eastern ties or contexts, or on relations between those regions and the Middle East and North Africa, are also strongly encouraged. Submissions may fall within the disciplines of anthropology, art and architecture, economics, history, law, literature, political science, religion, and sociology, or interdisciplinary approaches as with political economy, women, gender, and sexuality studies, and race and racialization.

Submitted articles should be 25–40 double-spaced pages in 12-point font (Times New Roman), or between 6,500 and 10,000 words including endnotes. All material submitted to ASJ must follow the submission guidelines, available at the following URL: https://www.arabstudiesjournal.org/article-submissions.html.

We welcome inquiries and submissions at coeditors@arabstudiesjournal.org

To view past issues of ASJ, visit https://www.arabstudiesjournal.org/issues.html

Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2020 Issue

11/17/2020

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVIII, No. 2
Fall 2020

This issue offers historical, conceptual, and comparative insights on how techniques of inclusion and exclusion shape possibilities for belonging, collective life, political solidarity, and social contestation. Rim Naguib examines the deportation of socialists, communists, and syndicalists from interwar Egypt. British authorities legitimized the deportation of leftist resident foreigners or “local subjects of foreign extraction.” Naguib argues these ideological-ethnic deportations were central to the colonial rule of difference and its legacies for the postcolonial Egyptian state. Rana AlMutawa’s urban ethnography of Emiratis in Dubai explores how “glitzy” places such as shopping malls and newly-built developments become sites of belonging. Challenging scholarly portrayals of Dubai’s “glitzy” development projects as alienating, inauthentic, or touristic, AlMutawa reveals how her interlocutors experience these spaces in personal and intimate ways while negotiating, upholding, and challenging social norms. Yusri Khaizran analyzes Israeli school curricula as a particular site for the production of a Druze identity and political sensibility severed and distinct from their Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic milieus. Tracing curricular and institutional developments in the education sector since the establishment of the State of Israel, he reveals critical junctures in the transmuting of Druze doctrinal particularism into a segregated sectarian identity, as part of a governance repertoire to exercise control over Palestinian-Arab society as a whole. Sima Shakhsari reads Fatima Mernissi’s 1994 Dreams of Trespass to reconsider queer kinship through temporal bonds and alliances. Shakhsari builds on this reading to challenge the politics of miseration in refugee discourse as well as the epistemological assumptions in gender studies and queer studies curricula that render Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass—and much else from Middle East studies—an impossibility as a teachable text. The issue features a robust reviews section that engages recent major works in the multidisciplinary study of the Middle East. In usual fashion, it brings together a diversity of early career and senior scholars, both as authors and reviewers.

This issue marks the beginning of our co-editorship of Arab Studies Journal (ASJ). As two historians who take delight in troubling ruptures and easy periodization, we must begin by acknowledging that this issue is truly the product of the diligent work of ASJ’s former editor, Sherene Seikaly. She assembled these articles, with all that entails in terms of initial intake, peer review, and her own substantive and stylistic feedback to authors. More importantly, Sherene assembled us: the entire editorial team. She mentored us as editors, empowered us as team members, and bequeathed us internal structures that allowed us as co-editors to focus on the substance of the texts as we worked with authors to finalize their articles and the ASJ team to prepare this issue for layout and publication. During her thirteen years at the helm, Sherene elevated the status of ASJ as a leading academic publica- tion and challenged herself and the team to transition into producing two issues per year. She imparted to us an ethics of care, a praxis of solidarity, and a diligence that we will strive to carry forward. We can only hope to live up to her model and legacy of generous, incisive, tireless labor and leadership. That task is facilitated by the collective volunteer labor of the entire ASJ editorial team, whose enthusiasm, commitment, and rigor make each issue possible.

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2020 Issue

5/8/2020

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVIII, No. 1
Spring 2020

This issue features a wealth of historical and contemporary insights on comedy, art, music, land, and labor. Carmen Gitre traces the vaudeville and comedy of the playwright Najib al-Rihani in early-twentieth-century Egypt. Reformers charged Rihani and his Everyman character, Kishkish Bey, with endangering the patriotic health of the newly independent nation. Gitre traces Rihani’s alternative moral and ethical vision of the nation, unfolding the Egyptiana theater as a shared liminal space of catharsis and imaginative transformation. Sarah Johnson takes us to mid-twentieth- century Iraq, where the work of artist Hafidh Druby married archeological practice with representational painting. Tracing Druby’s rise and fall as a pinnacle of art and theory, Johnson excavates blind spots in the history of modern Iraqi art, bringing to light multifaceted interpretations of modernity in Baghdad. Weaving performance ethnography, geography, and sound studies, Leila Tayeb explores post-Qaddafi Libya. She reveals how music is one of many quotidian sonic practices that produce militia power. Interrupting the conventional narration of Libya’s statelessness and its ostensibly bereft institutional landscape, Tayeb shows the audible and palpable ways that militias claim sovereignty. By detailing the dispossession of the villages of al-Kabri, al-Naher, Umm al-Faraj, and al-Tall in the western Galilee, Lily Eilan offers a new way to think about the Nakba. Reading mechanisms of negotiation, survival, and resistance to the Zionist state, Eilan illustrates a mode of transience in which Palestinians and Mizrahim accommodated, undermined, and exploited a new social order. The issue also features our stalwart book reviews section, anchored in an incisive review essay on Algeria.

Since its first issue in 1992, the journal has been a space for collaborative thinking and practice. I have witnessed ASJ in different formative moments: when it became fully peer reviewed in 2000; when the book review section moved to New York City and a whole new flock of graduate students joined the team; and through the present day when interdisci- plinary content and biannual publication have made ASJ a resource for publishing, research, and teaching. ASJ gives access to young scholars by inviting submissions, being transparent about our review process, and working closely with authors to let their work reach its full potential. The journal also provides scholars with experience in the world of publishing. Graduate students have joined ASJ and stayed on board long after their defenses and tenure.

ASJ was the brainchild of Bassam Haddad. Through the ideas and practices of the journal, Bassam began crafting the institutional force that gave birth to Jadaliyya, Quilting Point, the Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs, and Tadween Publishing, all under the umbrella of Arab Studies Institute. ASJ is the mothership of these organic and collective bodies that produce textual, aural, and visual knowledge committed to the Arab world as far more than an object of study. What holds us together is solidarity and commitment. . . . [Read More]

VIEW TABLE OF CONTENTS

10 Recently-published ASJ Articles Available for Free Download

3/20/2020

As most teachers, students, and researchers find themselves cut off from physical access to their offices and libraries, Arab Studies Journal is pleased to make the following articles available for free download as PDFs.

"'A Fever for an Education': Pedagogical Thought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914"
By Susanna Ferguson
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2018)]

"Spiritual Capital and the Copy: Painting, Photography, and the Production of the Image in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine"
By Nisa Ari
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXV, no. 2 (Fall 2017)]

"The Nahda in Parliament: Taha Husayn’s Career Building Knowledge Production Institutions, 1922-1952”
By Hussam R. Ahmed
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2018)]

"Arab Self-Criticism after 1967 Revisited: The Normative Turn in Marxist Thought and Its Heuristic Fallacies"
By Manfred Sing
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXV, no. 2 (Fall 2017)].

"If We All Leave, Who Will Cut the String: Exiled Intellectuals in Ghada al-Samman’s Thought"
By Louis Yako
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2018)]

"Jungle Films in Egypt: Race, Anti-Blackness, and Empire"
By Ifdal Elsaket
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXV, no. 2 (Fall 2017)]

"The Inequality Puzzle in Egypt: What Do We Really Know?"
By Tamer El Gindi
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXV, no. 2 (Fall 2017)]

"“Jerusalem, We Have a Problem”: Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination"
By Gil Z. Hochberg
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2018)]

"Trapped Escape: Young Palestinian Women and the Israeli National-Civic Service"
By Suhad Daher-Nashif
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXV, no. 2 (Fall 2017)]

"Infrastructure Crises in Beirut and the Struggle to (Not) Reform the Lebanese State"
By Éric Verdeil
[Published in Arab Studies Journal XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2018)]

Click Here to Download All 10 Articles

For a complete listing of all published articles, browse our past issues by clicking here.

Reem Bailouny's ASJ Article Selected Most-Outstanding Article by Syrian Studies Association

1/9/2020

Arab Studies Journal is pleased to announce that Reem Bailouny’s “From Mandate Borders to the Diaspora: Rashaya’s Transnational Suffering and the Making of Lebanon in 1925” (Fall 2018) was selected by the Syrian Studies Association (SSA) for its annual Most Outstanding Article Prize.

The SSA awards an annual prize for the most outstanding article or book chapter each year. The award aims to promote and highlight excellence in research on Bilad al-Sham until 1918 and on Syria in the period following. Bailouny was announced the winner in November 2019 and honored during the SSA’s activities at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting. The SSA is an international association organized to encourage and promote research and scholarly understanding of Syria in all periods and in all academic disciplines.

In celebration of this award, ASJ is pleased to make Bailouny’s article available for download (at no cost) for a limited time.

To download the article, please click here.

Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2019 Issue: Editor’s Note and Table of Contents

11/24/2019

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVII, No. 2
Fall 2019

Editor's Note:

We are proud to feature another collection of insightful articles that are theoretically rich and empirically grounded. In “Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel,” Lana Tatour draws on new archival findings of the 1948–52 period as Israel established its constitutional cornerstones. She situates Israel’s citizenship regime in a wider process of settler indigenization and native de- indigenization. Tatour shows how citizenship regimes are crucial to the colonization, dispossession, and domination of indigenous peoples. In this light, citizenship is not some failed unresolved promise, but a key mechanism for ethnic cleansing. Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed traces literary portrayals of the degradation of urban life in Morocco during the era of economic liberalization. His “Dispossession and Hybridity: The Neoliberal Moroccan City in Mohammed Achaari’s Literary Enterprise” reveals the Moroccan city in Mohammed Achaari’s novel, Al-Qaws wa-l-Farasha. He unravels the city as a scene of modern hybrid assemblages that bring the environmental, financial, and technological into violent association. Benny Nuriely makes use of new archival terrain to reveal how the Custodian of Absentee Property, the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and the Israeli Army used hunger to dispossess Palestinians in “The Hunger Economy, The Military Government in the Galilee, Ramle, and Lydda, 1948–1949.” In the Galilee, the army confiscated Palestinian lands and turned Palestinians into internal refugees. The Custodian took charge of land and mobile property in Ramle and Lydda. The ministry, in the meantime, transferred one thousand Palestinian workers from the Lower Galilee in the north to Ramle and Lydda in the central plain. Nuriely shows how the Military Government’s first year initiated a hunger economy to realize accumulation through dispossession. Iman Hamam traces two graphic novels’ depictions of the passageways, tunnels, and sewers that constitute Cairo’s underground spaces in “Over the Top and Underground: Graphic Visualizations of Space in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia.” She shows how these graphic representations teach us new lessons about neoliberalism in Egypt, while simultaneously subverting communication, transportation, and sewer networks to unsettle the spatial order. Nova Robinson critically engages graphic narratives of the Lebanese Civil War and highlights the politics of memory and reconciliation in the US classroom. In “Jerry Cans and Shrapnel Collections: Using Graphic Memoirs to Teach About the Lebanese Civil War,” Robinson provides scholars and teachers innovative pedagogical tools to improve visual literacy, nourish critical thinking, and add personal dimensions to courses on the history of the Middle East broadly, and Lebanon specifically. We are proud as always to feature a robust review section.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Articles

8. Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel
Lana Tatour

40. Dispossession and Hybridity: The Neoliberal Moroccan City in Mohammed Achaari’s Literary Enterprise
Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed

64. The Hunger Economy: The Military Government in the Galilee, Ramle, and Lydda, 1948–1949
Benny Nuriely

86. Over the Top and Underground: Graphic Visualizations of Space in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia
Iman Hamam

114. Jerry Cans and Shrapnel Collections: Using Graphic Memoirs to Teach about the Lebanese Civil War
Nova Robinson

Reviews

146. A History of Algeria by James McDougall
Reviewed by Austin R. Cooper

151. The Holocaust and North Africa by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Reviewed by Chris Silver

156. Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco by Jessica M. Marglin
Reviewed by Noam Sienna

160. The Palestinian Novel from 1948 to the Present by Bashir Abu-Manneh
Reviewed by Nora Parr

164. The Prose Works of Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman: The City and the Beast by Hilla Peled-Shapira
Reviewed by Levi Thompson

Review Essay

170. Medicine and Health in the Modern Middle East and North Africa
by Laura Francis Goffman

Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq
by Omar Dewachi
In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt
by Khaled Fahmy
Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis
by Richard C. Parks

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2019 Issue: Editor’s Note and Table of Contents

7/4/2019

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVII, No. 1
Spring 2019

Editor's Note:

This issue is a rich one that offers, in the best tradition of Arab Studies Journal, the rigor, insight, and transdisciplinarity that our team fosters. In “Confronting a Colonial Rule of Property: The al-Sakhina Case in Mandate Palestine,” Munir Fakher Eldin sheds an innovative light on popular conceptions and strategies of property, land, and sovereignty. His work reshapes our temporal and thematic understandings of land and settler-colonial politics in Palestine by centering how Sakhinites challenged colonial policy as well as interrupting, contesting, and shaping land and law. Chihab El Khachab traces how a family of successful film producers and their narrative formula came to signify a distinct genre of commercial entertainment in “The Sobky Recipe and the Struggle Over ‘The Popular’ in Egypt.” In illuminating struggles between multiple class-cultural formations, entrepreneurial interests and labor conditions, and highbrow and lowbrow music production, Khachab traces and explodes the category “popular.” In “Comic Images and the Art of Witnessing: A Visual Analysis of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza,” Nawal Musleh-Motut reveals how images facilitate readers’ role in bearing witness, through testimonial interactivity, appropriating and using images of trauma, manipulating time and space to narrativize trauma, and enabling self-reflexive interrogation. In “No One to See Here: Genres of Neutralization and the Ongoing Nakba,” Shir Alon analyzes Palestinian art in the late 1990s and early 2000s to show how emotional opacity, deflation of event-based plots, and a focus on banal everyday gestures constitute an aesthetic trend. Exploring Elia Suleiman’s film Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) and Adania Shibli’s first novel, Touch (2002), Alon shows how this aesthetic trend suspends temporality and historicity while interrogating the political. Liron Mor in “Resistance into Incitement: Translation, Legislation, ‘Early Detection,’ and the Palestinian Poet’s Intention” explores the case of Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian poet who posted a poem on social media and was recently convicted of incitement to terror. Through a close reading of the poem, the testimonies, and the court proceedings, Mor reveals the paradox of “non-translation,” a mode of depoliticizing and controlling Palestinian resistance. The issue also features a typically rich and incisive review section.

With this issue, we commemorate the end of an era. This February, the journal lost one of its intellectual and familial pillars, Asmahan Haddad. Asma, as she was known to her expansive family, both biological and far beyond, has made this journal possible since its initial steps over a quarter of a century ago. Not a scholar or activist in any conventional sense, Asma molded minds, made the present possible, and inspired different futures. In this sense, she was a public figure who shaped those around her with her sharp insight and boundless wit. Asma was an endless fountain of wisdom, love, and strength that nourished generations of people, projects, and visions. She enriched all who crossed her path, until the last moment, when dozens of loved ones from near and far surrounded her. Asma was a mother, a comrade, and an early principal supporter of the mothership of this publication, the Arab Studies Institute (ASI).

Asma helped propel ASI as an experiment in forging collectivity. Her energy went far beyond the warm generosity that characterized everything she did. It was her commitment to critical knowledge that inspired each of us in crucial ways. Perhaps more than anything, it was her faith in a group of young women and men who came together starting in the early 1990s. On paper, this group would embark on what is today ASI’s constellation of initiatives: the Arab Studies Journal, Jadaliyya, Quilting Point, Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs (FAMA), and Tadween Publishing.

In 1992, the Arab Studies Journal (ASJ) was launched as an aspiring graduate student academic journal at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), Georgetown University. However, the administration was not ready to fund the ambitious project beyond providing emotional support. Yet, it moved forward under the editorship of Bassam Haddad, Asma’s son, and a dedicated team of editors—notably Michelle Kjorlien (now Esposito) and Steve Brannon—who were then all graduate students in the MA in Arab Studies program (MAAS) at CCAS. Asma backed the project unconditionally, and committed to handling any unmet cost.

Asma gave all of us an expansive model of family, a family that embraced our ideas, acknowledged our weaknesses, and fortified our strength with humor, curiosity, and—above all—unstinting honesty. Her faith in, and support for, the project only grew as ASJ attracted a number of students who enrolled in the MAAS program and beyond at Georgetown, including Sinan Antoon, Chris Toensing, Nadya Sbaiti, and Sherene Seikaly. By 1994, ASJ had also attracted prominent writers from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including from Georgetown University, based on the promise of its English section as well as its meteoric Arabic section, which, under Sinan Antoon’s leadership, featured some of the leading Arabic writers and novelists of their time. While short-lived, the Arabic section spoke the most to one of Asma’s enduring passions: her mother tongue.

During the lead-up to publication, with hefty printing and distribution costs looming, Asma encouraged us to forge ahead without worry. In addition to financial contributions by some of the editors, and the remarkable dedication and volunteer labor of all the editors, she guaranteed the production of the publication during its early years. By 1996, the journal began attracting unsolicited work by luminaries in the field—while always serving as a platform for distinguished graduate student work—and the new leadership at CCAS was far more forthcoming in supporting ASJ, providing it with office space that continues to serve as its home at Georgetown University. And while the support came early on from our mentors, including Hanna Batatu, Halim Barakat, Hisham Sharabi, and Barbara Stowasser, among others, it was the steady hand of Michael Hudson and the leadership and unflinching enthusiasm of Judith Tucker that forged a permanent place for the journal at Georgetown University. This support continues until today, under the leadership of the center’s directors, Osama Abi-Mershed and, currently, Rochelle Davis.

For all these reasons, it was a painful but beautiful moment when Judith Tucker was among the first to arrive at Asma’s memorial, or “Celebration of Life,” in March 2019. Asma did not want grief to mark her farewell; she wanted us to go on, to fight the good fight, to celebrate life. Countless people attended Asma’s memorial or were there in spirit, including the good people who have fueled and nurtured ASI for nearly three decades. These included (in addition to those mentioned above) Ziad Abu-Rish, Noura Erakat, Maya Mikdashi, John Warner, Ibtisam Azem, Rosie Bsheer, Samia Errazzouki, Kylie Broderick, Hesham Sallam, Lisa Hajjar, Mouin Rabbani, Anthony Alessandrini, Mona Harb, Adel Iskandar, Omar Dahi, Khalid Namez, Tareq Radi, Maria Bouzeid, Malihe Razazan, Aslı Bâli, Osama Esber, Muriam Haleh Davis, Abdullah al-Arian, Paola Messina, Nour Joudah, Michael Haddad, Elliott Colla, In’aam Issawi, Musa Hamideh, Edward Gaier, Samantha Brotman, Anjali Kamat, Allison Brown, Solène Maillet, Basileus Zeno, Mohammad Ali Nayel, Brittany Dawson, Katty Elhayek, Noah Black, Katie Jackson, Max Ajl, John Kallas, Michael Ernst, Alicia Cagle, Lama Khoury, Kevin Martin, and dozens more, with whom Asma came into contact. Asma was the proudest when she attended ASJ’s twentieth anniversary in 2013, as the journal continued to thrive under the editorship of Sherene Seikaly and, at that time, Nadya Sbaiti.

Asma’s fearless energy did not stop at print alone. When the United States invaded Iraq, and we took our foray into documentary filmmaking, she was there holding us up. Despite the risks of venturing into Baghdad weeks after the occupation, Asma co-funded what became ASI’s award-winning documentary About Baghdad, the transnational series What is Said About Arabs and Terrorism, and the forward-looking documentary The Other Threat: Arab and Muslim Immigrants in Europe. Asma was always interested, always ready to learn more, always reminding us of the urgency of the political moments we were lucky to experience with her. She believed we were on to something long before we believed it ourselves.

Asma’s contributions far exceeded the material foundations that made these collective projects possible. Most, if not all, of us at ASJ juggled doctoral work, ASI development, and, sometimes, full-time jobs. The Haddad household, with its own supportive small business headed by Asma’s two other children, Elie and Carole Haddad, continued to be a material incubator. For nearly three decades, Asma’s home was the laboratory where we could hatch plans, ideas, and dreams; hold weekly meetings, workshops, and mini-conferences, and, most of all, grow and learn. She fed, comforted, listened to, and made space for hundreds of team members over the years. She would not rest until everything was in its place, even after a day of laboring over stoves and serving multitudes from large trays of delectables (“Take this piece, you always ask for it”). Her food gave a new meaning to joy. Hunger was not an option at Asma’s. She fed us effortlessly with edible delicacies, with her commitment to social justice, and with her piercing observations around the circle of life and love that was her kitchen table. It was at that table that we debated, gossiped, and most of all laughed, well into the early hours of dawn. She was always the last one to call it a night.

Perhaps one of her lasting lessons was the power of friendship across generations. She did not lecture or preach or don the mantle of the all-knowing matriarch. Asma’s bravery in confronting and transgressing social norms and taboos made her the best sort of friend, comrade, and confidante. She taught us to love what we do, and to stand tall against the odds. When we thought we were doing well with our projects, she would lift us up to see a yet broader horizon, another milestone to surpass, and a loftier goal to achieve.

There were never any pretenses with Asma. She revealed her beauty and her flaws. She did not hide her imperfections and limitations. Her willingness and eagerness to learn has imparted on each of us the lessons of humility. In her life and in her death, she inspires the desire to proximate her humanity and resolve. Asma’s ability to transcend the era she hailed from was evident in her practice. Her home was a refuge. She forged comfort and empowerment. You could just be, at Asma’s, even in ways that tested social norms and conventions. This personal comfort was itself an experiment in freedom. We observed and consumed it whole.

Asma gifted each of us the “je ne sais quoi” glue that continues to bind us. Even for those who did not share the most intimate of moments and ideas, the abundance of her power and love is evident. She was a living example of what friendship and thoughtfulness is, in theory and practice. When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in early January 2019, with few precious weeks/months to live, she opted to postpone the immediate treatment needed. Instead, she traveled, with an inordinate amount of pain, back to what she calls home (Beirut and Damascus), and said goodbye to her life-long friends and family. When the doctors told her “you may not make it back,” she responded with her emphatic accent: “I don’t care.” Asma knew they would surely be denied a last encounter with each other, as many could not make it to the States to say goodbye. She made it back, underwent an albeit moot round of therapy unselfishly, against her own preferences, and decided to discontinue the process and go back to be at home, surrounded with her family and loved ones. Asma passed away shortly after at her home in Fairfax, Virginia, on 23 February.

With her passing many things die: her exquisite taste, her unstinting commitment to freedom, and a kitchen that was always full to the brim with delicious food, laughter, and the kinds of discussions that were taboo elsewhere. Asma tore through boundaries and norms seamlessly and with passion. She was an anchor of anchors. And while her death leaves us bereft, we carry her hope for different futures and her celebration of the present with us always.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Articles

12. Confronting A Colonial Rule of Property: The al-Sakhina Case in Mandate Palestine
Munir Fakher Eldin

34. The Sobky Recipe and the Struggle Over “The Popular” in Egypt
Chihab El Khachab

62. Comic Images & the Art of Witnessing: A Visual Analysis of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza
Nawal Musleh-Motut

90. No One to See Here: Genres of Neutralization and the Ongoing Nakba
Shir Alon

118. Resistance into Incitement: Translation, Legislation, “Early Detection,” and the Palestinian Poet’s Intention
Liron Mor

Reviews

156. Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East by Peter Wien
Reviewed by Jens Hanssen

161. Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq by Sara Pursley
Reviewed by Kevin Jones

166. Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt by Kenneth M. Cuno
Reviewed by Hussein A. H. Omar

171. A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 by Fahad Ahmad Bishara
Reviewed by Matthew S. Hopper

176. British-Ottoman Relations, 1661–1807: Commerce and Diplomatic Practice in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul by Michael Talbot
Reviewed by Pascale Barthe

181. The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race by Neda Maghbouleh
Reviewed by Randa Tawil

Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2018 Issue: Editor's Note and Table of Contents

12/14/2018

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVI, No. 2
Fall 2018

Editor's Note:

We are proud to feature a collection of pieces that innovate new methodological approaches, confront the relationship between knowledge and power, and speak to the urgent concerns of the present, infrastructure, ecology, migration, and war. In “Epicures and Experts: The Drinking Water Controversy in British Colonial Cairo,” Shehab Ismail explores taste, class, and the environment. When in 1905 the Cairo Water Company altered its source of intake to deep wells instead of the Nile, it pitted experts, officials, and the urban poor in a battle over knowledge, medical traditions, and water practices. In tracing the five year struggle in which the palate became a battleground, Ismail reveals how taste, as a mode of embodied knowledge became a site of confrontation between heterogenous epistemic persuasions. In “From Mandate Borders to the Diaspora: Rashaya’s Transnational Suffering and the Making of Lebanon in 1925,” Reem Bailony traces debates on the social, political, and economic constructions of Lebanon and Syria, both in the borders of the French Mandate and well outside of it. By placing mahjar studies and Middle East studies in close conversation, Bailony both calls for and provides a model for a methodology that transgresses the territorial confines of the nation-state. In doing so, she reveals the crucial role of the mahjar in consolidating Lebanon as nation- ally distinct from Syria and in need of different sectarian arrangements. Neha Vora and Ahmed Kanna contribute reflections on two decades of ethnographic experiences researching Dubai and other cities in the Arabian Penninsula. “De-exceptionalizing the Field: Anthropological Reflections on Migration, Labor, and Identity in Dubai,” explores and critiques scholarly identity and authority in a call to develop understandings of Gulf cities that address migration, diaspora, place, and belonging. Vora and Kanna thus put the individual experiences of politics, geography, racialization, and minoritization into conversation with the knowledge that is produced on these historical forces. Graham Pitts reveals how the “human ecology” of Lebanon evolved according to the logic of an expanding and retracting global capitalism in “The Ecology of Migration: Remittances in World War I Mount Lebanon.” In detailing the material and environmental history of migration as well as highlighting World War I, the famine, and remittances, Pitts traces a broader trajectory of Lebanon’s history. In “Writing Shame in Asad’s Syria,” Judith Naeff analyzes how the Syrian author Khaled Khalifa built feelings of shame into the literary structure of his novelNo Knives in the Kitchens of this City. She traces the multiple forms of shame and how, like rot, its pervasive spread unravels relations. Shame, she suggests, is at once contagious and repulsive, and is one site to both reflect on and understand the unraveling of Syrian social landscapes under the Asads’ authoritarianism. We offer as always a robust set of reviews and review essays that feature the latest contributions to the study of the Middle East.

Table of Contents

Articles

8. Epicures and Experts: The Drinking Water Controversy in British Colonial Cairo
Shehab Ismail

44. From Mandate Borders to the Diaspora: Rashaya's Transnational Suffering and the Making of Lebanon in 1925
Reem Bailony

74. De-Exceptionalizing the Field: Anthropological Reflections on Migration, Labor, and Identity in Dubai
Neha Vora and Ahmed Kanna

102. The Ecology of Migration: Remittances in World War I Mount Lebanon
Graham Auman Pitts

130. Writing Shame in Asad’s Syria
Judith Naeff

Reviews

150. Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State by Shira Robinson
Reviewed by Maha Nassar

155. Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East by Adam Hanieh
Reviewed by Benoit Challand

160. Qatar: Securing the Global Ambitions of a City-State by David B. Roberts
Reviewed by Jocelyn Sage Mitchell

164. The Ottoman Scramble for Africa by Mostafa Minawi
Reviewed by David Gutman

169. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation by Zeina G. Halabi
Reviewed by Alexa Firat

174. The World in A Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition by Elias Muhanna
Reviewed by Matthew L. Keegan

Review Essays

180. Empire and Capitalism in the Western Indian Ocean
by Hollian Wint

Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire
by Matthew S. Hopper

Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea
by Johan Mathew

Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
by Thomas F. McDow

Susanna Ferguson's ASJ Article Selected as Co-Winner by Women Historians of the Middle East

12/6/2018

Arab Studies Journal is pleased to announce that Susanna Ferguson’s “‘A Fever for An Education’: Pedagogical Thought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914” (Spring 2018) was selected by the Women Historians of the Middle East (WHOME) group as a co-winner of their 2018 Graduate Student Paper Prize.

WHOME awards an annual prize for the best article about Middle Eastern history written by a female-identifying graduate student (Masters or PhD). The award aims to bring attention to the innovative scholarship women are producing in the field. The article may be about any period in Middle Eastern history and may address any subfield in the discipline. Nomination can be made by the author, academic advisors, professors, or journal editors. The winner was announced at the WHOME meeting at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting.

WHOME is a group of female-identifying historians dedicated to creating an inclusive space to inspire and promote women’s historical research on the Middle East, as well as to protect and mentor across and with ranks. Its membership is open to all graduate students and those holding a doctorate within the discipline.

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2018 Issue: Editor's Note and Table of Contents

10/4/2018

Arab Studies Journal
Vol. XVI, No. 1
Spring 2018

Editor's Note:

We are proud to feature a diverse array of disciplines and approaches in this issue. In “The Nahda in Parliament: Taha Husayn’s Career Building Knowledge Production Institutions, 1922-1952” Hussam R. Ahmed traces the bureaucratic and institutional force of one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. He reveals new ways to think about the ties between intellectual work, knowledge production, pedagogy, and the Egyptian state. In “‘Jerusalem, We Have a Problem’: Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination,” Gil Hochberg offers a reading of both the colonial legacies of the sci-f genre and the potential for its radical upending. Hochberg ponders the question of Palestine in a futuristic post-factual and post-national time of becoming. In “‘A Fever for an Education’: Pedagogical Thought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914,” Susanna Ferguson explores education’s appeal and promise of stability and reform in the nineteenth century Arab world. In “Infrastructure Crises in Beirut and the Struggle to (Not) Reform the Lebanese State,” Éric Verdeil approaches public infrastructure as a site of political struggle. Verdeil challenges the conventional readings that assert the power of neoliberalism and sectarianism to marginalize state institutions, showing instead how infrastructural policy instruments accentuate Lebanese society’s gaps and inequalities. Finally, in “If We All Leave, Who Will Cut the String: Exiled Intellectuals in Ghada al-Samman’s Thought,” Louis Yako contributes an engaged read of exile, the role of the intellectual, and the possibilities of revolution.

This issue also features the usual robust array of book reviews. With this issue, we bid farewell to a long-time pillar of Arab Studies Journal and its book review team. Allison Brown, an inimitable editor and thinker, will be departing after a decade of teaching and leading our team with the intellectual depth and editorial precision that have made the journal what it is today. While she may not grace our pages, she will always be part of the ASJ family.

Table of Contents

Articles

8. The Nahda in Parliament: Taha Husayn’s Career Building Knowledge Production Institutions, 1922-1952
Hussam R. Ahmed

34. “Jerusalem, We Have a Problem”: Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination
Gil Z. Hochberg

58. “A Fever for an Education”: Pedagogical Thought and Social Transformation in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1861-1914
Susanna Ferguson

84. Infrastructure Crises in Beirut and the Struggle to (Not) Reform the Lebanese State
Éric Verdeil

114. If We All Leave, Who Will Cut the String: Exiled Intellectuals in Ghada al-Samman’s Thought
Louis Yako

Reviews

140. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, by Laura U. Marks
Reviewed by Hend F. Alawadhi

145. Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by Wael Abu-‘Uksa
Reviewed by Susanna Ferguson

150.Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library, the Ashrafiyya Library Catalogue, by Konrad Kirschler
Reviewed by Steve Tamari

155. Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power, by Joanne Randa Nucho
Reviewed by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

160. Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life, by Farah Al-Nakib
Reviewed by Arbella Bet-Shlimon

165. Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin, by Berna Turam
Reviewed by Hilal Alkan

170. Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948–2012, by Thomas Philip Abowd
Reviewed by Marwan D. Hanania

174. Britain’s Hegemony in Palestine and the Middle East, 1917–56: Changing Strategic Imperatives, by Michael J. Cohen
Reviewed by Simon Davis

Review Essays

180. New Perspectives on Communal Memory, Intergenerational Identity, and the Algerian War in Contemporary France
by Chris Rominger

From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities
by Claire Eldridge

Hériter 1962: Harkis et immigrés algériens à l’épreuve des appartenances nationales
by Giulia Fabbiano

188. Resisting the Slow Violence of the North African and West Asian University
by Corinna Mullin

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education
by Henry A. Giroux

Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without
by Ramón Grosfoguel, Roberto D. Hernández, and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez

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