39th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference
Conceiving Time and Navigating Space: Spatiotemporal Relations in the Middle East and North Africa

About the Conference

Since its inception more than three decades ago, the annual Middle East History and Theory Conference at the University of Chicago has earned a reputation as one of the premier academic gatherings in the field. Capitalizing on its setting at a university with a strong tradition in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, MEHAT has established itself as a major forum for emerging scholars across disciplines to share their research with peers, receive constructive feedback, and establish fruitful academic relationships. Participants come from North America, Europe, and the Middle East, and they have traditionally included researchers at every stage of their careers. This year's conference theme is Conceiving Time and Navigating Space: Spatiotemporal Relations in the Middle East and North Africa. This event is free and open to the public. You will find a map of conference locations here.

Please register for the conference here.

This year's conference was organized by MES PhD Student Sharidan Russell with support from The University of Chicago's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Conference Program

Friday, May 2nd:

1:00-1:30PM: Arrival and check-in — Stuart Hall

1:30-2:00PM: Opening Remarks — Stuart Hall 104

2:00-3:40PM: Session 1 Post-Revolutionary Iranian Imaginaries — SSRB 105
Discussant: Prof. Alireza Doostdar (Divinity School, University of Chicago)

Fateme Tavakoli, UChicago — Reconstructing the Self in Confinement: Space, Performance and Memory in Evin Prison

This work examines the relationship between identity formation and spatial imaginaries within Evin Prison, a notorious site of incarceration and violence in Iran known for its political repression. Building on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical framework, as well as Lefebvre’s concept of space as socially produced and Massey’s view of space as relational networks, it explores how political prisoners, particularly those detained for their participation in anti-government protests or vocal critiques of the regime, navigate, resist, and negotiate their identities in a highly surveilled and oppressive environment. Through a qualitative analysis of prison literature, testimonies, and narratives from various sources—including the experiences documented by Iranian organizations, memoirs, and fictional accounts—this research aims to elucidate how prisoners construct their identities amidst the dehumanizing conditions of incarceration. The project highlights the centrality of spatial imaginaries in shaping prisoners’ experiences and the meanings they attach to their surroundings. By focusing on the unique conditions of Evin Prison, the thesis argues that even in the face of systemic violence and surveillance, political prisoners employ various strategies of resistance and identity assertion. This work not only contributes to the limited understanding of Iranian carceral history but also amplifies the voices of political prisoners and offers a deeper glimpse into their ongoing struggles and resilience. Ultimately, this work hopes to serve as a call for a broader moral and historical reckoning regarding the pervasive culture of violence and impunity within Iran’s carceral system.

Saeed Saffar-Heidari, University of Illinois-Chicago — Mobilizing Nostalgias: The Field of Monarchical Memory in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Having sealed the long monarchical history of Iran by overthrowing the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979) and constituting the new political order of the Islamic Republic, the cataclysmic event of the 1979 Revolution has largely determined and dominated the cultural discourse of post-revolutionary Iran. The epistemic rivalry to represent the monarchical legacy of the Ancien Regime is an arena around which a conflictual plurality of narratives was introduced and developed concerning the historical truth about the demised Pahlavi order. The paper aims to shed light on the field of monarchical memory, referring to the various actors competing to legitimize their discursive mode of remembrance of pre-1979 Iran. Besides outlining the field’s actors and their visions and divisions, I account for the way that a specific epistemic narrative about pre-1979 Iran has recently found political credibility in forging a symbolic alliance to challenge the official narrative of the in-power Iranian regime and succeeded in enacting a new mode of resistance culture and political activism, revolving around the glorification of the pre-1979 Iran. According to this emerging narrative, the Iranian Revolution is widely portrayed as a historical mistake that requires to be rectified or canceled. I, therefore, argue for the significance of the global upsurging of such a manner of nostalgic politics, laying the foundation and legitimizing a new pattern of reactionary political practice while running the risk of the obscuration of historical truth.

Pouya Nekouei, University of Texas-Austin — History of Political Aurality in Modern Iran: How History Reverberates into the Present

This presentation examines the ideas of sonic sovereignty and political aurality in modern Iran from the final years of the Qajar dynasty (1921) to the military coup in 1953. In doing this, this article argues for the temporality of the political imagination of the middle classes in contemporary Iran. Drawing from the theoretical insights of sound history and sound studies, this article shows three transformations in modern Iran's sonic renditions of political sovereignty in the early twentieth century. The military coup in 1921 was a transformational moment in the political and sonic history of modern Iran, ending the political rivalries of the late Qajar period. The period from 1925 to 1941 – the early Pahlavi period - marked an iron-fist era wherein sound and music informed the ideological formation of an authoritarian modernizing state. With the outbreak of WWII and its influence on the Iranian political landscape, the authoritarian monarchy was replaced with a relatively open space. However, the ideological sonic sovereign notions of the previous period under the authoritarian monarchy (1925 – 1941) continued between 1941 and 1953 but were diluted given the weakened structure of the monarchy. Finally, the last part looks at the question of sonic sovereignty during the Oil Nationalization movement in Iran until the coup in 1953. The final section shows how sound and music constituted notions of popular sovereignty. While historians have hitherto looked into written sources, this article focuses on sound and music and attempts to revisit this period in Iranian history. This paper concludes with an argument on the temporal continuity of the middle class's political imagination in modern Iran. As it will be shown, the political imagination of middle-class Iranians remained confined to state institutions and the ideology of King-centrism, which reverberates today in the political landscape, leaving fewer collective alternatives for political future and liberating horizons.

Afsaneh Kalantary, City Colleges of Chicago — Iranian Diaspora and Timescapes of Belonging

Drawing on prior ethnographic research with the Iranian diaspora in Berlin, Germany, and my personal lived experience within Iranian-American immigrant and diasporic communities in Northern California and Chicago, I use a combination of autoethnographic personal narratives and ethnographic observations to examine how my interlocutors navigate their multiply situated diasporic identities. This exploration focuses on how they adapt to new cultural landscapes while simultaneously maintaining strong connections to their homeland, revealing the complexities of negotiating identity and belonging in the context of migration and diaspora. This inquiry delves into how my interlocutors perceive time and space through a complex interplay of memory, displacement, a yearning for their “homeland,” and a quest for rootedness. It highlights the ongoing negotiation between their current location and the imagined space/time of their origins, often marked by a sense of “in-betweenness,” where they are simultaneously rooted in both places yet fully belong to neither. This experience is often conveyed through a fusion of cultural practices, invented traditions, and nostalgic narratives that bridge across different times and places, connecting them to their imagined ancestral past as they navigate their present reality in a new location.

Modern Literary Approaches Across Borders and Languages — SSRB 106
Discussant: Prof. Khalid Lyamlahy (Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago)

Ismail I. Ibrahim, University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign — Of Non‑Native Cultivation: The Intersections of Language and Identity in Nigerian Arabic Novels

Modern Nigerian Arabic literature emerged from the contact between the Middle Eastern, North African, and West African cultures over the centuries. The first contact was established in the tenth century CE mainly through trade relations and the advent of Sūfī Arab scholars. This intercultural marriage further resulted into the penetration of Arabic words into several Nigerian languages. Initially, Arabic served as a language of commerce between the Arab merchants and the local people and then became the language of Islam when the West African people started to become Muslims. The contributions of Ahmad Baba al‑Timbuktī, Uthman b. Muhammad Fodio, Muhammad Salga and Abu Bakr Mijinyawa remain some of the early Arabic‑Islamic writings in the region. The twenty‑first century witnesses the rise of a new generation of Arabic writers in the Nigerian literary space as they delve into socio‑cultural and political themes. This study diverges from the previous works by focusing on the influence of Nigerian languages on Arabic. This phenomenon is what I term as ‘nativization’ of Arabic which translates as incorporation of literal translation of Nigerian proverbs, local expressions, and indigenous words into the Nigerian Arabic writings. Through a close reading of Al‑Hijri’s Khādim al‑Watan (2008) and Abdullah’s Ahl al‑Qurā (2014), I shall explore the intersections of their use of Arabic language and their identity as Nigerian writers. Ultimately, I argue that the ‘Nigerianized’ Arabic of the novels are tools of identity.

Phoebe Carter, Kenyon College — Dialing Distant Futures: Spatiotemporal Disjuncture and the Transatlantic Telephone in Lebanese Diaspora Literature

When the first transatlantic telephone call was placed in 1927, one of the callers exclaimed, “Distance doesn’t mean anything anymore!” Yet, as transatlantic telecommunications promised to collapse distances between diaspora communities and their homelands in the early twentieth century, writers critically examined these claims of seamless connection through innovative literary forms. Through an analysis of Lebanese Brazilian author Shukri al‑Khūri’s Muḥādathāt tilifūniyya bayna al‑Brāzīl wa Lubnān (Telephone Calls Between Brazil and Lebanon, 1941), I challenge assumptions that new communication technologies were necessarily experienced as enabling more immediate forms of long‑distance participation in homeland affairs — a possibility which took on heightened significance amidst competing visions for Lebanon’s future under the French Mandate. Consisting of a series of satirical telephone conversations between a Lebanese journalist in Brazil and various interlocutors in Lebanon, al‑Khūri’s text is marked by missed connections, misrecognition, and failed interventions that reveal novel forms of temporal and spatial disjuncture. Repeatedly, the journalist attempts to reach Lebanon’s president in order to proffer a warning about the nation’s future. Through its use of telephonic dialogue as literary form, the text exposes the gap between the promise and reality of instantaneous long‑distance participation. The very promise of simultaneity introduced by new technologies heightened emigrants’ sense of temporal disconnect from the nation, producing new forms of diasporic consciousness marked by frustrated immediacy. Al‑Khūri’s text thus articulates a diasporic experience of modernity that locates technological progress not as the solution to emigration’s temporal and spatial ruptures, but as their very source.

Esther Kim, University of Chicago — Palimpsests of Silence: Collecting Lost Voices and Bodies from French Archives in Algerian and Korean Narratives

Examining Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia alongside the Korean novels Li Jin by Shin Kyung‑sook and Li Sim by Kim Tak‑hwan, I explore acts of recueillir (“to collect”) through Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation—a method that reimagines histories derived from fragmented or oppressive archives. In Maghrebi literature, Assia Djebar excavates French colonial archives to reclaim the abandoned bodies and silenced voices of Algerian women. Through the metaphor of gathering “flowers of death,” I examine how, by working with colonial texts in the colonizer’s language, Djebar rewrites history as a palimpsest, challenging hegemonic narratives, reconfiguring historical memory, and transforming collected fragments into a space of recueillement. Similarly, in Korean literature, the character of Li Jin—featured in Li Jin and Li Sim—represents a collection of historical fragments and cultural identities. A court dancer from late 19th‑century Korea who becomes the first Joseon woman to set foot in France and Morocco, Li Jin’s elusive historical presence is based on a single brief mention of “Li‑Tsin” in the 1905 memoir En Corée by Frandin, a French consul in Korea. Drawing on this scant record, the authors imaginatively reconstruct her life and give voice to a figure caught in an “in‑between” identity, thereby illuminating the tensions of colonialism, modernization, and the fall of Joseon. By juxtaposing Djebar’s Algerian women with Li Jin, I explore transcultural parallels in how these authors collect women’s bodies and voices—through engagement with French archives and critical fabulation—to disrupt history and create space for forgotten identities.

Youssef Boucetta, Northwestern — (Trans)national Dysphorias: Nation, Language and the Body in Contemporary Spanish‑Moroccan Literature

In Dysphoria Mundi (2022), Paul B. Preciado argues for a figurative understanding of dysphoria as a hard to define malaise, a “political and aesthetic inadequacy” of existing forms of subjectivation. Allegorizing modern science’s incomplete understanding of transness, Preciado sees the concept, paradoxically, as the image of what it fails to explain, and, perhaps too broadly, as a universal epochal diagnosis. In this paper, I use the central tension running through Preciado’s discussion of dysphoria as a point of departure to examine a distinct set of geographically interstitial literary subjectivities which I call (trans)national dysphorias, foregrounded in contemporary Spanish‑Moroccan literature. I situate these (trans)national dysphorias as specifically emergent from the interstices of the Morocco‑Schengen border, centering the chokepoint between Morocco and the European Union as an analytically significant geography defined by its fragmented locations—indeed the border is (re)produced in North‑Africa, the Mediterranean, and on the European continent, all at once. Examining the work of Youssef El Maimouni, Karima Ziali, Brigitte Vasallo, and Laura Casielles as primary sources, I comment on the kinships between contested interrelated representations that distance themselves from established categories of gender, religion, nation, and language. In this sense, dysphoria is an archipelago of late postcolonial symptoms, an elastic concept enveloping a mutating reality. Reading (trans)national dysphorias in contemporary Spanish‑Moroccan literature allows for a shuttling back and forth between the individual scale of embodied subjectivities, and the scale of regional nation‑states. The two scales are made commensurable through narrative approaches that connect by capturing a malaise of national and linguistic belonging while projecting avenues for resistance against old dominant paradigms.

Modernization and Political Economies Shaping Space — SSRB 107
Discussant: Prof. Aaron Jakes (History, University of Chicago)

Bridget Peak, MIT — Planning and Building in Omani Dreamtime

This paper explores the temporalities of planning and building a modern Oman through the lens of the unrealized 1973 Master Plan for a New Capital by French architect and urban planner Michel Écochard. More specifically, this paper engages with the friction of global and local periodizations of modernity in light of Oman’s oil‑induced ‘dreamtime’, elucidated by Mandana Limbert in her analysis of the changes experienced by the people of Bahla, Oman with the discovery of oil. It applies Limbert’s reconfiguration of Reinhart Koselleck’s “horizon of expectation” to a “horizon of sameness” in pre‑1970 Oman to speculate that the expectant temporality of planning – which I suggest paradoxically anchored both the rhetoric of Sultan Said bin Taimur pre‑1970 and international modernism – was fundamentally at odds with Sultan Qaboos’s messianic ascension to power in 1970 and the narrative of spontaneous development curated by his Oman. This paper, then, diverges from the presupposition that the architect’s renderings are necessarily protasis to the built, but firmly underwrites architectural historian Daniel Abramson’s argument that “...to pursue such questions about the consequences of the unbuilt — and not just to visualize its forms — would be to open architectural history more fully to history.” This paper offers a way forward in the absence of unfettered access to archival materials, demonstrating that that which is within reach, however compelling or not, can be used to tell new stories.

Mehdi Hoseini, Boston College — Suez Canal Nationalization: A Class Analysis of Nationalism in the Context of the Modern World System

This article provides a class analysis to explain nationalist movements in the peripheral countries within the context of geographical expansion of world economy, in other words, the modern world system. The existing literature of World System Theory regards anticapitalist movements in the core countries as class‑based antisystemic movements which advocated a socialist ideology, and the anticapitalist movements in the periphery as nationalist antisystemic movements which advocated a nationalist ideology. This bifurcation underemphasizes the varying class roots of anticolonial movements in the Global South which evolved into nationalism. This article argues that the expansion of global economy to the periphery brought about a process of colonization through unequal trade deals and warfare which produced a pattern of local resistances against dispossession and exploitation of resources. Also, the article contends that ideology does not necessarily determine the base of the movement. Adding a class analysis to the framework of World System Theory, this article explains that social classes basically forged nationalist movements in the periphery in response to exploitative expansion of global economy. As an empirical case, this article has chosen the nationalist movement in Egypt leading to nationalization of Suez Canal in 1956. Using a process‑tracing method, this article traces back the formation of Egypt’s nationalist movement in three episodes: Urabi Revolt (1879‑82), Independence Movement (1919‑22), and Egypt Revolution (1952‑56). Deploying a class analysis, the article shows that both local elite and grassroots forces were at play in resistance to exploitative integration into global economy while shaping a nationalist movement to break up from a colonial rule.

Camilla Flanesca, UC Santa Barbara — Toxic Archives: Memory and Political Economy in El Borma

How does memory shape material and ideological forces in political economy? Focusing on El Borma, an oil field on the border between Tunisia and Algeria, this paper explores memory as both material and cultural. El Borma was established in the 1960s through a partnership between the Tunisian government and the Italian energy company ENI. Decades of relentless oil extraction left behind a lake of biochemical sludge, visible from satellite imaging. The lake is more than waste; it is a living archive, reflecting the intertwined legacies of extraction on landscapes, labor, and bodies. Each layer of sludge tells a story of industrial labor, transnational capital flows, and ecological harm. Pollution seeps into human bodies, leaving biological vulnerabilities, and intergenerational consequences, turning pollution into both ecological and embodied memory. Cultural memory is equally vulnerable. Just as environments, memory can be eroded by suppression, and manipulation. Nationalist narratives glorify El Borma as a triumph of industrial progress, erasing rural voices and obscuring environmental degradation. Local narratives resist dominant accounts, reframing relationships to the land and its toxic legacy. These contested memories do not merely reflect political economy; they actively shape it, sustaining systems of exploitation while also enabling resistance. My project begins with an analysis of ecological and cultural memory to further investigate how it shapes biological memory. This paper engages with and fosters a dialogue between scholarship on political economy and memory studies. It illuminates the spatiotemporal dynamics of extraction and dispossession and reflects on memory as a multidisciplinary site of inquiry.

Murat Bozluolcay, UChicago — Mapping Sovereignty: Fractures and Coherence in Ottoman Economic Space

Any narrative of the transformation that the Ottoman Empire went through in the nineteenth century must refer to the reconfiguration of economic topography in the Empire. No wonder we rely on more spatial metaphors, such as “peripheralization,” “centralization,” “opening up,” “dis/integration,” “territorialization,” when we talk of the nineteenth century. However, as this paper will demonstrate, spatialization of economic difference was not a matter of disinterested documentation but, instead, was marked by shifts in economic policies, relationship to the provinces, and new ideological orientations on sovereignty. For example, as the Ottoman bureaucracy started producing new forms of economic knowledge on commercial, agricultural, and financial activities in the Empire, booming port cities on the imperial coast like Beirut, Smyrna, or Salonica were differentiated from economic hinterlands. The former became sites of mercantile capital, extra-sovereign claims, and European finance whereas, in the latter, traditional economy and Ottoman sovereignty reigned supreme. In this paper, I will focus on various contemporary descriptions of Ottoman economy in the early nineteenth century and the ways in which these narratives territorialized Ottoman economy. How different actors mapped economic activity in the Empire varied greatly from political economic writings such as the anonymous Risale-i Tedbir-i Ümran-ı Mülki in the 1830s to bureaucratic correspondence, from commercial reports and intelligence in Takvîm-i Vekâyi or contemporary European publications to record keeping practices like customs registers or the provincial yearbooks (Salnâmes). Comparing different spatial imaginaries of the economy in these historical sources sheds light on competing stakes on Ottoman economy in the nineteenth century and offers new areas of research for the study of Ottoman economic thought.

4:00-5:30PM — Keynote Address with Prof. Brahim El Guabli: "Saharanism and its Afterlives: Historicizing a Universalizing Desert Imagination" — SSRB 122

5:30-6:30PM — Opening Night Reception — SSRB Tea Room (201)

Saturday May 3rd:

8:30-10:00AM — Breakfast — Saieh Hall 112

9:15-10:45AM — Session 2

Alternative Approaches to Space and Time in the Islamic Tradition — Saieh Hall 146
Discussant: Prof. Yousef Casewit (Divinity School, University of Chicago)

Muhammad Usama, Duke University — A Mughal Theory of History: Irtifāqāt in Shāh Walī Allāh’s Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bālighah (The Conclusive Proof from God)

This paper examines the theory of history in Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bālighah (Conclusive Proof from God), a seminal text by the 18th‑century Mughal jurist and philosopher Shāh Walī Allāh (d.1762), written during the reign of Muḥammad Shah (1719–1748). It argues that Walī Allāh’s theory of history offers a historicization of religious traditions that is compatible with an Islamic modernity. The paper demonstrates that this theory emerges from both the internal crises of the Mughal Empire and the intellectual influences of Persian philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā, and possibly Ibn Khaldūn within the Indian Ocean context. Central to Walī Allāh’s thought, as I interpret it, is a dialectical relationship between metaphysics and history, expressed through the concepts of Iqterābāt (approaches) and Irtifāqāt (supports of civilization). This dialectical framework enables the historicization of religious thought and affirms the possibility of Muslim modernity as part of an Islamic conception of time and historical theory. By examining this text, I aim to contribute to the existing scholarship about Islamic conceptions of time and historical theory, particularly in the works of Stephen Blake and Gerhard Böwering.

Atiyeh Taghiei, UCLA — Across Time and Sectarian Lines: Pilgrimage to Jannat al-Baqīʿ

While typically associated with Ṣūfī and Shīʿī communities in both popular perception and scholarship, veneration of saints and pilgrimage (ziyāra) to their shrines also holds considerable significance in the Sunnī tradition. Sunnī elites have a long history of shrine patronage and development, paralleling similar practices within the Shīʿī tradition. In contrast with elaborate shrine complexes across the Islamicate world, modern cemeteries in Arabia are typically characterized by unmarked graves. Scholars have often interpreted this simplicity as evidence of a unique, long‑standing adherence to Islamic proscriptions against the embellishment of burials. In this paper, I argue that this simplicity is a modern development in Arabian cemeteries. I explore the case study of Jannat al-Baqīʿ and examine textual and visual representations of the cemetery to develop a fuller picture of pilgrimage to the site across centuries. To facilitate this, I compare Jannat al-Baqīʿ with similar Medinan cemeteries like Jannat al-Muʿallā to enrich our understanding of the visual landscape of pre‑modern pilgrimage. I trace the evolution of Baqīʿ by examining its depiction in works including 16th‑century illustrated manuscripts of the Futūḥ al-Ḥaramayn and the 19th‑century travelogue of Mirza Farahani. By examining surviving mausolea in the broader region alongside historical depictions of Baqīʿ, we are able to situate ziyāra liturgies and literature within their contextual landscapes. This approach enables a deeper understanding of the multi‑sensory nature of the pilgrim’s experience. An examination of this evidence also reveals that the cultures of saint veneration and pilgrimage are more similar across sectarian divides than previously imagined.

Hasan Tauha, Harvard Divinity School — Phenomenological Approaches to the Ghayb in Early Modern Islamic Thought: The Case of Aḥmad Sirhindī (d.1624)

This paper argues that the early modern Islamic east witnesses a transformation in the relationship of Muslim thinkers to the ghayb, or unseen. This argument centers on a reading of the Letters (Maktūbāt) of Aḥmad Sirhindī (d.1624, based in northern India) which finds his push toward waḥdat al-shuhūd emblematic of a broader phenomenological reorientation across his thought. For instance, Sirhindī tolerates the reified cosmologies of philosophers but also deems these presumptuous and scholastic. He likewise affirms the historiographical method of hadith scholars in its intention but then sidesteps the same for its obscurantism. Even more importantly, perhaps, he finds the immanent world to be virtually bereft of supernatural forces and entities. While Sirhindī does have a pronounced vision of spiritual ascent, this is an interiorized ascent which we should understand in phenomenological terms (possibly in meaningful—if genealogically disparate—parallel with developments soon to occur in European philosophy). Sirhindī’s phenomenological shift not only shapes subsequent Muslim thought in South Asia but also resonates with similarly transformative trends in contemporary Southeast Asia and Persia, as seen with Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī (d.1658) and Mullā Ṣadrā (d.1635), respectively. This paper considers these connections and their significance. In addition, finally, to pursuing the ghayb as a question in intellectual history and looking to a period and region understudied in this regard, this paper serves to challenge grand‑narratives whereby any step in the direction of disenchantment is necessarily wrought upon the Muslim world through its infamous encounter with Europe.

Nationalism and Modernism in the Late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey — Saieh Hall 203
Discussant: Prof. Hale Yılmaz (Historical Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

Ozge Kulak, Southern Illinois University Carbondale — The Turco‑Egyptian Administration in the Sudan (1821–1885): The Turkish Impact on the Formation of Sudanese Nationalism and Culture

By examining the impact of the Turco‑Egyptian administration in the Sudan in the 19th century, this study argues that the primary factors catalyzing Sudanese nationalism were the exploitative economic policies and governance under the rule of Mehmed Ali Pasha, the ambitious Khedive of Egypt, and his dynasty in Egypt, beginning in 1805. The establishment of authority over the Sudan’s resources and the disruption of traditional power structures by the Egyptian officials imposing excessive taxation on agriculture and participating actively in the slave trade caused widespread resentment among both northern Muslim and southern non-Muslim communities as well as across various social and economic groups from merchants to slaves. The Mahdist movement that emerged in 1881 and overthrew the Turco‑Egyptian rule in 1885 in the territories roughly defining Sudan’s modern borders marked a turning point in Sudanese history in terms of nationalism and collective resistance. This movement was not only the result of the administrative and economic impacts of the Turco‑Egyptian rule, but also its failure to break the influence of Arabic and Islamic elements in the northern cultural sphere, which formed the definition of Sudanese identity and generated long‑term problems rooted in the ethnic, religious, and cultural heterogeneity in the territory. In this regard, by challenging Eurocentric perspectives that neglect nationalist movements before the imperial expansion of Britain, this study critically examines the complex relationship between Mehmed Ali Pasha’s exploitative governance as an oriental colonial power and the rise of the Mahdist movement as an embodiment of nationalist resistance.

Emine Turkmen, Southern Illinois University Carbondale — The Marshall Plan Modernization Program and Public Health in Turkey in the late 1940s and 1950s

The research explores the Marshall Plan modernization program in Turkey and how it improved public health and scientific practices in Turkey in the late 1940s and 1950s. In Turkey, the Marshall Plan modernization program went beyond technical and economic fields. It encapsulated modernizing public health services and policies and redefined hygiene and sanitation practices in the country. Additionally, the Marshall Aid funds’ use in disease eradication campaigns, and the Marshall Plan health publications also raised awareness of health, hygiene, and scientific education among the villagers in Turkey. Drawing on extensive archival research in Turkey and the United States, the study reveals how public health became a critical aspect of the Marshall Plan modernization program, which aimed at countering Communism in Turkey. The research first revisits the Marshall Plan modernization program and explains how Turkey became a beneficiary of such a plan. Second, it focuses on the Marshall Aid fund’s use in public health services, the disease eradication campaigns such as the Malaria Eradication Campaign (MEP) and Smallpox Eradication Campaign (SEP). Finally, the research investigates how international public health became a critical part of the American Cold War foreign policy and served the broader goal of containing Communism in Turkey and the Middle East. It expands the scope of Marshall Plan Studies and contributes to the social and cultural aspect of the Cold War historiography.

Steve Wininger, Southern Illinois University Carbondale — Kurdish Nationalism: When did it first appear and how does it affect Kurdish unity and the pursuit of defining Kurdish nationalism?

Many Western scholars claim that Kurdish nationalism formed in opposition to the new states that were formed in the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This paper is part of a larger project and seeks to discover how the term nationalism or Kurdish nationalism is used by Kurds in the Tennessee diaspora, and what they base their definition on. This paper argues that although Kurdish identity, as well as other ethnic group identity did exist, national identity was the result of state-building projects. Oftentimes, history, especially ancient history, is an important part of building a national identity. For the Kurds, there are two works that predate the modern national state. Sharafnama, which is a book written by the late sixteen hundred prince popularly known as Şeref Xan is one of the oldest works to discuss Kurdish nationalism, or at least the idea of a Kurdish nation. The second important work written by Kurdish poet Ehmedê Xanî is a love story titled Mem û Zîn. Originally, the manuscript was read as a tragic love story, however, modern nationalists have adopted it to support their claim that Kurdish nationalism dates back hundreds of years. The use of ethnography and interviews with Kurdish people in Nashville will be used to give insight about how Kurdish nationalism in diaspora is defined.

Queer Approaches to Time and Space — Saieh Hall 122
Discussant: Rana Ghuloom (Comparative Literature, University of Chicago)

Syed Taha Kaleem, Brandeis University — Queer Futures in the Petro-State: Temporality, Oil, and Sexuality in Qatar

This paper examines the underexplored relationship between the oil and gas economy and sexuality in Qatar, with a focus on how oil shapes queer temporality and futurity. Building on recent scholarship that emphasizes oil’s influence on social and cultural institutions, it moves beyond discussions of economic growth to investigate how the petro‑economy generates speculative possibilities for queer life. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, the study documents moments of queer potentiality that emerge through the oil industry’s infrastructural, economic, and social impact. By centering these moments, the paper expands theoretical conversations on the temporal dimensions of oil’s power, particularly as it intersects with queerness, beyond established frameworks of capital accumulation and sex work. This research further explores oil’s “mythic and mystic” qualities, theorizing how these dynamics inform queer subjectivities and practices in Qatar’s petro‑modernity. It highlights the paradoxical ways in which the oil economy both disciplines and enables non‑normative sexualities, creating openings for reimagining queer futures in a context shaped by state control and surveillance. Through this analysis, the paper contributes to broader discussions on the social impact of oil, particularly within the Gulf, offering a new lens on the intersections of temporality, queerness, and resource economies.

Sarah Kaleem, UChicago — The Queer Touch Of Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj and Iqbāl Bāno: A Comparative Study of Dissidents in Political Islam

The narratives of al-Ḥallāj, a 10th‑century Persian Sufi mystic, and Iqbal Bāno, a prominent singer in 1980s Pakistan, exemplify–what Carolyn Dinshaw would note–as a queer historical touch that challenges established authority and norms. Al-Ḥallāj’s defiant proclamation, “I am the Real,” uttered during his execution, reflects a convergence of corporeality and transcendence, showcasing a dissonance between his spiritual practices and societal expectations. This complexity deepens as his manner of dress fluctuates, embodying his deviation from Islamic norms. The execution, marked by brutality, reveals how al-Ḥallāj’s physicality becomes a medium for expressing intimacy with God and undermining the Caliphate’s authority. Similarly, Bāno’s bold choice to wear a black sari, prohibited by the Zia regime, while reciting Faiz Aḥmed Faiz’s politically charged poem “Hum Dekhenge,” not only asserts her dissidence but also disrupts the military’s oppressive narrative. Their bodies become sites of queerness, where traditional expectations of gender, spirituality, and attire collapse, allowing for the emergence of alternate spaces and temporalities. Dinshaw’s concept of a historical queer touch elucidates how these acts transcend time, linking the past and present in a continuum of resistance against normative regimes. Through al-Ḥallāj’s declarations and Bāno’s defiance, the interplay of their experiences articulates a profound critique of authority, underscoring the relevance of queer gestures in critiquing cultural and political landscapes. Together, they illuminate how Islamic spirituality and corporeality allow marginalized voices to challenge and redefine parameters across time.

Anuj Sah, Emory University — An Equiry into Homoteroticism in Ṣufism, c. 8th to the 14th Centuries C.E.

Ṣūfīsm, the mystical dimension of Islam, has generally been believed to embody “unconventional” practices. One of these practices has been the presence of male homoeroticism in many Ṣūfī orders or silsilas (Schimmel, 2001). The present paper seeks to provide an overview of the attitudes towards male homoeroticism in Ṣūfīsm from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. It begins with al‑Junayd Baghādī (d.910) in whose time the ‘Abbāsid regime (750–1258) instituted an “inquisition” (miḥna) on the Baghdad Ṣūfīs. One of the reasons for this “inquisition” was the “association of adult males with male adolescents at these gatherings.” (Karamustafa, 2007). The paper then explores the Khorāṣān school of Ṣūfīsm through the writings of Abū Saʿīd Abū’l‑Khayr (d.1049) and ‘Uthmān ‘Alī al-Hujwirī (d.1077). A particularly interesting episode is explored involving the famous jurist‑scholar al‑Qushayrī (d.1072) and his attitude towards homoromantic love. Finally, the paper moves due south to Delhi and explores notions towards homoeroticism among the Chishtī Ṣūfīs through the help of the discourses (malfūẓāt) of Nizām al-Dīn Awliyā (d.1324). This is in the context of Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (d.1123) engaging in “witness‑play” (shāhid‑bāzī) as discussed in one of the malfūẓ of Awliyā (Kugle, 2016). Tentatively, the paper argues that historically differentiated shades of attitudes towards homoeroticism existed among different Ṣūfīsm which is difficult to reduce to a simplistic and dichotomous “tolerant” versus “intolerant” framework.

11:00-12:15PM — Session 3

Egyptian National Identity at Revolutionary Moments — Saieh Hall 203
Discussant: Dr. Ahmed Abozaid (Political Science, University of Chicago)

Nesma Gewily, UC Berkeley — On the Thawra and Fitna: An Intertextual Analysis of Post‑Revolutionary Liberal Discourse in Egypt

The political contest following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 was predominantly textual. Competing factions sought to legitimize their claims to power or delegitimize their rivals by invoking historical narratives, crafting an imagined continuity between the present and selectively constructed pasts. This process distorted the revolutionary moment, displacing its significance. This paper examines the writings of Ibrahim Eissa, a prominent liberal Egyptian journalist and fierce critic of President Mubarak. In the aftermath of the revolution, Eissa sought to undermine the Islamist claim to power by drawing parallels between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Kharijites, historically considered as outsiders to the Muslim community. By invoking the history of al‑fitna al‑kubra, Eissa framed the Brotherhood as a threat to societal cohesion. Situating Eissa’s rhetoric within the broader trajectory of liberal discourse in Egypt since the early 19th century, this study argues that his semiotic linkage of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Kharijites reflects the absence of parliamentary politics. While 19th‑century liberal writers used history as a persuasive tool to engage democratic audiences, post‑revolutionary Egypt saw history employed as an unchallengeable reference that overshadowed the present. This research highlights how the revolutionary moment was constructed as both a textual and temporal phenomenon, demonstrating the intersection of semiotics and politics in producing meaning and significance during moments of upheaval.

Morgan Jennings, Simon Fraser University — The Egyptian Spectacle: Understanding Egypt’s Role at the Great Exhibition of 1851

The story of Egyptian independence highlights the rule of Mehmet Ali and his grandson Ismail. Despite this, the end of Mehmet Ali’s rule and the beginning of Ismail’s leaves fourteen years unaccounted for. This study looks to broaden the scale at which we understand the origins of the Egyptian nation and presents a globally situated depiction of the act of statecraft rather than focusing primarily on traditional expressions of statehood. It evaluates the rule of Abbas Pasha and his participation in the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a display of independence from the Ottomans. The exhibition has been a popular subject of study due to its displaying of the emerging British empire to the world, and for aiding in the promotion of a standardized British identity. Conversely, the Khedivates have garnered extensive commentaries as they form the bases for modern Egyptian history. Despite this, the two topics rarely, if ever, intersect. Understanding the function of the exhibition and its role in shaping popular opinions regarding nations allows for connections to be drawn between Egypt’s participation and its eventual independence from the Ottomans. This subtle display of regional agency should be reevaluated and presented as equally impactful as the more grandiose displays of statehood put forth by Mehmet Ali and Ismail Pasha. Through an evaluation of newspapers, foreign records, and exhibition material, we can see how Egypt put forth this new identity to the world, and how they were in turn received leading to their eventual independence.

Justin Posner, UChicago — Two Days Away: Competing Legal Regimes and the Birth of the Egyptian Nationalist Movement

In a 1906 open letter published in Le Figaro, Mustafa Kamel, leader of the Egyptian Watani Party, wrote that Egypt was a mere “two days away from Europe.” This geographical truth was reflected in the myriad ties that bound Egypt to continental Europe during the period of the British occupation. This paper will examine the ways in which institutions such as the Capitulations and the Caisse de la Dette allowed European powers, in particular France, to contest British authority in Egypt during the two decades leading up to the First World War. In particular, it will make the case that when France and other powers challenged the legal basis of British policies in order to protect their own citizens or financial interests in Egypt, they often lent support to the Nationalist cause, either by destabilizing British authority or presenting crackdowns on the Nationalists. As mentioned, France was the primary agent of this activity, and French intellectuals also helped to popularize the cause of Egyptian nationalism by encouraging the leaders of the Watani party to use French newspapers as platforms. This project will rely primarily on correspondence between the British foreign office and the British Consulate in Egypt, and Arabic‑language articles from a range of Egyptian newspapers, including Al‑Hilal, Al‑Mu’ayyad, Al‑Ahram, and Misr‑al‑Fatah. It will build on scholarship including Shana Minkin’s Imperial Bodies: Empire and Death in Alexandria, Egypt and Adam Mestyan’s Arab Patriotism: The Idea and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt by illuminating the role of cross‑border legal and intellectual relationships in the project of Egyptian nationalism and the internationalized nature of the British‑managed colonial state in Egypt.

Salma Mostafa Kamel, Northwestern — Continuities in Crisis: Frames of Citizenship and Belonging in Egyptian Discourses of Refugeeness

This article calls attention to the multiple historical discourses that emerge in the framing of refugees and migrants as a matter of national “crisis,” and connects them to theories of citizenship and national identity to better understand the historical continuities reflected in framings of “crisis.” Critical discourse analysis has been useful in understanding how salient language practices reveal, produce, and perpetuate relationships of power and dominance. In Egypt in particular, research on media framing and state‑media relations has been crucial to analyses of social movements, political change, and civil society. Recent years have seen a rise in migration from neighboring countries to Egypt due to violent conflict, which has been widely reported in Egyptian media and on digital forums and framed as a national crisis affecting Egyptians’ access to resources. By applying a critical discourse analysis of news and media articles between April 2023 and December 2024, this article focuses on the various narratives packed into three “crises” that are reflected in the framing of the presence of refugee and migrant communities in Egypt: the escalating costs of rent, the mis‑categorization and opacity of the true number of the refugee population in Egypt, and objections to the perceived threat of Afro‑centrism. By focusing on the three “crisis narratives,” this paper argues that the collective identities of refugee and migrant groups are mutually transformative of those of the host country. And, further, that state‑sanctioned media narratives apply tactics of categorization, de‑categorization, and mis‑categorization in discussions of refugees and ethnic groups, obscuring the boundaries of citizenship and national belonging.

Indigenous Re‑mappings of Space and Knowledge — Saieh Hall 146
Discussant: Prof. Brahim El Guabli (Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University)

Maha Bouhin, University of Florida — Myth, Water, and Resilience: Amazigh Storytelling Traditions and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge

Imazighen (the Indigenous people of North Africa) have produced a vibrant body of myths that address a variety of issues. Using myths as a cultural framework, this paper argues that Imazighen’s storytelling traditions act as a powerful tool that continue to shape contemporary Amazigh responses to environmental and socio‑political challenges, particularly in the face of the climate crisis and successive years of drought. By examining the myth of Anzar, the Amazigh rain god, and the annual ritual of Tislit n Anzar (Bride of Rain), this paper investigates how indigenous myths inform environmental practices that have wider ramifications for contemporary narratives on land rights and access to water in liminal spaces. Furthermore, the paper contends that narratives rooted in non‑linear time and communal spatiality offer valuable pathways for climate justice and the revival of Indigenous knowledge systems. In doing so, the paper illustrates how speculative fiction can reshape our approach to climate resilience while also advocating for Indigenous‑led environmental policies and more equitable futures. The decline of Khettaras—ancient irrigation systems that have historically sustained Amazigh communities in the Saharan and pre-Saharan areas in North Africa—has triggered waves of migrations in the region. Through interviews with local farmers conducted in the Drâa‑Tafilalet region—home to one of the last remaining khettara systems in Morocco—alongside textual analysis of the environmental significance of the myth of Anzar, this paper examines Amazigh indigenous myths as a cosmogonic framework for understanding contemporary water conservation efforts and their limitations. The paper seeks to reveal that Imazighen’s relationship to water is multilayered, straddling both mythical and practical worlds, and is deeply connected to processes of reciprocity and exchange that take into account human and non‑human subjects. The presence of myth does not negate the fact that these practices are codified through tribal communities’ water and land rights, while bureaucratic policies and modernization efforts disrupt the temporality and communal governance of the traditional khettara system. In its broader contribution, this paper will demonstrate the importance of Amazigh Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) through the lens of khettara systems and Amazigh mythology within speculative frameworks by integrating these storytelling traditions into global sustainability discussions.

Andrew Edmondson, University of Chicago — Between Antiquity and Intervention: Competing Cartographies of 1860s Lebanon

Toponymic and historical analyses of Renan’s 1860–1861 Mission de Phénicie have detailed its introduction of the toponym “Phoenicia” into French geographies of the Levant, which intensified Biblical and Greco‑Roman connotations. The expedition, however, failed to preserve Phoenicia as a relevant unit of political analysis among French intellectual elites, whose absorption with the contemporary distribution of local Christians—exemplified by the cartographical and statistical efforts that accompanied France’s 1860–1861 military intervention in the Levant—evidences the contradictory tendencies of the effort to conceptualize the region within familiar categories. Cartography here does not only refer to the maps produced, but also to the motivations and representations shaping their creation, as well as to the discursive effects of their intervention. Through an analysis of the maps, diaries, and reports produced by members of the contemporaneous military intervention and Mission de Phénicie—focusing on their open collusion, the tensions in their goals and methodologies, and their representations of the local populace—this paper explicates the contradictory cartographical depictions of Lebanon as both a historical anachronism and a present‑day reality populated by civilizational associates. Further analysis of discussions occurring both before and after the region’s reconnaissance, including extensive newspaper coverage, the procès‑verbaux of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles‑Lettres, and a series of state reports on these missions, contextualizes this comparison. This paper draws on this primary source analysis to provide a limited synthesis of ongoing debates regarding these missions’ effects on France’s imperial consciousness vis‑à‑vis Lebanon, contending that both frameworks were practically and conceptually blurred by the cartographic process, eliciting further attempts to clarify the results which solidified a novel, if self‑consciously inaccurate, vision of Lebanon.

bridge mcwaid, UC Santa Barbara — The Future of Fish and Fisheries: British Management and Indigenous Resistance in Palestine, 1930s

What can the Mediterranean Sea, fish, fishing, and the people it sustains, teach about the history of imperialism, settler colonialism, and indigenous resistance? This paper explores the interwar years (1917–1948) in Palestine as a moment in time that encapsulates many histories, a web of multispecies and intergenerational relations. As Palestinians began resisting the encroachments of the British Mandate in the 1930s, British governance over the sea, tethered to the ambitions of Zionist settler colonialism, greatly intensified but, in doing so, fractured the worlds it sought to rule. British legal frameworks and scientific surveillance aimed at regulating fish, fisheries, and the rhythms of local economies through ordinances dictating fishing practices, mesh sizes, and territorial rights. The tendrils of British imperialism, rooted less in understanding than in profit and control, also reached into managing food production, agricultural modernization, and environmental control in Palestine and the wider Mediterranean. While British officials debated whether to dismantle or maintain a Fisheries Service, the waters teemed with the unacknowledged presence of fish, fishers, and the histories they carried. And so, this paper invites us to think about this Mediterranean world before and after colonization through the lens of a multispecies history. Weaving together archival research, multispecies history, and political ecology, this paper engages with and fosters a dialogue between scholarship on political economy and blue humanities. It illuminates the spatiotemporal dynamics of surveillance and dispossession, learning from the sea and fish as a multidisciplinary site of inquiry.

12:30-1:45PM — Lunch and Faculty Roundtable — Saieh Hall 146
Time and Space in Modern Literature: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches
With Prof. Brahim El Guabli (Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University), Prof. Khaled Lyamlahy (Romance Language and Literatures, University of Chicago), Prof. Ahmed Qabaha (Comparative Literature, University of Chicago and al-Najah University, Nablus) Discussant: Prof. Orit Bashkin (Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago)

2:00-3:40PM — Session 4

Changing Relationships to Space and Memory Under Colonial Violence — Saieh Hall 122
Discussant: Dr. Carl Shook (Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago)

Rand Saleh, University of Toronto — Mapping Memory and Violence: The Mosul and Kirkuk Massacres Under the British Mandate

This paper examines the 1923 and 1924 massacres in Mosul and Kirkuk, carried out by the Assyrian Levies—an auxiliary force of the British military—as pivotal episodes of colonially sanctioned violence that continue to shape spatial and temporal imaginaries in Iraq. By situating these events within the broader structures of racialized governance and imperial military practices, this study interrogates how colonial violence reconfigured urban geographies, altered communal relationships, and inscribed lasting forms of marginalization onto Iraq’s social and political landscape. Drawing on Iraqi historiography and archival sources, the paper foregrounds perspectives often marginalized in Western accounts, exploring how these massacres became embedded in contested narratives of belonging, displacement, and national identity. Furthermore, it considers the spatialized afterlives of this violence—how memory sites, geographic imaginaries, and localized histories intersect with broader reckonings of trauma and resistance. I argue that the events in Mosul and Kirkuk did not simply constitute discrete episodes of violence but rather set in motion enduring cycles of exclusion and retaliation, culminating in the 1933 Iraqi Army-led massacre of Assyrians. By engaging with theories of cultural trauma and collective memory, this paper examines how post-colonial communities in Iraq continue to navigate the aftereffects of imperial violence, contest historical erasure, and reimagine futures beyond the ruins of colonial intervention.

Kareem M. Abdelbary, UCSB — Shaping the Nation, Breaking the Nation: Peasants’ Violence and Politics in Interwar Egypt

This paper explores the politics of violence among landless fellahin (peasants) and agricultural laborers between the 1919 uprisings and the 1952 revolution. Challenging the historiographic focus on urban centers and the depiction of the worker as the main agent of history, the paper delves into subaltern experiences to rethink interwar Egypt. It attempts to answer the following questions: what were fellahin politics of violence and how did they understand and shape them? What practices of political resistance and belonging did they draw on and what did they innovate? The violent uprising of 1919 in rural Egypt saw an unprecedented scale of unorganized collective action that left both colonizer and nationalist shaken in fear. Nationalists used these direct confrontations to discredit fellahin’s role in shaping interwar Egyptian politics. This dismissive posture is mirrored in the literature depicting the fellahin as apolitical and conservative. By foregrounding rural struggles, it frames different forms of violence as deliberate and meaningful forms of political agency. From this standpoint, fellahin’s organized assassinations of supervisors and plantation managers, interactions with ‘modern’ medical expertise as well as resistance to the Ismail Sidqi government in the early 1930s and the movement against landlords in Bahut and Kufur Nijm in 1951 form part of a broader, interconnected struggle against colonial and elite domination. Focusing on the themes of rural criminality, medical discourse and fellahin’s political resurgence, the paper contributes to broader discussions of how marginalized communities, through acts of resistance, challenge dominant temporal conceptions of belonging, power and historical agency in interwar Egypt.

Adam Dehsabzi, University of Chicago — Preventing Anti‑Sectarian Solidarity: The King‑Crane Commission and a Greater Syrian State in the Levant

This paper examines the neglected findings and legacy of the 1919 King‑Crane Commission, the first major U.S. diplomatic intervention in the post‑Ottoman Middle East. To resolve Britain and France’s disputing imperial ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean, Woodrow Wilson assigned an inter‑allied Commission to travel to the Levant and “elucidate the state of opinion” among the region’s population via surveys with various religious delegations. The most remarkable figure was that a full 80.4% of respondents favored the establishment of a united and multi‑religious Greater Syrian State. The desired entity combined the territories of present‑day Jordan, Lebanon, Israel‑Palestine, and Syria, unifying a mosaic of religious identities into a single Levantine nation‑state. Drawing on insights from key scholars, this paper argues that the crucial 80.4% figure stands as a testament that an anti‑sectarian solidarity, emanating from the Nahda movement, had materialized among the Levant’s indigenous population. However, the consensus for an ecumenical pan‑Levantine nationalism conflicted with Britain and France’s territorial incentives negotiated by Sykes‑Picot. To mitigate this threat, Europe exploited the notion of vulnerable minorities and chauvinistic majorities to emphasize religious differences, erode coexistence, and crystallize a sectarian social taxonomy. This strategy was fundamentally intrinsic to facilitate dependency on Europe and thus, sustain its influence in the Levant. Ultimately, the strategy catalyzed the establishment of a Christian majority State in Lebanon allied with France and a Jewish State in Palestine allied with Britain. As Palestine struggles for self‑determination, Syria defines its post‑Baath identity, and Lebanon reckons with its post‑civil war confessional order, recasting the legacy of the King‑Crane Commission highlights the significance of European imperialism in undermining anti‑sectarian and ecumenical solidarity in the Levant.

Asaf Levy, Penn State — Compensating Displacement: Internal Refugees in Israel, 1948–1977

On July 16, 1948, the Israel Defense Forces occupied the Palestinian village of Saffuriya, displacing its population. The villagers demanded resettlement, but when Israeli authorities rejected their claims on security grounds, negotiations shifted to compensation. While around 700,000 Palestinian refugees from the Nakba were denied reparations or return, approximately 30,000 internal refugees—termed “present absentees” by the Israeli state—engaged in compensation talks. A scrutiny of letters, petitions, newspapers, and government documents shows why Israel pursued these negotiations and how internal refugees improved their status through persistent advocacy. Refugees framed their demands around ideas of equal citizenship, resisted inadequate offers, and sought return when possible. Israel’s compensation strategy was a calculated policy aimed at consolidating sovereignty while minimizing costs and international backlash. Driven by both material concerns (securing land) and legitimacy crises (domestic and international), this approach led most villagers to eventually relinquish their claims in exchange for some form of compensation. However, Palestinian resistance exposed contradictions in Israeli policies, forcing concessions that conflicted with the state’s settler‑colonial logic. These included allowing a limited number of refugees to return to some of the lands of Saffuriya. Situating Saffuriya within the broader negotiations between internal refugees and the state reveals how internal refugees challenged Israel’s efforts to Judaize the land and how the state ultimately considered compensation as the most cost‑effective response to this challenge.

Solidarity and Futurity Through Visual and Dramatic Performance — Saieh Hall 203
Discussant: Dr. Callie Maidhof (Global Studies, University of Chicago)

Eman Elhadad, Columbia University — Two, Three…Many Guevaras: Loss, Solidarity, and a Poetics of Accompaniment in Post-1967 Arab Drama

This work-in-progress investigates a poetics of accompaniment in post-1967 Arab plays about the death of Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara. It theorizes solidarity as a form of accompaniment by drawing on concepts of musical accompaniment alongside Guevara’s principles regarding guerrilla warfare and solidarity with Vietnam. Being in solidarity with another, or accompanying another, is a positionality that accepts anonymity in order to privilege another other. I consider dramatic engagements with Guevara’s death by Mu’in Bseiso, Mikhail Ruman, and Jalil al-Qaysi for their own accompaniment practices with the fallen leader, whose ideas and strategies they feature while also avoiding romanticized, individualist depictions. Guevara is performed in repetitive, open-ended manners that allow the martyr to live on in diverse forms. As Guevara the icon is decentered, political power, mediated through creative acts, is displaced onto nondescript bodies that are particularly suited to a politics of accompaniment – peasant communities. These take the form of Bolivian peasants in Bseiso’s and al-Qaysi’s works and an ambiguous chorus of peasants in Ruman’s play, all of whom give voice to populations that were increasingly silenced in postcolonial national political life. Bseiso’s and al-Qaysi’s peasants suggest the need for mass-driven political struggle through modes of nameless, unremarkable resistance while Ruman’s chorus gestures to the alternatively structured narratives that can emerge from illegible collective bodies. Taken together, these three plays attribute a creative and revolutionary capacity to these discounted communities, relegated far from the centers of power, that is enabled through their practices of accompaniment.

MacKenzie L. Guthrie, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — Imagining Otherwise through Arabfuturist Aesthetics: Affiliation and Alienation in Manal’s Arabian Heartbreak

Futurism/s are a provocation to imagination. They invite us to envision future worlds outside what is made possible by historical realities. Employing the concepts of Arabfuturism/s articulated by Sulaïman Majali in his 2015 manifesto and rooted in principles of science fiction and Afrofuturism, this paper explores the Arabfuturist world constructed by Moroccan singer Manal Benchlikha in her July 2023 music videos ‘Introduction’ and ‘Morak – Chapter I’, the first tracks on her newly released album, Arabian Heartbreak. In contrast to the prevailing sense of alienation prominent in most Arabic science fiction (ASF) and Arabfuturist projects, I argue that the world built in Manal’s videos utilizes its setting, sound, cinematography, and lyrics to craft an Arabfuturist aesthetic that juggles alienation and affiliation. I find that in the process, Manal creates a formulation of the future that is neither purely utopian nor dystopian, neither wholly familiar nor unfamiliar. In such a future, healing and justice are possible, not just individually, but collectively. Out of the chaos of violence and self-destruction emerges the possibility of (re)creation into someone and something different, the birth of a self and society still recognizable despite their transformations.

Aciah Abdulsater, UCLA — A Lesson in Love: Reviving Solidarity with Palestine

In 2015, Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi discovered an archive housing rare films on the Palestinian struggle dating back to the 1960s and 80s. Synthesizing excerpted film scenes, Yaqubi released R 21 aka Restoring Solidarity (2022), a time capsule that rehashes memory of past political struggles and aspirations while also carving out space for pondering a potential future to a revisited communal movement. My research focuses on the dynamics and engagements between dispossessed communities and subjects working to overcome colonial harm. By close-reading how Yaqubi reuses archival materials to frame and guide interpretation of the film, I ask: what is the language needed to speak and think about international solidarity within and beyond the archive? I expect to explore the ways in which elements from Yaqubi’s film weave a picture of how solidarity acts and praxis function. I investigate simultaneously how internal relations between subjects in solidarity and external relations with an outsider entity are framed to synthesize a theoretical language for a better understanding of solidarity. In the mid-20th century, archives were predominantly seen as static custodians of the past. However, the introduction of decolonial studies in the early 21st century provided a new vantage point from which to think of archives as more than just static indexical materials narrating histories. Within the ongoing conversation on solidarity with Palestine, I hope to introduce new voices and perspectives and thus bring the field a step closer towards its goal to transform how topics on struggle are taught in the US academy.

Jewish Experiences of Colonialism, Sectarianism and Exile — Saieh Hall 146
Discussant: Prof. Orit Bashkin (Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago)

Eline van Erdewijk, University of Groningen — Mapping Antisemitism: The Press, Time, and Space in Colonial Algeria (1870–1914)

This paper explores the interplay between time, space, and antisemitism in settler colonial Algeria by analyzing the role of the press as a mediator of settler colonial ideologies. Focusing on the period between the Crémieux Decree (1870) and the First World War (1914), it investigates how French, Spanish, and Italian settler communities used the press to construct a shared narrative of European superiority shaped by racial antisemitism and settler colonial dynamics. The press emerged as a crucial platform for disseminating antisemitic propaganda and sustaining the settler colonial republic, serving as a bridge between the metropole and Algeria’s settler communities. This study addresses gaps in existing scholarship, which predominantly centers on French settlers and French-language sources, by investigating how the multilingual press amplified antisemitism across European settler groups. Drawing on primary sources —including French, Spanish, and Italian newspapers—the analysis highlights how racial antisemitism intertwined with cultural hierarchies and national identity, reinforcing settler cohesion while marginalizing Jewish and all other historic communities residing in Algeria. Moreover, this paper situates its findings within broader debates on spatiotemporal engagements in settler colonial contexts. The press shaped European settlers’ perceptions of Algeria as both a European space and a colonial frontier while framing Jewish communities as outsiders excluded from the “progress” and “modernity” that Europeans attributed to settler colonial rule. This investigation underscores how the press functioned as a tool to reinforce perceived European “racial superiority,” reflecting the complexities of settler colonial Algeria and its enduring legacies.

Omar Kamal, University of Chicago — Rationalism and Ecumenicalism: Nahdawi Responses to European anti-Jewish Hysterias

When the censorious Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid issued November 1840’s firmān, he impugned Damascene blood libels—“we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence is evident,” “to be tormented,” absent of “truth”—proclaiming the Porte’s rejection of the stated case and Judeophobic slanders outright. Nevertheless, 1840’s Damascus Affair’s French championship of local Christian accusations attributing the disappearance of Franciscan friar Father Thomas of Sardinia and his Muslim servant to Damascene Jews engendered subsequent witch hunts, subjecting innocents to occidental antisemitic canards. This thesis intends to study a counter‑tradition rooted in pluralism and rationalism, refuting coeval sectarianism via direct challenges from Nahdawis like Al-Manar’s Rashid Rida and indirect mediums such as Christian Jurji Zaydan’s employment of historical fictions. I seek to explore Arab enlightenment commentary on cases of internal blood libel aside from 1840’s Damascus Affair and events external to the Mashriq, like the Dreyfus Affair, as opportunities for and examples of the actualization of Ussama Makdisi’s ecumenical frame. Ottomanists concerned with sectarianism, the Jewish Middle East, and the Arab Enlightenment have discussed regional and temporal themes of confessionalization, Jewish experience in the Middle East, and the unitary values of the Nahda. Yet a limited body of scholarship has invested in studying the specific juxtaposition of a century-long outbreak of libels influenced by an expanding European, particularly French, sphere of influence and an oppositional native intellectual culture interested in highlighting shared regional ties in response to and independent of accusations levied against Jews. Providing room for scholarship that expands and centers on Arab interreligious communion’s role in challenging blood ritual conspiracies and European intrusion.

Hamza Woodson, Williams College — Destroyed Landscapes and Augmented Imaginaries: Digital Technologies, Identity Formation Processes and Mixed Reality Phenomenology in Post-Disaster Moroccan-Jewish Heritage Landscapes

This paper examines how 3‑D augmented models of built heritage can open new dimensions in the phenomenological experience of cultural landscapes. Drawing on the concept of “spatial culture” (Zaninović et al., 2018), which emphasizes how spatial arrangements encode and produce cultural meaning, the study engages with how digital renderings of heritage spaces inform preservation practices, archival cultural narratives, and socio‑political realities. While heritage studies has long addressed the spatial aspects of conservation, it has yet to fully grapple with the implications of digital technologies—particularly in their capacity to mediate relationships between indigenous communities and contested landscapes. In light of this gap, this study interrogates how augmented heritage models can serve as digital monuments, anchoring spatial memory, mapping intangible cultural elements, and forming new experiential understandings of place. Through the case of Moroccan Jewish heritage in Rabat—a city undergoing rapid coastal degradation and urban restoration—the study explores how digital modeling may reveal erased or marginalized narratives in the built environment, and may even act as a conduit for redefining Moroccan‑Jewish heritage as indigenous to Morocco’s contemporary cultural landscape. These restoration efforts have historically effaced Jewish and “non‑Arab” presences, altering the city’s cultural fabric. In response, the paper considers whether 3‑D augmented models can recuperate such presences through a digital re‑inscription of memory. By assessing the capacity of these technologies to visualize cultural biographies and spatial affiliations over time, the study interrogates the role of digital heritage in Indigenous identity formation. Can these visualizations act not just as records, but as active agents in reconstituting cultural and political ecologies? Through a critical analysis of Rabat’s heritage interventions and their implications for Moroccan Jewish indigeneity, this paper contributes to broader conversations on digital conservation, spatial justice, and the intersections of technology and identity in North African cultural landscapes.

4:00-5:30PM — Session 5

Literary Approaches to National Memory and Imagined Geography — Saieh Hall 122
Discussant: Dr. Stephanie Kraver (Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago)

Indran Fernando, UChicago — Spatial and Temporal Aspects of State Characterization in Two Salim Barakat Novels

The novels Fuqahā’ al-Ẓalām (1985) and al-Rīsh (1990) by Salim Barakat are best known as early examples of Arabic magic realism, as well as for their depiction of Kurdish life in northeastern Syria. My presentation examines spatial and temporal aspects of how states are encountered and characterized in these works, with emphasis on the role of the Syrian–Turkish border. I first argue that by engaging with the theme of movement and restriction of movement in different ways — some mundane, others speculative or fantastical — the novels lend coherence to states like the First Syrian Republic and Ba‘athist Syria. I then analyze two temporal anomalies in the novels (a newborn who reaches old age in a single day, and a lengthy first-person account that is later shown to exist on an impossible timeline) in relation to abortive aspirations for a Kurdish state.

Ivanna Berrios, UCLA — “I feel a strange closeness with Gaza”: Traces of Relation Across Time and Space in A Minor Detail

In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman critiques the idea that archival violence can be ameliorated through “romances of resistance,” insisting rather on the value of “a ‘recombinant narrative,’ which ‘loops the strands’ of incommensurate accounts and which weaves present, past, and future.” In her novella A Minor Detail, Adania Shibli accomplishes this through the depiction of an uncanny world which echoes the sounds and images from the past into the present. The synchronous relationship between past and present, the Nakba that never ended, is a common theme across Palestinian cultural production. By overlaying this multivalent temporality onto the narrator’s journey through Palestine’s fragmented geography, Shibli presents both memory and spatiality as a palimpsest of traces and unexpected affiliations. I argue that by attending to the relational geographies that allow the narrator to reach an archive despite enclosure, A Minor Detail advances a memory politics of quotidian and “minor” practices rather than the idealized impossibility of repairing/protecting the past. These relational geographies — snippets of conversation about viable roads, the overheard name of a village, a borrowed identity card — emerge both within and against the violence of archives and checkpoints, allowing the narrator to orient herself and paralleling Shibli’s own overlay of past and present. By tracing relation across time and space through recurrent, surreal sensory cues — a dog howling, the smell of gasoline, the echoes of bombs — Shibli indexes what the narrator describes as a “strange closeness” that tethers together the ruptured geography and collective experience of Palestinians.

Zahra Meshkani, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — Imagined Geographies, Disrupted Temporalities: Rethinking Iran through Post-Revolutionary Fiction

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 marks a rupture in Iran’s collective historical consciousness and it can be defined as a temporal anchor that, even today, continues to structure national memory, identity, and literary production. A common thread among the works of scholars and writers who have been engaging massively with the Revolution is their recursive conceptualization of the event to not only define the past, but also present and future. This retrospective movement is not a mere sense of nostalgia and lamentation for a lost glorified past; it is in fact a heterochronic rupture that defines the spatial and political atmosphere of present Iran. The present research looks at authors from Moniro Ravanipour to Shokoufeh Azar, who both create chronotopes that cast doubt on Iran’s geopolitical fixity. Through Ravanipour’s distorted time at a secluded village in The Drowned (1990) and Azar’s intermingled temporalities and worlds in her award-winning The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017), this study aims to revisit the co-constitutive relationship between temporality and spatiality. The analysis draws on Edward Said’s ideas of imagined geographies to discuss how these texts construct space not as a neutral container but as a contested site shaped through time and in which power and memory converge, and how these spatio-temporal assemblages shape modern Iran.

Hossame Boudaghia, University of Abdelmalek Essaadi — Divorcing the Past: Tangier and Collective Trauma in Anouar Majid’s Si Yussef

In Formation of Arab Reason (1982), Mohamed Abed Al‑Jabri aims to bridge the cultural divide between the Arab world and the West. Instead of using familiar techniques, Al‑Jabri urges Arab scholars to explore new ways of reasoning. Using Kai Erikson’s collective trauma and Gabrielle Schwab’s reading of cryptonymy, I will analyze the symbols and reflections in Anouar Majid’s novel Si Yussef to show that psychological perspectives are an important addition to Al‑Jabri’s epistemological approach. The symbols are the main character’s marriage to a Catholic woman who refuses to change her faith and the lost grave of his father who migrated to Tangier to escape a violent past. I argue that Lucia’s faith is rejected because it is a reminder of colonialism which in itself is reminiscent of previous collective traumas like the loss of Tangier’s Amazigh identity. The lost grave refers to violent past cultural conflicts that create collective anxiety surrounding foreign cultures. The marriage between Lucia and Yussef symbolizes coming to terms with the past and reconciliation between communities. The aim of my analysis is to start conversations where mutual suffering is explored and recognized. This approach goes beyond the antagonist/protagonist narratives that aggravate pain. The social theory of trauma is crucial to Al‑Jabri’s project because it traces the impact of past conflicts on present communities, urging them to face their suffering and explore new ways of building connections.

Re‑Encountering the Pre‑Modern through Technology and Translation — Saieh Hall 203
Discussant: Dr. Mustafa Kaya (Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago)

Pouyan Shaidi, Indiana University Bloomington — From Biobibliographies to Geodatabases: A Time‑Lapse Map of Ibn Sīnā’s Discipline‑Specific Authorship and a Geospatial Critique of His Imagined Past in Isfahan

Ibn Sīnā (980–1037 CE), the renowned physician‑philosopher and polymath, lived a life of nonstop writing and constant traveling. This has made the task of organizing his scholarly works challenging from the medieval period to the modern era alike. In my doctoral project, I am interested in the interaction between two of his many fields of scholarship—namely, celestial natural philosophy and mathematical astronomy. In my research, besides traditional methodologies, I implemented digital mapping as a digital humanities method to establish a spatiotemporal relationship between Ibn Sīnā’s works on general physics, celestial physics, and astronomy, putting his works in the geographical, social, and political context where they were produced. In this three‑part paper, I first show how, using two geographic information system (GIS) software, ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online, I scaffolded my research by visualizing Ibn Sīnā’s journey, scholarly production, and the political changes of his times on a multilayered, temporally dynamic map. In the second part, I show how the geospatial datasets that I produced allowed me to run a quantitative, geospatial analysis on Ibn Sīnā’s scholarship using ArcGIS Insights to find the hotspots of his activities in these two fields. Subsequently, I focus on his final city of residence, Isfahan, showing how I used GIS mapping to assess a claim made by local historians who identified a domed building in the city as Ibn Sīnā’s teaching space.

Maria Zabaneh, Boston University — Bir Varmış Bir Yokmuş…

“Bir Varmış Bir Yokmuş,” or once upon a time in Turkish, have been the magic words that have captured audiences’ attention for centuries within the Ottoman Empire. Seated outside coffeehouses, Turkish meddahs, or storytellers, have enchanted their spectators with tales of love, adventure, and even magic, using an array of voices, jokes, and instruments to bring their stories to life. Be that ancient battle of “Bedi and Kasim” or the tragic love story of “Layla and Majnun,” the art of meddah storytelling has transcended time and space, bringing diverse communities together through shared morals and experiences. Travelers such as Evliya Çelebi, a seventeenth‑century Ottoman explorer, chronicler, and storyteller in his own right, were often inspired by meddahs’ stories, preserving their oral tradition within their own travelogs. By analyzing Çelebi’s Seyâhatnâme or “Book of Travel,” this paper argues that Çelebi introduced the oral craft of meddah storytelling to the world of Ottoman literature, while expertly emulating meddahs’ skills and tropes into his own literary style, thus becoming a true meddah himself.

Egor Korneev, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor — From Oral Storytelling to Radio and Television Drama: Serialized Narratives in 20th‑Century Egypt

In the mid‑20th century, Egypt witnessed a significant shift in practices associated with leisure. The popular storytellers (shuʿarāʾ and maddāḥūn), who had regularly performed in local cities and villages, started to lose popularity because of radio and television, with Egypt becoming the major Arab production center for the new mass media. Between the 1930s and 1970s, radio and television sets disseminated in Egyptian urban and rural areas and became an indispensable part of people’s everyday lives — by entering either their private or publicly shared spaces. Although scholarly and literary works have tended to emphasize the rupture brought about by the emergence of modern forms of mass culture, my paper will focus on this transformation from a different angle and stress the continuities between the narrative formats used by Egyptian professional storytellers and serialized drama (musalsalāt) broadcast on Egyptian state‑controlled radio and television in the 1950s–1960s. To achieve that, I will rely on periodicals that traced transformations in entertainment practices, as well as existing studies of Egyptian popular culture, “folklore,” radio, and television. My research shows a significant connection between premodern oral storytelling and drama on radio and television in Egypt can be identified on the level of narrative seriality (episodic format and cliffhangers) and the spaces of collective reception (coffeehouses). These observations allow us to see the success of television and radio drama in the contemporary Arab world as contingent on the entertainment conventions developed within regional oral storytelling traditions during the premodern period. My research also poses a broader question about serialized narratives in the premodern and modern MENA region, challenging the tendency among mass media scholars to tie narrative seriality solely to Western modernity.

Murtaza Shakir, Aljamea‑tus‑Saifiyah — Reconstructing Space and Time through the Poetic Lens: A Fatimid Prince‑Poet’s Representation of the Nāʿūrah (Waterwheel) in an Egyptian Garden

Memory and place have always been central themes in Arabic poetry, offering a unique lens through which we can understand how time and space have shaped human experiences. A vivid waṣf (description) of a memorialized space can evoke both the physicality of a location and the subjective experience of the individual. This paper explores such an intersection through the poetry of the Fatimid-era poet and son of the Fatimid Imam-Caliph al-Muʿizz, al-Amīr Tamīm (337–374 AH/949–984 CE), focusing on his sensory portrayal of the nāʿūrah, a waterwheel commonly found in Egyptian gardens. Tamīm’s verses not only immortalize the nāʿūrah’s architectural beauty but also capture its deeper temporal and spatial significance within the tranquil garden environment. By reconstructing the dynamics between text and object, this paper highlights how the nāʿūrah becomes more than a mere structure; it represents a confluence of memory, sensory experience, and historical moment. Tamīm’s description invites readers to reflect on how non-religious spaces—like the nāʿūrah—embody broader cultural and philosophical meanings, offering a nuanced perspective on time and place in the Egyptian milieu, beyond religious contexts. In the broader scope of Islamic art and architecture, this study underscores how spaces like the nāʿūrah serve as avenues for contemplation, inviting us to reconsider the role of architecture in shaping cultural memory, individual and collective identities, and the experience of time.

Approaches to Time and Space through Chronicles and Historiography — Saieh Hall 146
Discussant: Dr. Mehmetcan Akpınar (Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago)

Dorian Bon, Princeton University — Microhistories and the Long Durée in the Muslim Mediterranean: The Case of Qawṣara

Many secondary geographies across the Mediterranean region are the sites of largely forgotten histories of Muslim civilization. What evidence from the Islamic period that remains is often fragmentary and scattered. Yet the benefits of the micro‑historical model of inquiry—drilling down into a particular place and learning as much as one can about its society and culture—are widely recognized. The question therefore arises: how can scholars best leverage sparse information to reconstruct obscure periods of history? When is deductive reasoning appropriate, and when does it mislead more than it instructs? How should the imperative to convey as much plausible insight as possible be weighed against the dangers of projection and hyperbole? The small Italian island of Pantelleria (known as Qawṣara during the Islamic period), offers a compelling case study. Pantelleria had a majority Muslim and Arabic‑speaking population for hundreds of years, falling to Norman rule only in 1221 (compared to 1091 in Sicily). As late as 1670, a French merchant was obligated to bring Arabic speakers from Malta to serve as translators on the island. Qawṣara appears sporadically in the Arabic literature, whether as a staging ground for the Norman invasion of Africa (Ibn Khaldūn); a hideout for raiders (’Abū Ubayd al‑Bakrī); a producer of figs and cotton (Ibn Sa‘īd al‑Maghribiyy); or a convenient getaway for Tunisian princes (Shihāb al‑Dīn al‑Nuwayrī). Using Arabic and later sources (in particular Norman and Spanish‑era Sicilian documents collected by Henri Bresc), this presentation attempts to develop a composite picture of Pantelleria before its de‑Arabization, while offering methodological reflections on the question of micro‑histories in the medieval Muslim context.

Kareem M. Abdelbary, University of California, Santa Barbara — The 1757 Hajj Caravan Raid and its Interpretation in Eighteenth‑Century Chronicles

This paper will analyze the perspectives of eighteenth‑century chroniclers on the disastrous raid on the Hajj caravan as it returned from Mecca in 1757. Although Bedouin attacks on pilgrimage caravans were common, the massacre of 1757, combined with the subsequent Damascus earthquake of 1759, was serious enough to cause the Ottoman government to make radical changes in the Damascus sanjak. As contemporary historians such as Mustafa Güler, Karl Barbir, Nir Shafir, Shimon Shamir and Jane Hathaway have pointed out, a major contributing factor to the massacre was mismanagement by the governor of Damascus, Asʿad Pasha al‑Azm (governor from 1743–56) and his successor, Hüseyin Pasha (1756–57). One of the key lines of inquiry of this paper is thus to see how eighteenth‑century writers assigned blame for the attacks and interpreted the subsequent changes to Damascene political life. The main sources for this paper include the Ottoman historian Ahmed Vasıf’s Mahasin ul‑Asar wa Haqa’iq ul‑Akhbar, Ahmed ibn Budayr’s chronicle, Muhammad Khalil al‑Muradi’s biographical dictionary Silk al‑Durar, and Mikhaʾil Burayk al‑Dimashqi’s Tarikh al‑Sham (1720–1782). By considering the religion, occupation, social status, historiographical styles, and political loyalties of the authors, the study will compare their points of overlap and difference and discuss what their accounts of the 1757 raid reveal about eighteenth‑century Ottoman and specifically Damascene political life. By observing how Ahmed Vasıf’s moralizing state perspective, Ibn Budayr’s anti‑elite criticisms, and Burayk’s defense of the Orthodox community shape their descriptions of the events of 1757, we can better understand the wide variety of meanings assigned to these events by those who lived through them.

Zain Alattar, University of California, Berkeley — “As the Moon’s Silver Lips Kiss Sunset’s Amber Pond”: Innovation and Redefinition in the Time Imagery of Abdallah ibn al‑Mu‘tazz (d. 908 CE, Baghdad)

Time and space represent an important topos in the classical Arabic ode (qaṣīda). In Imru’ al‑Qays’ (d. 544 CE, Turkey) seminal Hanging Ode (mu‘allaqa), the protagonist knight‑hero sets out for the hunt pre‑dawn, while “the birds are still in their nests.” The setting of this famous scene helped establish the transient period of dawn, when the darkness of night mixes with the light of day, as the liminal timespace during which the hunt occurs. Elsewhere, time is the subject of reproach and fear, as Labīd (d. 661, Arabia) reproaches time (al‑dahr) for its conquering of all, lamenting that even day and night, themselves bodies of time, cannot avoid exhaustion as one cedes to the next in an unending cycle. These early odes set the poetic tropes and motifs which future Umayyad and Abbasid poets sought to emulate and innovate. This paper focuses on the verse of Abdallah ibn al‑Mu‘tazz (d. 908 CE, Baghdad), an early Abbasid poet and tragic caliph‑for‑a‑day who lived in Samarra and Baghdad in modern‑day Iraq. Through a careful reading of selections from his love (ghazal) and hunt (ṭardiyya) poetry, this article argues that although Ibn al‑Mu‘tazz’s use of time and space is clearly indebted to the classical odes of the above‑mentioned authors, his implementation of temporal imagery transcends that of his predecessors in two ways. First, the degree of Ibn al‑Mu‘tazz’s personification of night and day, in which they are given faces and facial features like eyelids, hair, and lips, is unprecedented. Second, Ibn al‑Mu‘tazz’s “genre‑bashing,” accomplished through transpositions of spatiotemporal motifs from ghazal into ṭardiyya and vice versa, serves to challenge and redefine the contours of the traditional categories of classical Arabic poetry. Although modern scholars like Nefeli Papoutsakis and Jaroslav Stetkevych have examined and appreciated Ibn al‑Mu‘tazz’s verse, this is the first study to focus specifically on his treatment of time.

Kyle Bennett Capps, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor — Redrawing the Border: Diplomatic and Artistic Developments in Mehmed Tahir Munif Pasha’s Iranian Epistle

Through much of the nineteenth century, diplomatic relations between the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran had been strained, but the latter half of the century witnessed efforts at diplomatic rapprochement between the two countries. During Mehmed Tahir Münif Pasha’s (1828–1910 CE) first appointment as Ottoman ambassador to Iran in the 1870s, he saw the mural of Fath Ali Shah displayed in the Negarestan Palace in Tehran. This mural depicted several former Ottoman officials to the shah’s court. Münif Pasha was told the story of these Ottoman functionaries and their role within a border dispute initiated by members of the Kurdish Baban dynasty. Inspired by these depictions and the story surrounding them, Münif Pasha commissioned an illuminated manuscript, which reproduced the paintings and conveyed the story of four notable Ottoman actors during the conflict. While scholars have explored this text as a reflection of Münif Pasha’s career, I position his work at the nexus of shifting diplomatic and historiographic trends that culminated in the reevaluation of the relationship between the Ottomans and Qajars. I argue that his manuscript, the Iranian Epistle, served as a didactic work, illustrating proper and improper ambassadorial conduct through a salient historical example. In this sense, by invoking dual chronologies, the writer positioned himself within the larger tradition of Ottoman ambassadors for his own political gain. In conclusion, I contend that, through the synthesis of Iranian artistic production and Ottoman Turkish prose, Münif Pasha created diplomatic gifts emblematic of the potential for cultural and political cooperation.

5:45-7:00PM — Traditional Lamb Roast Farewell Dinner — Saieh Hall 122

Conference Map