Abstract The occult is enjoying a remarkable popularity in Erdoğan’s Turkey. Publications and web sites purveying astrology, amulets and talismans, fortune-telling, dream interpretation, and physiognomy are everywhere. How is one to explain the suspension of disbelief that leads so many in Turkey today to find these practices and pseudo-sciences compelling? This article focuses on a small number of case studies to explore the forms taken by occult practices in contemporary Turkey, emphasizing in particular both the links to their Ottoman forerunners and the ways in which they differ from them. It argues that they are well articulated with modern life—in other words, that they are less the signs of a “return” to Ottoman ways than instances of thoroughly modern acculturation.

Abstract Did Turkey and the newly formed Arab states truly become mutually estranged following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? By looking at the experiences of the Iraqi political elite and intellectual circles (booksellers, poets, educators, and historians) after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, this article challenges this narrative. I focus on the role played by the Kemalist movement ( al-ḥaraka al-kamāliyya ) in Iraq in the context of growing opposition to the British Mandate and I identify in particular two forms of Kemalism, which I describe as “regressive” and “inspirational”. Regressive Kemalism aimed at renewing former Ottoman relations in order to forge new ties with Turkey, thereby attempting to weaken British power in the country, while “inspirational Kemalism” promoted the policies implemented in Republican Turkey by Mustafa Kemal as a model for a possible future in Iraq. These dimensions emphasize the complex ways in which Ottoman and then Turkish influences continued to shape the Iraqi political and ideological landscape, even after the fall of the Empire.

Abstract Between the 1880s and 1960s an industry for the production of Islamic books in the Malay language and its adaptation of the Arabic script, the so-called kitab jawi , developed in the Hejaz and Cairo. It was the result of collaboration by Malay authors and editors, Arab and Ottoman state presses and private publishers, and local booksellers, many of whom were of Indian descent. This study identifies the key actors in kitab jawi publishing in the Hejaz, Cairo and, to a lesser extent, Istanbul. Thereby it sheds light on the role played by Middle Eastern kitab jawi printing for community formation among Southeast Asian Muslims and on how its function contrasted with that of periodicals in this regard. Furthermore, it shows how the legacy of Middle Eastern kitab jawi editions, as an instructive testimony to transregional Islamic connections and cross- cultural cooperation, lives on until the present day.

Abstract A recent wave of research across several fields has emphasized the seriality of print media like journals and periodicals, especially for the late 19th and 20th centuries, when such formats were essentially the New Media of their day. Previous studies, like Benedict Anderson’s now classical thesis on post-colonial nationalism in Imagined Communities (1983) have born out the powers of novel forms and circuits of communication to create and promote association, companionship, and social cohesion, especially for the larger constellation of national boundaries, cultural identities, and confessional divisions that still determine today’s world. This special issue investigates the same formative potential, but concerning the periphery of the Islamicate Middle East, as it were, namely in relation to either diaspora networks and minority communities or to other seemingly marginal cases far away from the symbolic centers of the Muslim World. Viewed before the background of the regional and confessional patterns of book culture, early print history, and mediated community formation prior to the large-scale adoption of printing since the second half of the 19th century, the contexts and dynamics under study here reveal developments with a pronounced translocal and entangled character. Drawing on the methodological approach of Periodical Studies, the role and effect of print periodicals for communities on the Islamicate periphery are conceptualized along the lines of Birgit Meyer’s Aesthetic Formations (2009).