Eastern History Research Articles

Competition in the Mid-20th Century Saudi Education System

The formation of the Saudi education system in the middle of the 20th century, with its parallel religious and modernizing authorities, represents a form of institutional gestation that is quite distinct from the dominant models of modern Middle Eastern history. In Saudi Arabia, unlike elsewhere in the postcolonial Arab world, a religious ideology (Wahhabism) was made a centerpiece of the nation-building enterprise. This paper examines that nation-building process through the lens of the competition between the modernizing authorities of the Ministry of Education (Wizārat al-Ma‘ārif), which controlled the bulk of the kingdom’s new educational institutions, and the Wahhābī religious establishment, which was placed in autonomous charge of religious high schools and universities, as well as girls’ primary schools. This paper explores the opposing strategies of modernizers and ulama as they worked to imprint their priorities on the education sector. I look closely at contests over vocational education, resource allocation and authority, and private religious schooling initiatives, through which I map some foundational aspects of the institutionalization of ulama and technocratic authority in the Saudi education sphere. I argue that competition over the future of education was the impulse for cross-pollination between religious and modernizing educational institutions, and that this competition helps to explain the particular nature of the modern Saudi educational system.

Cultural tensions in the late Ottoman Empire: a romantic nationalism model

In the 19th century, Romantic Nationalism provided an alternative to rational visions and universal strategies for mankind. Doing so involved affirming that cultures are products of their heritage and that people are emotionally connected to them. As a result, alternative ways of life should not be forced upon people. By adapting Romantic Nationalism in order to analyse of tensions in the later years of the Ottoman Empire, a widely understood paradigm of cultural stability and change is applied to a crucial era in Middle Eastern history.

Reading and Analyzing Ottoman Manuscripts: 3–8 September 2018, Ankara

Reading and Analyzing Ottoman Manuscripts 3–8 September 2018, Ankara Matthew Ghazarian Archives are powerful but seductive; they inform and misinform. These were ideas broached at the “Reading and Analyzing Ottoman Manuscripts,” workshop hosted in Ankara in September 2018. The program aimed to show participants the pleasures and pitfalls of Ottoman archives. It follows two similar programs in Amman (2016) and Beirut (2017). At the 2018 edition, participants compared experiences, learned about dozens of manuscript collections, and critically contemplated their contents. The bulk of the program was comprised of talks, reading groups, and tours of archives and libraries. The program opened with panels and talks, which were also peppered throughout the following days. Speakers addressed two major questions—“Where do I start?” and “How can we trust archives, anyway?” Yonca Köksal talked about the contents of the Presidential State Archives (Cumhurbaşkanlık Devlet Arşivleri, formerly the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi), especially collections pertaining to nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms and their ramifications in the provinces. Mark Aymes, Norig Neveu, and Metin Atmaca, meanwhile, formed a panel to discuss the collections available to researchers in Greece and Cyprus, Jordan, and Iraq, respectively. Other speakers also offered their takes on how to use specific collections. Mustafa Alkan described sources available in the archives of the General Directorate of Pious Foundations (Vakıflar Müdürlüğü), and Evgeni Rad-shev presented on tahrir and other sources from the early modern Ottoman Balkans and Bulgaria. Others focused on method. Özer Ergenç presented on approaches for using Ottoman primary sources, and Oktay Özel gave a broad overview of the kinds of archives available in Turkey and how to utilize them. He discussed at length the trap of collections that appear open but are in fact redacted. All of the speakers offered anecdotes, tips, and basic information about researching in, traveling to, and accessing collections relevant to Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. [End Page 245] Although they also questioned the archive’s constitution and authority, earlier talks were geared more toward describing where and how to conduct research. Later talks dwelled more on questions than answers. Füat Dündar, Christine Jungen, and Abdul-Hameed Al-Kayyali, for example, raised issues of power, memory, and identity when dealing with state collections. What makes Arab archives Arab, and what kinds of Ottoman pasts can we find within them? What Armenian or Palestinian histories can emerge from archives constructed and policed by Turkish or Israeli officials? How does the presence of such archives continue to shape the possibility of writing histories of Turkey, Israel, and the Middle East? They also raised questions about the kinds of knowledge production—oral, for instance—that are rarely captured and preserved in the archive. The reading groups formed the bread and butter of the program, meeting for six separate hour-long sessions spread across three days. Split into ten-person sections with a few instructors, they provided a space for participants to compare experiences reading, translating, and analyzing Ottoman documents. Discussions touched on everything from paleography to poetics. These reading groups offered a chance for participants to glance at and discuss, even briefly, a broad sampling of documents from former Ottoman realms. Participants looked at fifteenth-century letters, sixteenth-century poetry, and seventeenth-century pious foundation registers (vakıf defterleri), in addition to eighteenth and nineteenth-century state papers. Unfortunately, these were brief encounters, not committed engagements: the summer school was five days, not five weeks. Holding the program in Ankara offered the chief advantage of the city’s many archival collections, which include a digital copy of Ottoman collections held in Istanbul’s Presidential State Archives. With over forty million sorted documents, and over forty-five million unsorted documents, it is by far the largest collection of Ottoman materials in this country and likely anywhere in the world. Still, the summer school made a convincing case for all researchers—not just those of the Turkish Republic—to take a trip to Ankara for the collections held only there. Some of these were run by state-funded institutions including: • State Archive General Directorate (Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü) • General Directorate of Pious Foundations (Vakıflar Genel...

The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī (Volume 1)

The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī (Volume 1)

Islamist Movements and the Arab Spring

The Arab uprisings of 2011, popularly known as the Arab Spring, were first initiated by a broad range of movements shaped primarily by a non-ideological sense of civic identity. As the uprisings gained momentum, however, Islamist groups were able to utilise their organisational strength and mobilisation capabilities to position themselves at the centre of this watershed moment in modern Middle Eastern history. This article examines the role Islamism came to play in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, notably in the reformulation of the norms of regional governance as authoritarian rule appeared poised to be replaced by a system rooted in democratic legitimacy, independent institutions, and a redefined relationship between the state and its citizens. The article begins with a consideration of the evolution of political Islam in the Arab world, from its origins as a significant social movement actor to its various attempts at political engagement with the state. The articlethen proceeds to a more explicit examine of both political Islams role in the Arab Spring and its apparent intentions for the post-authoritarian order. It is argued that, since the Arab uprisings took place, many Islamist groups have abandoned abstract slogans in favour of coherent political platforms concerned with, amongst other things, the role of Islam in a revised constitution and determining the powers and responsibilities of state institutions. Looking ahead to long-term trends, the interpretation of Shariah, understanding the nature of the civil state, and the shape of democratic participation appear set to become crucial issues within Islamist discourse. The realities of rule, requiring pragmatism and compromise, will almost certainly challenge the ideological orientation of political Islam in the coming years, as Islamists come to realise that political survival is predicated not on ideological purity but on practical results.

Heather D. Baker / Michael Jursa (Eds.), Documentary Sources in Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Economic History. Methodology and Practice. Oxford, Oxbow Books 2014

Heather D. Baker / Michael Jursa (Eds.), Documentary Sources in Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Economic History. Methodology and Practice. Oxford, Oxbow Books 2014

Popular politics in the Medieval Middle East

AbstractPremodern Middle Eastern regimes were in general despotic, yet various social groups and communities did take part in the politics of their societies. Incidents of urban protest in Egypt and Syria in the late Mamluk period allow us to see some of their politics in practice, to understand some of the dynamics that operated in medieval Middle Eastern cities and the alliances between various groups and the social and political transformations that were taking place from the 15th century onwards. Recent research has added more nuance to understanding urban protest, not simply as reflexive reactions to economic strife but more as part of the dynamic that maintained city life and integrated various communities and which reflected new ideas of shared values and expectations of power. In riots, crowds of common people allied with and protested against military elites, religious scholars, merchants, and craftsmen. Recent studies have highlighted various roles of non‐elite urban groups in politics, analyzed urban politics in a regional and global context, and revised assumptions about unchanging autocratic Middle Eastern political culture. Some attention has also been given to the roles of peasants in rural politics. Studying popular politics allows us a better understanding of the role of various communities in pre‐modern Middle Eastern history.

The Origins of the Assyrian King List

Abstract The Assyrian King List (AKL) is central to the reconstruction of Assyrian and broader Near Eastern history and chronology. Because of AKL’s significance, locating its original moment of composition has far-reaching historiographical implications. There is no scholarly consensus on the dating of AKL, but a closer look at the internal evidence of AKL indicates a firm, fifteenth century terminus post quem for the creation of AKL, while the bilingual tablet fragment BM 98496 establishes the thirteenth century reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I as a secure terminus ante quem. Within this temporal range, it is possible to trace the genesis of AKL to the reign of Aššur-uballiṭ I. This period witnessed great change in Assyria, and the nature of this change provides an ideal historical, political, and ideological context for the production of AKL. No other moment in Assyrian history offers so compelling a conjunction of political motives and historical circumstances for AKL’s composition.

Constructing large multinational corporations from China: East meets West at Huawei, 1987-2017

The telecommunication enterprise Huawei, founded in 1987, is one of few multinational companies emerging from China to date. The development of the capabilities that allowed Huawei to become a formidable competitor on the global stage undoubtedly owes a great deal to importation of best practice routines from the West with the help of western consulting firms. But Huawei is also distinctly Chinese. In the West, a founder who relinquished all but a 1.4 percent of equity in the firm to give the remaining shares to employees would be an abnormality. Huawei’s collective ownership arrangement (88,000 people own the other 98.6 percent of the shares) enabled management actions that are unthinkable in the West. The top 6,687 managers in 2007, for example, agreed to collectively resign from the company and to be selectively rehired to avoid falling under new labor law restrictions. We develop an account of how Western and Eastern history has shaped the leadership’s decision making through multiple transmission mechanisms. Because the founder is an avid reader and student of history, major strategic decisions of Huawei have been deeply influenced by historical precedent. We argue that Huawei cannot be understood without coming to terms with the imprinting the firm has received both by the Chinese context and the founder’s conviction that the firm needed to learn from historically accumulated Western knowledge.

REPRESENTING TURKISHNESS IN NEO-LATIN DRAMA: THE CASE OF SOLYMANNIDAE

The Elizabethan period witnessed a proliferation of Neo-Latin drama in Oxford and Cambridge universities and in the Inns of Court. Despite the sheer bulk of academic drama and its role in paving the way for the mature drama written in the vernacular, it has not yet received adequate critical attention. Consequently, this paper tries to shed some light on this neglected genre by presenting a reading of the surviving drama Solymannidae — a play which draws on the history of the Ottoman dynasty. In creating action and characters the anonymous playwright borrowed extensively from the classical dramatic conventions, but, at the same time, he was original in representing the Turkish cultural identity. The discussion unveils the drama’s pioneering role in introducing plots from Eastern history on the English stage and its contribution in formulating the dramaturgical practices to perform them. In this paper there is also an attempt to verify Solymannidae’s source. The present inquiry aims to extend our knowledge of English Neo-Latin drama which is customarily excluded from the mainstream of scholarship.

Allies at arm’s length: Redefining Egyptian–Soviet relations in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war

ABSTRACTThis article examines Egyptian–Soviet relations in the run up to the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. It argues that Egypt and the Soviet Union stumbled into brinkmanship with little coordination and no agreement on common objectives or goals. The article demonstrates how frustration and mutual disappointment were recurring features of the interactions between the two allies during the critical weeks prior to the war. In doing so, the article exposes new aspects of how Cairo and Moscow managed their alliance and assesses what that means to our understanding of the origins of this transformative war. These conclusions challenge revisionist accounts that attribute the start of the war to Egyptian–Soviet collusion and some traditional narratives that present the Soviet Union as an enterprising risk-taker invested in regional brinkmanship. The article draws heavily on Egyptian and Arabic language sources to examine Egyptian–Soviet interactions during this key period of Middle Eastern history.

The Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath Archaeological Project: Overview

The Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath Archaeological Project commenced in 1996 and is one of the largest and longest continuously running archaeological projects in Israel. As the year 2017 marks twenty-two years of research and excavations, it is an apt opportunity to present an overview and reflection on the project in general, and various aspects of the research in particular. The opportunity to do this in two special issues of NEA is an excellent occasion, as this provides an expertly produced medium, read by many interested in the field of ancient Near Eastern history, archaeology, and culture.1 In this, first article of this special issue, I would like to provide an overview of the project and its primary accomplishments.

Interpreting the Oil Kingdom: Opportunities and Hazards

It is telling that Cambridge University Press commissioned two anthropologists to write its histories of modern Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Having escaped the experience of direct colonial rule, these countries do not fit comfortably into the dominant model of modern Middle Eastern history. It follows that the template for modern Saudi statehood cannot be retrieved from the colonial archives, or the postcolonial corporate ones, for that matter. Instead, it must be cobbled out of disparate parts, some Arabian, some Islamic, and some imported. Few modern states defy the reigning scholarly consensuses of economics, politics, history, and anthropology like Saudi Arabia, a place that on account of oil wealth has been transformed almost beyond recognition in the span of two or three generations. As a rentier-based, kinship-organized, orally inscribed, puritanically orthodox Muslim polity, Saudi Arabia poses problems for the best traditions of graduate training in any single discipline.

THE MANUFACTURE, EVALUATION AND CONSERVATION OF CLAY TABLETS INSCRIBED IN CUNEIFORM: TRADITIONAL PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern history is largely based on written records preserved on clay tablets, but tablets have often been separated from other archaeological artefacts, with erratic consequences. This paper discusses the treatment, distribution and evaluation of tablets since the first major discoveries in 1850, the problems and potential advantages of identifying clay sources and methods of manufacture, the challenges of preserving and recording tablets found in different conditions in the field, and the development of cleaning and long-term conservation techniques. Early experiments in firing tablets at the British Museum and at Babylon were followed by the systematic work of Friedrich Rathgen in Berlin around 1900. While his methods were gradually accepted in principle, there was limited communication among specialists, and independent procedures evolved. The debate on best practice continues.

Towards the First Far Eastern Republic: Regionalism, Socialism, and Nationalism in Pacific Russia, 190551918

The working paper offers a new interpretation of the intellectual and political genealogies of the Far Eastern Republic (1920–1922). The working paper demonstrates that the Far Eastern Republic was not a new project, as a similar formation was first proclaimed on April 10, 1918, in Khabarovsk as an autonomy within the Soviet Russian Republic under the name of the Soviet Republic of the Far East in line with the resolutions of the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The Soviet Republic of the Far East was a product of regionalist and nationalist discourses and built on the ideas of decentralization which were widely discussed since the First Russian Revolution (1905–1907) by liberals and socialists alike and began to be implemented after the February Revolution (1917). The Chernobyl-born and Chicago-educated Bolshevik Aleksandr Mikhailovich Krasnoshchekov, who led the establishment of the Far Eastern Republic in 1920, also headed the Soviet Republic of the Far East in 1918. Its government, the Far Eastern Council of People’s Commissars (Dal’sovnarkom) defied the authority of the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets (Tsentrosibir’) and disobeyed the Moscow central government implementing thereby a regionalist approach to Soviet federalism. Krasnoshchekov’s project relied on the ideas of the Populists (Narodniki), the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Social Democrats which were tested in the Russian Far East during the First Russian Revolution and the interpretations of Far Eastern history and interests which were put forward by regional deputies in the Russian State Duma. The formation of the first Far Eastern republic was facilitated by the activities of Deputy of the Fourth Duma and Commissar of the Provisional Government for the Far East Aleksandr Nikolaevich Rusanov who led the formation of a regional organization uniting democratically elected zemstvo and municipal self-government bodies.

Making the Foreign Past Real: Teaching and Assessing Middle Eastern History in Australia

Teaching modern Middle East history at the University of Melbourne raises problems of culture. Students are not generally acquainted with the Middle East and North Africa—even those whose families originate there—news coverage is patchy, and Australia is far away. Not all students are even arts students let alone history majors: our degree structure requires interdisciplinary study. The University is liberal about how to assess students, only requiring that during a twelve-week semester subject a student must write 4000 words. Within broad bounds, how teachers do this is up to them, although the Arts Faculty has a culture of avoiding unseen examinations. History major students are very accustomed to the “traditional” researched essay format, but it does not provide much variety of intellectual training; it is unfamiliar to non-Arts students; in classes that regularly number over 100 students, it is tiring and boring to assess; and large numbers of essays are freely available online. So I have introduced an assessment task to replace the standard researched essay. The purpose here is to describe an alternative approach to assessment and learning by using a simulation: in that sense the actual topic of the simulation is secondary. It concerns refugees, which is of course, a matter of vital current concern, but it is the reasoning behind the task that I hope is instructive.

Richard L. Chambers 1929-2016

Richard L. Chambers was born on 27 September 1929 in Brundidge, Alabama, and died on 1 August 2016 in Montgomery, Alabama. He attended the University of Alabama, studying diplomatic and Middle Eastern history and gaining a B.A. in 1950. He obtained a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a fellowship at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He then pursued an M.A. in History at Alabama, graduating in 1955, just when Middle Eastern studies really began to expand nationwide. He moved to Princeton for a second master's in 1958 and a Ph.D. in 1968. He studied with Ottoman historian Lewis Thomas and wrote a dissertation on Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, the nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectual, historian, and statesman.

The Midwest and Early American History

The Midwest and Early American History Donald R. Hickey David Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Read to Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 460pp. $29.95. Colin Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 214pp. $24.95. [End Page 147] Patrick Bottiger, The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 244pp. $50.00. Mary Elise Antoine, The War of 1812 in Wisconsin: The Battle for Prairie du Chien. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016. 287pp. $29.95. David Andrew Nichols, Engines of Diplomacy: Indian Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Expansion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 254pp. $32.95. John Reda, From Furs to Farms: The Transformation of the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. 201pp. $38.00. Peter Shrake, The Silver Man: The Life and Times of Indian Agent John Kinzie. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016. 165pp. $14.95. Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 391pp. $34.95. Scholarly interest in the history of the Midwest originated in the late nineteenth century, stimulated in part by the enormous influence of Frederick Jackson’s Turner’s seminal paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which he delivered in 1893 at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in Chicago. “The true point of view in the history of this nation,” he said in that paper, “is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West.” Turner’s call coincided roughly with the publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s popular 4-volume work, The Winning of the West (1889–96), which was devoted almost entirely to the Trans-Appalachian West and especially the Midwest. Turner’s pronouncement was followed by the proliferation of PhD programs at midwestern universities, where faculty and students, using readily accessible local sources, produced a growing body of monographs exploring the local, state, and sectional history of the region. Most of these works are still serviceable today. Of special note are two broad studies of the Old Northwest that represent a kind of culmination of this phase of the [End Page 148] historiography: Beverly W. Bond Jr., The Civilization of the Old Northwest: A Study of Political, Economic, and Social Development, 1788–1812 (1934), which makes good use of contemporary newspapers; and R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840 (two volumes, 1950), which is full of valuable information. Seeking a greater voice in the profession, historians in the region in 1914 established an association that produced a journal, the Mississippi Valley Historical Journal. Although the field of midwestern history was well-established by World War II, thereafter it went into eclipse. The huge growth of graduate programs in other parts of the nation, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with the emergence of new fields of study, pushed midwestern history into the background. In truth, the elite schools in the East had never lost their dominant position nor their interest in eastern history. Students of colonial and early national America who practiced the newer forms of history—quantitative history in the 1970s and the history of race, class, ethnicity, and gender more recently—have had no trouble finding congenial topics in the East. Reflecting these changes, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1964 was retitled the Journal of American History. Recently, midwestern history has enjoyed something of a revival. One reason is a growing belief that events in the West shaped broader government decisions. As François Furstenberg has put it, “rather than imperial capitals imposing their will on the populations of distant peripheries, the actors on those peripheries impose their will on policymakers in the center” (Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 [June 2008], 653). Some of the credit for this revival must also go to historian Jon Lauck. An indefatigable advocate of the history of the Midwest, Lauck is the author of several books on the...

Hijacking Law

This essay considers the legal strategies of comparative communities in South Asian, Middle Eastern, and US history. What does it mean for a particular group to “hijack” a body of law, taking everyone on board to an unwanted destination? The piece compares the legal strategies of the Parsi community in colonial and postcolonial India to those of the German Jewish yekke population in mandate Palestine and early independent Israel, the women's movement in India in recent decades, and Protestants in contemporary America before the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. There are multiple ways of trying to take control of a body of law, and for multiple reasons. A group may capture a body of personal law to perpetuate its own values within the group. It may try to control a territorial legal system to impose its values on the entire population. It may work across bodies of personal law to obtain as uniform a result as possible—as if the system were a unified field, not a segmented one. Or its group members may make available their legal expertise to shore up a newly independent state's legal system. The essay suggests that taking control of a body of law does not necessarily mean hijacking it.

Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in Nineteenth-Century Egypt and the Mediterranean

AbstractIn October 1898, the Italian vice-consul in Alexandria charged a group of Italians with participating in an anarchist plot to attack German Emperor Wilhelm II during his planned tour through Egypt and Palestine. This collective arrest produced unexpected outcomes, left a trail of multi-lingual documents, and illuminated specific forms of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean migration. Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of and connected to what was happening elsewhere: they sent letters, circulated manifestos, raised and transported money, and helped fugitive comrades. They maintained nodes of subversion and moved along circuits of solidarity. Similarly, diplomats of Europe, Cairo, Istanbul, and local consular officials operated across borders and cooperated to hunt anarchists down. By following people who were on the move on boats, in post offices, and in taverns, I make a methodological and historiographical argument. First, I examine the Mediterranean as a space of flows and show how theMaghreb/Mashreqdivide in Middle Eastern history has concealed webs and connections. Because anarchists and authorities acted on multiple fronts simultaneously, so must scholarship of this part of the world take account of several histories at once. Second, I look beyond the micro-macro binary to emphasize the interconnections and mutual implications of the micro, the macro, and everything in between. I highlight competing, intersecting, and even contradictory trajectories of some of these anarchist migrants’ belonging. As the affair of the bombs unfolded, all of these contradictions and scales of analysis became visible at once.