Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000612
L. Carminati
inquisitorial record, the author also reveals the fabulators’ deep familiarity with very real prophecy-driven plans for Morisco action which were intelligible to diplomats and Inquisitors also deeply conversant in the apocalyptic cultures of the Mediterranean. Like other stories of Iberian fabulators at the close of the sixteenth century – including the authors of the plomos of Granada or the Baker who Pretended to be King of Portugal studied by Ruth MacKay – the Pérez-Cornejo affair was emblematic of the range of ideas and expertise (legal, scribal, political) that circulated at all levels of society. By reading such diverse sources together in these and the other cases she studies, Green-Mercado brings to the fore vital details about Morisco mobility and the effect of the circulation of individuals and ideas on a broader political identity amongst Moriscos and Muslims in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Through such cases, the book gives us a much richer sense of the lives and movements of the men and women who kept, adapted, and circulated Islamic idea(l)s in Morisco societies. It also gives us a more sophisticated sense of the shared apocalyptic cultures among Moriscos and Inquisitors. Along with the extensive appendices providing English translations of all the major Morisco prophecies that Green-Mercado worked with – many translated for the first time – the texture she draws out of her sources will make the book as useful for introducing students to this complex topic as it is for scholars. Visions of Deliverance offers valuable new perspectives on questions of Morisco identity and experiences. Firstly, this history of the Moriscos between periods of conversion and expulsion is told on a Mediterranean scale, within which Moriscos are mobile agents whose transregional links had an enormous effect on local lived experiences. With such a scale in mind, Green-Mercado demonstrates, we can understand how the same politics of prophecy which cohered diverse Morisco communities around hope for their future over the course of the sixteenth century was converted in a short span into a justification for their suffering in the seventeenth century and after. In her telling, the history of Spain’s Moriscos recovers the agency of this community and their role across Mediterranean politics long before the expulsion. By so doing, she re-inscribes Moriscos in both broader European history and broader Islamic history for the early modern period, and in so doing offers a uniquely Mediterranean viewpoint on this diverse community. As L.P. Harvey remarked in his 2005 survey of Morisco history, Spain’s Moriscos were “also indeed Europeans of their Age” (Harvey’s emphasis, 135) as much as they were (or were thought to be) members of the broader Islamic community. This challenge was taken up with great aplomb by scholars like Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano (2010), Lucette Valensi (2012), and the team of experts coordinated by Jocelyn Dakhl
{"title":"Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire Malte Fuhrmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Pp. 477. $103.00 hardback, $44.99 paper. ISBN: 9781108477376","authors":"L. Carminati","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000612","url":null,"abstract":"inquisitorial record, the author also reveals the fabulators’ deep familiarity with very real prophecy-driven plans for Morisco action which were intelligible to diplomats and Inquisitors also deeply conversant in the apocalyptic cultures of the Mediterranean. Like other stories of Iberian fabulators at the close of the sixteenth century – including the authors of the plomos of Granada or the Baker who Pretended to be King of Portugal studied by Ruth MacKay – the Pérez-Cornejo affair was emblematic of the range of ideas and expertise (legal, scribal, political) that circulated at all levels of society. By reading such diverse sources together in these and the other cases she studies, Green-Mercado brings to the fore vital details about Morisco mobility and the effect of the circulation of individuals and ideas on a broader political identity amongst Moriscos and Muslims in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Through such cases, the book gives us a much richer sense of the lives and movements of the men and women who kept, adapted, and circulated Islamic idea(l)s in Morisco societies. It also gives us a more sophisticated sense of the shared apocalyptic cultures among Moriscos and Inquisitors. Along with the extensive appendices providing English translations of all the major Morisco prophecies that Green-Mercado worked with – many translated for the first time – the texture she draws out of her sources will make the book as useful for introducing students to this complex topic as it is for scholars. Visions of Deliverance offers valuable new perspectives on questions of Morisco identity and experiences. Firstly, this history of the Moriscos between periods of conversion and expulsion is told on a Mediterranean scale, within which Moriscos are mobile agents whose transregional links had an enormous effect on local lived experiences. With such a scale in mind, Green-Mercado demonstrates, we can understand how the same politics of prophecy which cohered diverse Morisco communities around hope for their future over the course of the sixteenth century was converted in a short span into a justification for their suffering in the seventeenth century and after. In her telling, the history of Spain’s Moriscos recovers the agency of this community and their role across Mediterranean politics long before the expulsion. By so doing, she re-inscribes Moriscos in both broader European history and broader Islamic history for the early modern period, and in so doing offers a uniquely Mediterranean viewpoint on this diverse community. As L.P. Harvey remarked in his 2005 survey of Morisco history, Spain’s Moriscos were “also indeed Europeans of their Age” (Harvey’s emphasis, 135) as much as they were (or were thought to be) members of the broader Islamic community. This challenge was taken up with great aplomb by scholars like Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano (2010), Lucette Valensi (2012), and the team of experts coordinated by Jocelyn Dakhl","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"387 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47449658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000855
Amir Taha
Modern nation–states typically strive to define the cultural memory of a society by promoting certain historical narratives through mass media, museums, monuments, education, national holidays, and the like. Although huge differences exist between states in the realm of cultural policies, they usually entail the marginalization of certain groups or collective memories and often mark their exclusion from the imagined national collective. But even if publicly suppressed or silenced, the collective memory of marginal groups continues to thrive in the private sphere or in protected social niches. The dichotomy between public and private memory is not rigid, as state hegemony in the sphere of cultural memory fluctuates and is rarely complete.
{"title":"Sovereignty and Nationalism in Contemporary Iraq through the Memory of the 1991 Uprising","authors":"Amir Taha","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000855","url":null,"abstract":"Modern nation–states typically strive to define the cultural memory of a society by promoting certain historical narratives through mass media, museums, monuments, education, national holidays, and the like. Although huge differences exist between states in the realm of cultural policies, they usually entail the marginalization of certain groups or collective memories and often mark their exclusion from the imagined national collective. But even if publicly suppressed or silenced, the collective memory of marginal groups continues to thrive in the private sphere or in protected social niches. The dichotomy between public and private memory is not rigid, as state hegemony in the sphere of cultural memory fluctuates and is rarely complete.","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"369 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43256904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000818
David Jordan
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Iraqi society has experienced profound crises in its transition from a strong centralized state under secular Baʿth Party authoritarianism to a new weak but still authoritarian federal state that is dominated by Shiʿi Islamist parties and plagued by factionalism, open sectarian competition, and conflict. A comprehensive scrutiny of the country's recent historical ruptures and continuities that pertain to the relations between the state and religion in particular is still a desideratum in contemporary Iraq studies. The extent to which thirty-five years of Baʿthi dictatorship transformed and lastingly shaped Iraq's diverse religious landscape is still not yet fully understood. Following the US-led invasion, the former regime was well-remembered for its repression and atrocities against almost all segments of society, but its image and the long-held notion and memory of it as “atheist” and “antireligious” are increasingly being challenged. Moreover, sectarian conflicts and violence since 2005 reveal an ongoing conflict over the interpretive sovereignty and ownership of famous religious sites of memory, such as shrines and mosques, between the various factions in Iraq. Beginning with the Iran–Iraq War in 1980, the Baʿth regime lavishly sponsored Sunni and Shiʿi shrines and advertised them in its religious war propaganda all over the country as sites of memory for the Iraqi and Arab nation. Many of these religious sites were surrounded by a certain confessional ambiguity and constitute memorials and meeting places for Sunnis and Shiʿis equally. After the fall of the regime, this ambiguity sparked sectarian competition over these sites since both communities often associated with one and the same shrine quite different memories of the same saintly figure, or they disagreed about who was buried there. Radical jihadist Salafis, in turn, generally rejected them as un-Islamic and even associated them with the old regime from 2014 onward.
{"title":"State and Religion in Iraq: The Sufi Insurgency of the Former Baʿth Regime in Historical Context","authors":"David Jordan","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000818","url":null,"abstract":"Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Iraqi society has experienced profound crises in its transition from a strong centralized state under secular Baʿth Party authoritarianism to a new weak but still authoritarian federal state that is dominated by Shiʿi Islamist parties and plagued by factionalism, open sectarian competition, and conflict. A comprehensive scrutiny of the country's recent historical ruptures and continuities that pertain to the relations between the state and religion in particular is still a desideratum in contemporary Iraq studies. The extent to which thirty-five years of Baʿthi dictatorship transformed and lastingly shaped Iraq's diverse religious landscape is still not yet fully understood. Following the US-led invasion, the former regime was well-remembered for its repression and atrocities against almost all segments of society, but its image and the long-held notion and memory of it as “atheist” and “antireligious” are increasingly being challenged. Moreover, sectarian conflicts and violence since 2005 reveal an ongoing conflict over the interpretive sovereignty and ownership of famous religious sites of memory, such as shrines and mosques, between the various factions in Iraq. Beginning with the Iran–Iraq War in 1980, the Baʿth regime lavishly sponsored Sunni and Shiʿi shrines and advertised them in its religious war propaganda all over the country as sites of memory for the Iraqi and Arab nation. Many of these religious sites were surrounded by a certain confessional ambiguity and constitute memorials and meeting places for Sunnis and Shiʿis equally. After the fall of the regime, this ambiguity sparked sectarian competition over these sites since both communities often associated with one and the same shrine quite different memories of the same saintly figure, or they disagreed about who was buried there. Radical jihadist Salafis, in turn, generally rejected them as un-Islamic and even associated them with the old regime from 2014 onward.","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"344 - 352"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41854097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000697
Lior B. Sternfeld
Abstract Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian Jews have faced two powerful and inherently contradictory calls to compromise their voice and identity. From one side, Israel has consistently held the opinion that as an at-risk community they should be evacuated and resettled. On the other, Iran's revolutionary regime has made “Islamic” a centerpiece of Iranian identity, placing Jewish identity directly at odds with what it means to be an Iranian. For decades, foreign opposition groups have spread baseless and unsubstantiated claims suggesting that Iranian Jews are to be placed in concentration camps or forced to wear yellow stars. At the same time, Iran's top politicians repeatedly peddle anti-Semitic innuendo and promote Holocaust denial conspiracies. Yet such narratives miss the central fact rarely acknowledged in Israel or Western academic and public spheres: Iranian Jews have continued to maintain ownership of their story and narrative as both Iranian and Jewish. This article seeks to analyze the navigation of Iranian Jews between their struggle as a religious minority in the Islamic Republic and maintenance of their autonomous voice as represented outside Iran.
{"title":"Combating the Double Erasure: Can a Jew (Kalimi) be an Iranian in the Islamic Republic?","authors":"Lior B. Sternfeld","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000697","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian Jews have faced two powerful and inherently contradictory calls to compromise their voice and identity. From one side, Israel has consistently held the opinion that as an at-risk community they should be evacuated and resettled. On the other, Iran's revolutionary regime has made “Islamic” a centerpiece of Iranian identity, placing Jewish identity directly at odds with what it means to be an Iranian. For decades, foreign opposition groups have spread baseless and unsubstantiated claims suggesting that Iranian Jews are to be placed in concentration camps or forced to wear yellow stars. At the same time, Iran's top politicians repeatedly peddle anti-Semitic innuendo and promote Holocaust denial conspiracies. Yet such narratives miss the central fact rarely acknowledged in Israel or Western academic and public spheres: Iranian Jews have continued to maintain ownership of their story and narrative as both Iranian and Jewish. This article seeks to analyze the navigation of Iranian Jews between their struggle as a religious minority in the Islamic Republic and maintenance of their autonomous voice as represented outside Iran.","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"299 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45908824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000843
Alissa Walter, Ali Taher Al-Hammood
Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Ba‘thist regime, what kinds of historical narratives are starting to emerge among residents of Baghdad about the events of the recent past? How have their experiences with the new Iraqi state over the past twenty years colored Baghdadis’ perceptions of what their lives were like under Saddam Hussein, and how are they making sense of the profound disruptions their city has undergone in the years since 2003? We conducted structured interviews with sixty residents of Baghdad across four different neighborhoods in December 2022 and January 2023 to better understand how Baghdadis are perceiving, interpreting, and narrating changes that have taken place in their neighborhoods during their lifetimes. In light of these interviews, we offer preliminary insights about the politics of memory in contemporary Baghdad: how history, memory, and collective identities intersect in different ways for Iraqis in different parts of the city. How do residents of different Baghdad neighborhoods identify and describe the “good times” and “bad times” of the recent past, and what factors are influencing the construction of their historical narratives?
{"title":"The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Baghdad: A Comparative Neighborhood Study","authors":"Alissa Walter, Ali Taher Al-Hammood","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000843","url":null,"abstract":"Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Ba‘thist regime, what kinds of historical narratives are starting to emerge among residents of Baghdad about the events of the recent past? How have their experiences with the new Iraqi state over the past twenty years colored Baghdadis’ perceptions of what their lives were like under Saddam Hussein, and how are they making sense of the profound disruptions their city has undergone in the years since 2003? We conducted structured interviews with sixty residents of Baghdad across four different neighborhoods in December 2022 and January 2023 to better understand how Baghdadis are perceiving, interpreting, and narrating changes that have taken place in their neighborhoods during their lifetimes. In light of these interviews, we offer preliminary insights about the politics of memory in contemporary Baghdad: how history, memory, and collective identities intersect in different ways for Iraqis in different parts of the city. How do residents of different Baghdad neighborhoods identify and describe the “good times” and “bad times” of the recent past, and what factors are influencing the construction of their historical narratives?","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"353 - 361"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46333964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000685
M. Levine
Like great port cities throughout history, Jaffa has always welcomed strangers; enough of them to earn its sobriquet “mother of strangers” (umm al-gharīb). The gateway to Palestine and the Levant since ancient times, Jaffa is not only the site of multiple events of biblical or broader religious significance. With the incorporation of Palestine in the late 18th century into the still developing modern world system, Jaffa became a city of culture and commerce, with winding casbahs and tree-lined boulevards, Turkish baths and Jewish bordellos, sand dunes and orange orchards—lots of them, as we'll see—and some of the most striking architecture, never mind coastline, of the Eastern Mediterranean. North African Jews, Haurani Bedouins, Afghan traders, rabbis from Beirut, troubadours from Jerusalem, divas from Mansoura, and more than a few European Christian and Jewish pilgrims, all made their way to and through Jaffa over the centuries, joining a local population that septupled to over 17,000 during the course of the 19th century. They were joined by tens of thousands of Jews for whom Jaffa was a port of entry to Palestine with the onset of Zionist colonization. Jaffa, in other words, is the perfect locale for a novel, especially when, as with award-winning architect and writer Suad Amiry's first novel, Mother of Strangers, most of it happens to be rooted in truth.
{"title":"“Filling in the Blanks”: Jaffa's Oranges, an English Suit, and the Rememorying of Palestinian History","authors":"M. Levine","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000685","url":null,"abstract":"Like great port cities throughout history, Jaffa has always welcomed strangers; enough of them to earn its sobriquet “mother of strangers” (umm al-gharīb). The gateway to Palestine and the Levant since ancient times, Jaffa is not only the site of multiple events of biblical or broader religious significance. With the incorporation of Palestine in the late 18th century into the still developing modern world system, Jaffa became a city of culture and commerce, with winding casbahs and tree-lined boulevards, Turkish baths and Jewish bordellos, sand dunes and orange orchards—lots of them, as we'll see—and some of the most striking architecture, never mind coastline, of the Eastern Mediterranean. North African Jews, Haurani Bedouins, Afghan traders, rabbis from Beirut, troubadours from Jerusalem, divas from Mansoura, and more than a few European Christian and Jewish pilgrims, all made their way to and through Jaffa over the centuries, joining a local population that septupled to over 17,000 during the course of the 19th century. They were joined by tens of thousands of Jews for whom Jaffa was a port of entry to Palestine with the onset of Zionist colonization. Jaffa, in other words, is the perfect locale for a novel, especially when, as with award-winning architect and writer Suad Amiry's first novel, Mother of Strangers, most of it happens to be rooted in truth.","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"377 - 385"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46413082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0020743823001009
{"title":"MES volume 55 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0020743823001009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743823001009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"b1 - b2"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46923942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000727
Hannah Scott Deuchar
Abstract Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the pioneering postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Bringing three competing accounts of the machine's invention together, I find that in each the Arabic typewriter was turned to very different purposes. Consistently, however, it was co-opted into intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeded its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it was written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. And across the accounts, diverse names and places reappear: New York, Palestine, Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter's origin-stories, I ask finally whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history—one that is itself uncanny and estranged.
{"title":"A Case of Multiple Identities: Uncanny Histories of the Arabic Typewriter","authors":"Hannah Scott Deuchar","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000727","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the pioneering postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Bringing three competing accounts of the machine's invention together, I find that in each the Arabic typewriter was turned to very different purposes. Consistently, however, it was co-opted into intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeded its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it was written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. And across the accounts, diverse names and places reappear: New York, Palestine, Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter's origin-stories, I ask finally whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history—one that is itself uncanny and estranged.","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"238 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48314231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0020743823000867
Hawraa Al-Hassan
In his 2019 critical study, Husayn Sarmak Hassan complained that not enough attention has been given to the production of Iraqi prison writing even after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and its censorship apparatus. He notes, for example, that during the 2017 Cairo book fair, he found thirty (presumably new) prison novels, none of which were written by Iraqis. The relative scarcity of prison novels from Iraq is most certainly not due to lack of content; since the collapse of the old regime, there has been a proliferation of personal accounts, both oral and written, detailing the horrors of Saddam's Ba'th and the extent of the human toll of its wars and oppression. The ensuing documentation projects that emerged out of this mass catharsis aimed to amplify voices that had hitherto been marginalized and silenced, including the experiences of political prisoners. Hassan's study on prison writing, published by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, can be seen in this light: as part of a national effort to process the literary and psychological aspects of the Ba‘th's legacy. However, the author's interest in prison writing also stems from his professional background as a medical doctor and psychiatrist directly involved in the study and treatment of PTSD in military veterans of the Iran–Iraq War. His personal interest in the experiences of Iraqi political prisoners is also made clear by certain paratextual elements in his study; in the acknowledgements, for example, Hassan dedicates his text to a friend who spent twenty years in incarceration as a political prisoner, and to his brother, who he found unrecognizable due to starvation and torture on a visit to a Najaf prison in 1994.
{"title":"The Form of Remembrance: Prison Writing and the Memory of the Ba‘th in Dreaming of Baghdad and I‘jaam","authors":"Hawraa Al-Hassan","doi":"10.1017/S0020743823000867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743823000867","url":null,"abstract":"In his 2019 critical study, Husayn Sarmak Hassan complained that not enough attention has been given to the production of Iraqi prison writing even after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and its censorship apparatus. He notes, for example, that during the 2017 Cairo book fair, he found thirty (presumably new) prison novels, none of which were written by Iraqis. The relative scarcity of prison novels from Iraq is most certainly not due to lack of content; since the collapse of the old regime, there has been a proliferation of personal accounts, both oral and written, detailing the horrors of Saddam's Ba'th and the extent of the human toll of its wars and oppression. The ensuing documentation projects that emerged out of this mass catharsis aimed to amplify voices that had hitherto been marginalized and silenced, including the experiences of political prisoners. Hassan's study on prison writing, published by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, can be seen in this light: as part of a national effort to process the literary and psychological aspects of the Ba‘th's legacy. However, the author's interest in prison writing also stems from his professional background as a medical doctor and psychiatrist directly involved in the study and treatment of PTSD in military veterans of the Iran–Iraq War. His personal interest in the experiences of Iraqi political prisoners is also made clear by certain paratextual elements in his study; in the acknowledgements, for example, Hassan dedicates his text to a friend who spent twenty years in incarceration as a political prisoner, and to his brother, who he found unrecognizable due to starvation and torture on a visit to a Najaf prison in 1994.","PeriodicalId":47340,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"362 - 368"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41842894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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