In December 1936, producer Walter Futter announced that he had discovered a Sudanese princess named Kouka to play the romantic lead opposite Paul Robeson in Jericho (Thorton Freedland, 1937). “Princess Kouka” was not Sudanese, nor was she royalty, nor was she unknown. Kouka (née Nagiya Ibrahim Bilal; 1917–79) was an Egyptian actor who had been cast in supporting roles in Egyptian films. This article examines what media coverage of Kouka’s brief moment in the international limelight (1936–38) reveals about differing constructions of race across three race-conscious societies: the United Kingdom, where the film is made; the Jim Crow United States that Paul Robeson left behind; and colonial Egypt.

This article examines the subject of Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean in the two and a half centuries after 1650. With reference to both Ottoman and European sources, it first grapples with the empirical problems involved in studying the subject. It then explores how a combination of trade dynamics in the Gulf and the economic preferences of both Ottoman state and private actors attenuated the expansion of Ottoman shipping. Taken together, these factors confirm that the comparative dearth of Ottoman vessels in the Indian Ocean trade was a product of geopolitical and ecological contingency rather than entrepreneurial neglect or state aversion. Even so, as shown by two case studies, Ottoman subjects of one type or another were found in ports from Surat to Batavia at various moments before 1800. The analysis then turns to later nineteenth-century attempts by Ottoman state actors to augment Ottoman shipping. These efforts were inhibited by the contrasting incentives of private Ottoman seafarers, the dominance of European and Indian ships in the empire’s trade with India, the dislocation of nominal Ottoman territories in the Gulf, and the political economy of the Ottoman Gulf itself. Despite the fact that state-sponsored shipping came to grief, the presence of Ottoman ships in the Indian Ocean invites reflections on the highly mutable character of Ottoman identity and sovereignty, as well as the empire’s relative position in the wider commercial world of the Indian Ocean, across these centuries.

This article provides a microhistorical case study centered on a Roma couple residing in Istanbul’s renowned Romani settlement, Sulukule. It sheds light on three significant historical processes related to modernity that influenced the interactions of the individuals involved: land commodification, the 1881 census reform, and the rise of both inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses within the Ottoman ruling elite. At the heart of the narrative are Sadık and Züleyha, who aimed to purchase waqf land subdivided and offered for sale by Mehmed Efendi in Yenibahçe. Their goal was to escape the spatial segregation they experienced. They leveraged the new census policy, which eliminated the classification of Muslim "Gypsy” from official records, allowing them to present themselves as Muslim refugees from Bulgaria. However, upon discovering the couple’s Roma identity from Sulukule, their new neighbors initiated a legal dispute, resulting in the Internal Affairs Section of the Council of State voting to annul the transaction. The differing opinions among council members highlighted the competing inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses. The article first reconstructs the case and examines the associated historical processes using extensive primary and secondary sources.

This article examines the “beloved’s male camel section” in classical Arabic poetry, a structural and thematic component within the traditional ẓaʿāʾin section, which depicts the departure of the beloved. It investigates the development of this significant element and explores its usage in both Umayyad and pre-Umayyad poetry, with particular emphasis on the work of the early Islamic poet Mulayh b. al-Hakam from the Hejaz region, whose contributions have been largely overlooked in modern studies. The article concludes with several key findings, notably that the beloved’s male camel section is a defining feature of Umayyad-era poetry. This study also helps pinpoint when six poems from Mulayh’s dīwān were composed and reevaluates the timeframe of another poem attributed to an anonymous poet.

Is Meta a more decentralized organization today than twenty years ago, when it was known as “Thefacebook”? Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, certainly delegates a wider range of tasks to a wider range of intermediaries in 2024 compared to 2004. But Meta is also a far larger company today. Two decades ago, it was a small start-up; today, it is a multinational, publicly listed company. Given this organizational transformation, it would be odd to describe Meta as more decentralized today than “Thefacebook” twenty years ago without accounting for scale or giving more context. It is similarly odd when historians describe the Ottoman state as being more decentralized in the 18th century than in the 16th century.1

The essays in this roundtable emerged from a panel we organized at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association that took place in Montreal in 2023. With a focus on “ecocritical terrains,” the panel sought to rethink environments in the Middle East and Tamazgha (the broader North Africa) by paying attention to more-than-human ecologies. We use “Tamazgha” to acknowledge the reimagination by the Imazighen, the Indigenous people of North Africa, of the geography of their ancestral homeland, which encompasses the expansive space extending between the Canary Islands and west Egypt, from the Mediterranean Sea to sub-Saharan Africa.1 This remapping of the territory offers tremendous environmental and ecocritical opportunities that current methods of knowledge production about the region have not permitted to emerge or become part of academic conversations.

Aerial perspectives are often used to strategic ends by providing the valuable survey view instrumental to military operations, while also contributing to damage assessment and potentially to accountability efforts in the aftermath of such initiatives, via before-and-after diptychs. Precision is the lauded principle of military visioning and targeting, whereas uncertainty or ambiguity is frequently a governing characteristic of aerial photographs in civilian contexts. Aerial photographs are examples of what Allan Sekula refers to as “instrumental images” (images with primarily logistical purposes), a term that sits adjacent to Harun Farocki’s “operational images” (“pictures that are part of an operation”).1 Commenting on the instrumentality of aerial reconnaissance photographs in the context of the First World War, Sekula remarks that these images “seem to have been devoid of any rhetorical structure” so that their interpretation demanded that each photograph “be treated as an ensemble of ‘univalent,’ or indexical signs—signs that could only hold one meaning, that could only point to one object. Efficiency demanded this illusory certainty.” Given this imposed limitation of meaning, Sekula concludes, “Within the context of intelligence operations, the only ‘rational’ questions were those that addressed the photograph at an indexical level, such as ‘Is that a machine gun or a stump?’”2

I have defined “Saharanism” as a racializing and extractive imaginary that operates across deserts.1 Saharanism “entails a universalizing idea of deserts as empty and lifeless spaces, providing the conceptual justification for brutal, conscienceless, and life-threatening actions in desert environments.”2 Saharanism is informed by an ideology that creates, sustains, and weaponizes the ubiquitous perception of deserts as abnormal environments that are there to accommodate actions and undertakings that would not otherwise be undertaken in places that are considered ordinary. Given its extensive history and trans-desertic nature, Saharanism encompasses a wide array of disciplinary and policy thinking about deserts, which has had dire effects on deserts and arid lands globally.3

Across the Arabian Gulf, oil rich countries are increasingly turning to space exploration as a way to diversify their economies and assert their global influence. In 2020, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman committed over $2 billion to a national space program. Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman have launched their first satellites, and Oman recently announced plans to establish the region’s first space port alongside a research center for simulated Mars missions. Yet none of these initiatives rivals the ambitions of the United Arab Emirates, which in 2017 announced plans to establish a self-sufficient colony on Mars within a hundred years. Why have the UAE and other Gulf countries turned their gaze to human space exploration, particularly around the planet Mars?

Fundamentally, this paper is an intervention on the crucial importance of the geophysical when situating and defining the space of the Maghrib.1 Considering the age-old question, “Where is the Maghrib?,” to borrow the title of an introduction to a recent special issue of Arab Studies Journal, requires attending to the Maghrib’s unique liminality, its “interstitial position between different continents and transnational cultural formations, a variety of linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, aesthetic, and other cultural elements [that] constitute the Maghrib. This position as a space-between-spaces makes the Maghrib a hub for human hybridization, literary creolization, artistic miscegenation, and cultural cross-pollination.”2 Although these cultural and identity-based narratives are crucial, I argue that framing the Maghrib’s liminality in terms of “space-between-spaces” concurrently requires accounting for the region’s geophysical dimension—its topography, morphology, volume, geological density, and material agency, among other markers.

Many of the cartographic and environmental terrains gathered under the area studies rubric of the Middle East and North Africa are seismic zones. Geological study defines seismic zones as areas where earthquakes tend to focus and classifies these zones into different levels of seismic hazard.1 World maps of seismic hazard show differently colored bands sweeping across the globe (Fig. 1). A continuous swath of varying colors winds across the northern coast of Africa, with the yellows, oranges, and reds that indicate increasingly elevated hazard concentrated on spans of the Middle and High Atlas Mountains, extending outward in greens and blues to surrounding plains and coasts. Long lines of orange and red trace the highest levels of hazard around Iran and Turkey. From there, some bands double back West across the northern Mediterranean. Others widen across the whole of central Asia, embrace the entire Pacific rim, and spill over Oceania. Interrupting the colored seismic zones are projections of nation–state borders, presenting a visual contrast between continuity and discontinuity that is suggestive of the way that seismicity may disrupt other geographical and conceptual terrains.

In early 2011, at the height of the so-called Arab Spring, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime (r. 1969–2011) started to disintegrate. As violence convulsed Libya, hundreds of thousands of people fled across the borders into Tunisia and Egypt—not only Libyans, but also third-country nationals who had been living and working within Libyan borders, many from sub-Saharan Africa.1 In response, and against the backdrop of a newfound revolutionary idealism, the Tunisian government chose to keep the border open.2 In February, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) established the Choucha refugee camp, located eleven kilometers from the Ras Jadir border post—Tunisia’s first refugee camp since the Algerian war in 1962.3 That same month, the filmmakers Ismaël, Youssef Chebbi, and Ala Eddine Slim drove south from Tunis to Choucha to make a film.