This issue marks the launch of a new IJMES cover. While it's not likely to please everyone—some of you may be nostalgic for the old maroon and yellow cover—we have opted for a design that enables the journal to highlight the visual culture of the Middle East. The image on the cover will change with each issue, and it is our hope that authors of articles and roundtable essays will be inspired to submit visual images with their work for consideration as that issue's cover. We thank our partners at Cambridge University Press, Laura Etheredge and Nancy BriggsShearer; IJMES board members, who encouraged us to move forward with a new design; and the MESA directorate, which supported the adoption of a new cover.

This issue of IJMES features seven full-length articles and a roundtable on “theorizing violence.” While we were preparing the articles for publication in June and early July, the conflict in Syria was escalating, the Turkish state was suppressing protests in Gezi Park, and the situation in Egypt took a precipitous turn when the military killed more than fifty Muslim Brotherhood supporters. As our colleagues writing in more time-sensitive venues such as Jadaliyya, Facebook, and personal blogs scrambled to keep up with events, we decided to take a broader look at scholarly approaches to the study of violence. For the roundtable, we asked seven political scientists, historians, and anthropologists working on the Middle East and South Asia to reflect on “violence” as a theoretical category across the disciplines. The responses move from introductory reflections on studying, teaching, and writing about violence by our new board member Laleh Khalili, who helped us organize the roundtable, to conceptualizations of violence “from above” employed by colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal states (Khalili, Daniel Neep), through everyday and crisis-linked forms of sexual violence (Veena Das) and violence “from below,” whether in the forms of communal riots and suicide bombing (Faisal Devji) or self-immolation, hunger strikes, and other acts of self-destruction (Banu Bargu), to reflections on violence and nonviolence in Gezi Park (Yeşim Arat). The roundtable concludes with a broad-sweep analysis of most of the above in relation to (inter)disciplinarity and to Middle Eastern modernity by our board member James McDougall.

We are thrilled to present this special issue on “Queer Affects,” which explores a range of topics and analytical approaches that have rarely appeared in the pages of IJMES but reflect vital emerging discussions in diverse subfields of Middle East studies. That so many contributors hail from literary disciplines, which have tended to be underrepresented in the journal, also makes this a landmark issue for us. We thank guest editors Hanadi Al-Samman and Tarek El-Ariss for proposing the special issue, gathering the original collection of manuscript submissions, and introducing the final group of six articles we present here, all of which have gone through the standard IJMES peer review process. We also acknowledge the anonymous reviewers, some of whom read more than one article for this issue, for their perceptive evaluations. We are grateful to Huda Lufti for permitting us to use a photograph of her artwork, “Lipstick and Moustache (2010),” as this issue's cover art.

The first two articles in this issue, reflecting growing scholarly interest in the global era of decolonization in the two decades after World War II, track multilayered local, regional, and global forces that shaped particular historical shifts during these pivotal years. Cyrus Schayegh, in “1958 Reconsidered: State Formation and the Cold War in the Early Postcolonial Arab Middle East,” revisits the political crises that tore rapidly through the central Arab states in 1958, focusing on Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which were “sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt.” While Schayegh concurs with previous scholarship that the convulsions of that year did not lead to the deep sociopolitical and ideological transformations in the region that many contemporaries either hoped or feared, he argues that they can now be read as marking a historical milestone of a different sort. In all three countries, the events of 1958 sparked immediate, dramatic, and persistent “state-formation surges,” particularly through the rapid implementation of development plans aimed at defusing both socioeconomic discontent and the political aspirations fueled by Nasirist Arab nationalism on one side and Arab communist movements on the other. Schayegh suggests that these state-formation surges in turn shaped similarities in the three countries’ subsequent historical development in spite of stark differences in their political systems of governance.

Using Arabic, English, and French sources, and engaging Middle East and Cold War historians, this article makes a threefold argument. First, in United Arab Republic (UAR)–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, the 1958–59 explosion of domestic and regional tensions triggered state-formation surges. Second, these formed one process, which made those states more alike, with state-led socioeconomic planning playing a key role. Third, that process partook of a global Third World trend intersecting with the early Cold War. I draw three conclusions. Although existing scholarly readings that the events of 1958–59 in the Arab Middle East formed a crisis but not an ideological or political watershed are correct, from the viewpoint of state formation this crisis was a milestone. Moreover, UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had persisting affinities and shared regional positions—notably, the fact that all were sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt—that shaped their individual postindependence histories of state formation. Last, Washington's low-profile involvement in this state-formation surge illustrates how domestic sociopolitics and regional geopolitics—including the UAR's peaking popularity and influence in 1958–59—affected U.S. policy in the Cold War postcolonial world.

When we and several authors of the articles included here originally debated the idea of this special issue, our aim was to respond to what we perceived as a standstill that locks Middle Eastern queer studies into a premodern Eastern versus modern Western-oriented division. While the East is studied as a repository of tradition with an identifiable sexual and amorous nomenclature, the West is often presented as a fixed hegemonic structure distinct from the East, regardless of the long traditions of cultural exchange and the specific forms of translation and dialogue that take shape when the identities and models of desire associated with the West travel or are performed outside it or at its periphery. This division has generated a set of binaries pertaining to the applicability of terms (gay, lesbian, homosexual) and theoretical frameworks (queer theory) to Middle Eastern literary and cultural contexts. It is our belief that critical engagements with queer Arab and Iranian sexualities in literature and culture ought to situate current discussions in queer theory within debates and concerns arising from specific Middle Eastern social and political realities.

In this article, I explore how the rapid commercialism and commodification of Turkish premier league football has affected the activities of a particular fan group, Çarşı, for the club Beşiktaş, one of Turkey's oldest teams. I look at how elements of the commodification of football have been harnessed and mediated by Çarşı to make ethical and political statements and convey an anarcho-socialist message. These processes, I argue, are driven by the possibilities opened up by rapid social and technological development. The shift to searching for identity among the forums and video websites of the internet, rather than on the terraces of Beşiktaş, is profoundly altering how fans construct their allegiance to the fan group and the club. This process, it will be shown, is not so much liberating supporters from the requirements of fandom as it is generating new conventions and processes to which Çarşı members must adhere.

In the 18th century, non-Muslims and women crossed social boundaries during a period of increased global consumption, prompting intervention on the part of Ottoman officials. On the imperial level, the sultan promulgated edicts to restrict such crossings, following the path of earlier laws that had regulated public spaces including bathhouses. In Aleppo, a local reflection of these 18th-century trends was increased monitoring of nudity and of contact between Muslims and non-Muslims within the city's bathhouses. Regulations required that bathkeepers provide separate bath sundries for Muslims and non-Muslims and prohibited co-confessional bathing for women in particular. With the assistance of guilds—and to a lesser extent millet representatives—complex bathing schedules for Muslim and non-Muslim women were registered at court to support segregation policies. Jurists discussing modesty requirements for Muslim women declared that non-Muslim (dhimmī) women were to be treated as unrelated men in that they were forbidden to gaze upon a naked Muslim woman. Shariʿa court rulings were constructed along similar lines, indicating that the dhimmī woman was an unstable, liminal social category because in some circumstances her gaze was gendered male. Muslim male elites and local guilds ultimately instituted segregated bathing schedules to protect the purity of Muslim women from the danger posed by the dhimmī female figure.

This paper focuses on the relationship between social identity based on national, religious, or international affiliations and attitudes toward foreign policy in the Turkish context. Evidence is drawn from an original survey conducted among university students in Turkey. The results show that students' social identity has a significant correlation with their perceptions of foreign policy. Most Turkish university students provide conditional support for the new directions in Turkey's foreign policy, but those with an Islamic identity appear to be more supportive of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi's (Justice and Development Party) policies. Most university students believe that Turkey's future lies in the European Union and the Central Asian Turkic republics rather than in the Middle East. Overall, the perceptions of educated youth toward foreign policy are shaped by both social identity and their conceptions of national interest.

The Algerian war resituated the meaning of “Muslims” and “Jews” in France in relation to religion and “origins” and this process reshaped French secular nationhood, with Algerian independence in mid-1962 crystallizing a complex and shifting debate that took shape in the interwar period and blossomed between 1945 and 1962. In its failed efforts to keep all Algerians French, the French government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism, and did so with policies that took seriously, rather than rejected, the so-called ethnoreligious arguments that they embraced—and that, according to existing scholarship, have always been anathema to French laïcité. Most scholars on France continue to presume that its history is national or wholly “European.” Yet paying attention to this transnational confrontation, driven by claims from Algeria and Israel, emphasizes the crucial roles of North African and Mediterranean developments in the making of contemporary France.

From 1891 to 1911, a disenfranchised shaykh of the Muntafiq tribe, Saʿdun al-Mansur, led a large uprising against Ottoman rule in southern Iraq. Feeling that he had been disinherited from properties that were his birthright, he fought battle after battle against rival family claimants, shaykhs in Arabia and the Gulf, and reformist Ottoman governors in Baghdad and Basra. This article analyzes Saʿdun's insurgency both within the context of his life and against the background of shifting socioeconomic and political events in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf at the turn of the 20th century. One of the last rebellions against Ottoman central authority in southern Iraq, the insurgency was also notable for the indirect but intriguing links between the rebel shaykh and his nominal overlord Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid II, who paid special attention to the rebel's fate.

In recent decades, Iran has witnessed radical transformations concerning the conceptualization of and procedural standards for changing sex. Psychologists, medical and legal practitioners, law enforcement officials, and scholars of fiqh have debated the advisability (in debates among health and legal professionals) or the permissibility (among scholars of fiqh) of sex-change. This article asks what historical transformations of the concept of jins/genus have informed the debates and enabled the contemporary dominant concepts and practices that shape them. How has jins come to mean sex and how does this matter? The article first maps out the historical genealogy of these reconfigurations. What were some of the 19th- and pre-19th-century concepts that could be considered disparate precedents to this cluster around sex/jins? It then reviews some of the late-19th- and 20th-century reshaping of biomedical knowledge and marital practices that have contributed to the contemporary meanings of jins.

This article offers a reading of the groundbreaking book Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories, a collection of the narratives of Lebanese queers. Here, I argue, a burgeoning collective queer experience is being mapped from the conditions of Western imperialism and globalization, from the legacies of a colonial past, and from everyday life in postwar Lebanon. Resisting the urge to reduce Arab queer identities as either Western or traditionally Arab, the article suggests that though Western constructions of sexualities have certainly been influential, these identities are also responding to the local and cultural context. If we attune our readings to the affects that underlie the stories in this collection, it becomes clear that the emotional strategies to survive and negotiate the difficulties of postcoloniality are different from the strategies of post-Stonewall pride culture. Rather than stifle shame with the insistence of queer pride, this community is creating itself by expressing its suffering from the effects of shame and social humiliation. The narrative thread that comes through is not pride but hope. That is because shame, as Elspeth Probyn contends, gives access to what is most important and, as Eve Sedgwick has argued, is a resource for imagining change.

Since 2009, analyses of Iran have stressed the centralizing takeover of the country's economy by a single state institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. At the same time, however, Iran's factionalized political elite uniformly advocate for rapid privatization of state-owned enterprises. Underneath this puzzling contradiction is a complex shift of economic ownership away from the state toward a variety of parastatal organizations including banks, cooperatives, pension funds, foundations, and military-linked contractors. The result is not a praetorian monolith but a subcontractor state. This article draws on interviews conducted in Iran during 2009 and 2010, primary data from parliamentary and governmental reports, and secondary sources to show how intraelite conflict and nonelite claims have structured the process of privatization. Framed comparatively with privatization outcomes in other middle-income countries, Iran's subcontractor state can be seen as a consequence of the way in which politics and society shaped the form of capitalism that has taken root in the Islamic Republic.

This article traces the ways that the Moroccan Police Journal, a state-produced periodical that first appeared in 1961, constructed and disseminated an aspirational identity for the Moroccan police, one that was radically distinct from the image of the brutal security forces of the Protectorate period. Unlike other state-produced periodicals in Morocco or the Middle East at the time, Police Journal included fictional short stories written in the form of a police procedural, a genre that places a real-world criminal detective in the center of a narrative depicting a believable police investigation into a puzzling crime. As this article shows, these stories are the first examples of police procedurals in the Arabic language. The article examines three stories from Police Journal, tracing how they projected a new professional institutional culture for the police in the era of independence and served as both didactic pieces for police readers and entertaining works of fiction for the literate public.

The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

A political trial, according to Steven E. Barkan, is a trial revolving around highly publicized legal controversies. In some cases, such a trial may determine fundamental political questions, exceeding the legal realm, which are in debate inside a given polity. The 1957–58 trial related to the 1956 massacre in Kafr Qasim, Israel certainly belongs to this category. The trial established the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order” in Israeli military law, contributed considerably to the reshaping of civil–military relations, and influenced the civic status of the Arab minority in Israel. In this article, using hitherto underexamined primary sources, I argue that the most important contribution of the trial, the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order,” was not only a creation of the bench but also a result of a complicated interaction between the actors present in the courtroom: the defendants, their defense lawyers, the prosecutors, and the judges. Above all, the article shows how the bitter struggle between the two main attorneys helped shape the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order,” that is, an order that is illegal for a soldier to obey.

Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan, the book's author, ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani, responded, “Why aren't Italy, France, or the United States defamed by movies dealing with homosexuality?” Implicit in his defensive question is a perceived distinction between First World gay rights and social conservatism in the Third World. My paper considers this conventional coupling of gay rights and civilizational discourse in the global reception of ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan. Against the author's remarks, I argue that the story is remarkable for staging an interplay between the putatively opposed characters of Hatim Rashid, an openly gay newspaper editor, and Taha al-Shazli, a young man lured into a terrorist group. By uniting these two characters along parallel tracks, ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan queerly couples the seemingly antagonistic forces endemic to the civilizational discourse of gay rights and offers us a means for imagining new constellations of queer politics.

Social, political, and technological changes have forced changes in the contemporary Moroccan linguistic landscape. In print media, advertising, music, fictional writing, and translation, Moroccan Arabic (dārija) is being written in a variety of ways that point to a shift in perceptions and usage of dārija in daily Moroccan life. In this article, I provide a discussion of recent developments in the use of dārija in writing, and discuss how this evolving situation is articulated by intellectuals, journalists, publishers, fiction writers, and translators.

In this article, I argue that commercial legislation promulgated and implemented in Egypt during the first half of the 19th century was one of several factors that diminished the effect of merchants’ social networks, reduced merchants’ identity to a purely professional dimension, and made profit dependent upon association with the state. The transformation of merchants’ social roles was not part of a natural evolution toward modernization and the specialized division of labor. Rather, it resulted from interactions between state-building endeavors, pressures from established merchants who sought to parry threats to their position while profiting from new business opportunities, and an influx of merchants from outside the Ottoman sultanate, who could draw neither on personal connections nor on knowledge of local markets but instead had to depend on the protection of the European consulates and the influence of the growing Egyptian state apparatus.