The article examines the position of Yemenite Jews under Ottoman rule between 1872 and 1914 through three interconnected themes: relations, networks, and migration. Drawing primarily on underutilized Ottoman archival sources, the analysis examines changes in the social, legal and political conditions of the Jewish community following the re-establishment of Ottoman authority in Yemen. The present study places particular emphasis on the analysis of Ottoman correspondence, with a view to exploring interactions with Zaydi Muslim communities and provincial authorities, as well as contacts with European Jewish organizations. The text further explores the phenomenon of migration to Palestine, contextualizing it within the broader geopolitical landscape, marked by instances of political instability, economic hardship, and prevailing security concerns.
This article examines the screening of the Faust legend in four Egyptian films: Ambassador of Hell (Safeer Jahannam, 1945); A Meeting with the Devil (Maw'id m' Iblis, 1955); The Woman Who Defeated the Devil (al-Mar'ah allati Ghalabat al-Shaytan, 1973); and The Disappearance of Ja'far al-Masri (Ikhtifa' Ja'far al-Masri, 1998). These films employ the Devil character in order to condemn social ills such as poverty, feudalism, and the cruelty of capitalism in pre-Nasser and post-Nasser Egypt during the twentieth century. Although modern scholarship attributes the influence upon Egyptian screenwriters to Goethe's Faust (1808/1832), this study demonstrates that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1592) is another significant source for weaving the Faust-Devil confrontation into the Egyptian context. All Egyptian Fausts triumph over the Devil figures through the lens of Islamic Sufism, declaring reconciliation with God and themselves. The Faust legend also serves as a medium of political propaganda for Nasser's anti-colonial politics, particularly against British colonialism in Egypt, as well as the political and social corruption that emerged in the post-Nasser era.
Despite record levels of inflation, millions of immigrants and widespread economic difficulties, Erdo & gbreve;an's AKP won the 2023 Presidential Elections in Turkey. The limited resources that deprived the opposition of benefitting fully from the best professional political services delivered by public opinion researchers, political consultants, communication and social media experts and analysts were one of the main factors that facilitated the AKP's victory. Yet, especially in local elections, the cost-efficient use of political professionals can help opposition parties effectively challenge incumbents in competitive authoritarian regimes, as revealed by the CHP's local election victory in 2024. From a broader theoretical perspective, this paper argues that, to retain the legitimacy benefits of a genuinely competitive polity based on a compelling degree of electoral 'uncertainty', incumbents in competitive authoritarian regimes usually need to reveal a full proficiency in the legitimate as well as Machiavellian use of modern professional techniques in electoral politics. The paper supports its arguments through the examination of existing studies on professional campaigns in 2023 and 2024 elections in Turkey as well as with primary evidence deriving from relevant publicly accessible sources and eight interviews with some key political professionals delivering services to the AKP and CHP.
In this essay, I argue that not all five phases of the polity in Al-Muqaddima are necessary or inevitable. While the first three phases are essential for its development, phases four and five, wherein deficiencies in the polity's foundations may become entrenched and lead to decline, depend on humans' actions. Grounded in Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of language and rhetorical style, this interpretation shows that, by employing the conditional particle idh & amacr;, he indicates that the entrenchment of deficiencies is uncertain, making decline possible rather than inevitable. Similarly, by portraying the polity as having a lifespan like that of a human, he renders its decline both perceptible and repellent, exhorting readers to exercise restraint. In doing so, the simile also raises awareness that deterioration is, in principle, avoidable, placing responsibility on humans' choices and habits. Finally, attention to Ibn Khaldun's rhetorical brevity reveals that he uses gh & amacr;ya in its lexical sense of 'utmost' or 'extent', rather than as a natural cause, challenging deterministic readings that overlook his deliberate elision. This reading shifts the focus from 'umr (lifespan) to 'umr & amacr;n (human association), emphasizing the latter and its extent: excessive refinement and luxury ultimately weaken the polity, underscoring the impact of humans' actions.
This article examines elite trans-confessionalism as a distinct premodern governance system in Mount Lebanon between 1697 and 1861. It argues that Lebanese political elites under the Shihabi Emirate maintained a sophisticated system of strategic religious ambiguity that enabled stable multi-confessional governance for over a century. Trans-confessionalism denotes neither proto-secularism nor sectarianism but the deliberate subordination of confessional identity to dynastic and administrative imperatives, in which elites maintained strict private religious boundaries whilst crossing those same boundaries freely in public political life. Employing a comparative-historical method, the article makes three interventions in existing scholarship. It reverses the causal narrative dominant in Makdisi and Farha by asking not when sectarianism emerged or why secularism failed, but how a functioning trans-confessional system collapsed. It identifies a structural paradox: elite trans-confessional autonomy enabled more stable management of religious diversity than modern democratic confessionalism's rigid quotas precisely because it was undemocratic and elite-controlled. Finally, it argues that the nahda intellectual developments Makdisi traces built upon lived political practices incubated within Shihabi court culture. The destruction of trans-confessionalism through Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, European intervention and mass political mobilization reveals how modernization paradoxically eliminated the elite autonomy that had prevented confessional boundaries from hardening into sectarian antagonism.
This article offers a contrapuntal reading of Returning to Haifa and Mornings in Jenin to examine how Palestinian narratives of return, displacement, memory, and cultural sustainability are reconfigured across generations. Drawing on Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and adaptation theory, the article argues that Mornings in Jenin functions not only as a thematic continuation of Returning to Haifa but also as an adaptive reconfiguration that expands its historical, psychological, and narrative scope. While Kanafani foregrounds the immediate trauma of dispossession through Said and Safiyya's return to Haifa, Abulhawa extends this trajectory through Amal's intergenerational experience of exile, postmemory, inherited loss, and the struggle to sustain Palestinian identity under prolonged settler colonialism. Read contrapuntally, the texts reveal how Palestinian subjectivity is shaped by evolving structures of colonial violence, where return becomes both desire and traumatic confrontation. The protagonists' encounters with occupied homes mark an encounter with the Lacanian Real, exposing the irreversibility of displacement and affirming literature as a site of resistance and cultural memory.
