This ethnography explores the temporalizing practices of workers at the Litani River powerplant-a key site of national infrastructural development in Lebanon. Departing from dominant narratives of crisis or collapse, it argues that workers inhabit a distinct spatial and temporal mode described as tarabut maslahi, an ambivalent alliance of convenience with the Litani river, its infrastructure, and the state. Rather than viewing their experience through paradigms of progress or decline, workers cultivate a modular relation to time, and to the seemingly isolated powerplant, marked by endurance. Tarabut maslahi, the article suggests, is a mode of exercising and reproducing power at the intersection of material structures and embodied experience. Like a M & ouml;bius strip, its fraught political relations and dynamics of social reproduction continuously weave the space they constitute. It illustrates power's reach through time while also revealing workers' subtle ways of challenging it, beyond binaries of submission or resistance.
Recent commentaries on Iran have stressed attacks on workers and wages by a neoliberal regime bent on slashing costs in response to sanctions, stagnation, and inflation. At the same time, Iranian political elites and government experts uniformly advocate for higher minimum pay. Underneath this paradox lies a complex shift of class inequality away from salary scales determined by firms and government agencies toward a single minimum wage set every year by the Supreme Labor Council, the central body responsible for employment policy. The result is not labor discipline or wage repression but an unruly wage containment state. Integrating archival sources, interviews, and statistical data, the article examines how elite conflicts, societal interests, and economic forces have structured the politics of pay in Iran. Framed comparatively, Iran's wage containment state is a product of the way in which politics, development, and international relations have shaped Iranian capitalism.
This article explores Islamic citizenship education as the conduit through which ideological governance was articulated and enacted in rebel-governed northwestern Syria (2017-25) with a close ethnographic and textual analysis of the Dar al-Wahy al-Sharif (DWS) school network. Founded in 2017 under the patronage of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), DWS has grown into the region's most expansive educational institution, blending Qur'anic learning with nationalist Islamic pedagogy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Idlib in 2025, the study examines how DWS cultivates an "exceptional Qur'anic generation" while operating within, and reinforcing, a political environment structured by HTS rule, shaping patterns of loyalty and parental alignment. Situating DWS within HTS's post-Salafi turn and broader state-building project, the article argues that the school system functions as both a site of ideological reproduction and an arena in which postconflict Islamist governance takes shape.
The question of unity between Egypt and Sudan has received extensive scholarly attention, with most studies focusing on the monarchy's efforts to preserve both polities as a single geopolitical entity. A prevailing view holds that the Free Officers abandoned this project, relinquishing Egypt's claims to Sudan. Drawing on materials from the Egyptian National Archives and the National Archives in London, this article shows instead that unity with Sudan remained a core objective of the new military regime. I trace how an ostensibly secular regime strategically deployed religion in pursuit of this objective. I demonstrate that transnational networks of al-Azhar and Sufi orders were central to the Free Officers' efforts to maintain Egyptian hegemony in Sudan. This analysis offers new insight into the religious diplomacy of the post-1952 regime, complicating our understanding of a key episode in Egyptian-Sudanese relations and highlighting the interplay between religion and statecraft in shaping Egyptian politics, especially under Nasser.
This article examines the early history of Iranian communism through two Persian translations of The Communist Manifesto (1923 and 1951), situating them within broader debates on Soviet cultural politics, Iranian modernism, and the politics of translation. By analyzing the rhetorical strategies and conceptual vocabularies employed by translators, the study highlights how Persian intellectuals mediated Marxism through local traditions of political thought and literary modernism. The 1923 translation by Sayyid Muhammad Dihgan drew on Perso-Islamic notions of justice and temporality, asserting Iran's coevalness with the West and aligning Marxist concepts with late Qajar reformist discourse. In contrast, the 1951 Moscow-sponsored translation, produced under the auspices of the Tudeh Party, reflected Cold War cultural rivalries, privileging secular and nationalist vocabularies and erasing Islamic political resonances. Juxtaposing these two translations, the article rethinks Iranian Marxism not as a mere extension of Soviet influence but as a contested field of cultural mediation and conceptual innovation.
