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The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold (2010)

August 17, 2011

There exists a fault line near the tenth parallel north of the equator where the two great proselytizing religions of the last two millennia meet. In centuries past, desert traders and merchant seamen carried Islam along with their goods, halting only where they confronted unsurpassable natural barriers or the expansion of European Christianity in the colonized regions of Asia and Africa. The diverse peoples of these lands found ways to live alongside each other, yet the past decades have seen this relative peace come unglued. New Yorker reporter and poet Eliza Griswold traveled along this increasingly chaotic border, documenting the day-to-day realities of the growing conflicts between the world’s largest monotheistic faiths. She finds that more than mere ideology motivates these men and women; instead, “growing numbers of people and an increasingly vulnerable environment are sharpening the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water.”

In Nigeria, Sudan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Griswold reveals that religious identity serves as a refuge from the constant challenges of the modern way of life. Climate change, the expansion of the nation state in search of natural resources, political conflict, and the globalization of the market economy all undermine traditional beliefs that rely heavily on local community and close association with the environment. Colonial legacies and ethnic differences have inspired deep political divides.

In these developing countries, state institutions and social organization often lag behind economic growth and fail to fill the place of ailing traditions. Here, religious community provides stability and scripture proves “a more practical rule of law than the government does.” Faith offers a support network, a form of advocacy, and a unifying identity where life is difficult and the control of valuable resources contentious. The transnational nature of both Christianity and Islam means that these parochial negotiations of power often invite foreign assistance from evangelical missionaries and radical Islamists with their own agendas, meaning that battles are “fought locally and exploited globally.” The ease of communication and common beliefs connect disparate peoples, but such interactions also work to inspire divisions among coreligionists who reject the perceived superficiality and wickedness of the more secularized spiritual practices of developed states. Griswold finds that both Christianity and Islam prove complicated beliefs, neither inherently contradictory nor monolithic, powerful stabilizing forces abused by self-interested leaders. Faith in this context becomes a coping mechanism for unfamiliar world; it “could mean whatever one wanted it to; it could hold a link to the past or forge a vision for the future.”

Displaced Persons camp in Sudan resulting from the conflict in Darfur.

Griswold offers a fascinating, poignant, and insightful account of global religious conflict. Part history, part travelogue, and part theological mediation, the work successfully dissects the “compound of multiple identities” that drives the mass conversion of whole populations and motivates pious believers to take up arms against their neighbors. The daughter of Episcopal bishop Frank Griswold, the author situates this discussion of devotional violence within the context of her own spirituality, offering a personal and accessible view of a highly charged subject. Her pithy, graceful writing clothes this complicated story in an understated elegance. The Tenth Parallel demands attention as an insightful piece of historically informed news reporting and a truly engrossing account of one woman’s theological journey across the globe.

Further reading:

Eliza Griswold discusses Christian-Muslim relations on NPR Books.

Darfur photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn by Asef Bayat (2007)

April 21, 2011

by Lior Sternfeld

In the wake of the recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, many try to predict whether Islam can exist together harmoniously with democracy. In this book, Bayat successfully dismantles the presumptions that constitute this discourse, by stating in the beginning that “the question is not whether Islam is or is not compatible with democracy, or by extension, modernity, but rather under what conditions Muslims can make them compatible.” In order to answer this question Making Islam Democratic closely examines the different trajectories of two countries with similar socio-religious backgrounds: Iran and Egypt. Specifically Bayat asks why Iran produced an Islamic revolution, while Egypt developed only an Islamic Movement.

Bayat first analyzes Iran as a “revolution without movement,” arguing that as a result of years of a repressive political system the clergy failed to build social infrastructures and thought that the way to gain political influence would be to “recruit” the intellectual elites to their side. While they were successful in creating national-religious discourse among the intellectual elites, they “lost” the masses to other ideologies, such as Socialism, Marxism, and Secularism. The public heavily consumed western cultural products, magazines, movies, and books. During the revolution in 1979, the different sectors “were pushed into the arms of Shi’a clergy” to lead the revolution, but sectarianism remained present and vital.In Egypt, on the other hand, the Islamic parties could not participate in the political game, but succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the population by establishing a wide system of education, healthcare, banking and social welfare that benefitted the poor and traditional population of Egypt. The decision of the Egyptian ‘ulema (Muslim jurists) not to attempt to take over the government but rather to win the population allowed them work and prosper with government consent, and was therefore able to influence and Islamize society, which became significant later (as recently seen). This model can be useful to some extent in looking at other instances such as Turkey and Jordan.

Bayat has succeeded in writing a clear and jargon-free book. He supports his argument on profound research in these two telling case studies. This book eloquently refutes many common beliefs and anxieties about Islam and democracy.

A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory

March 28, 2022

By Carel Bertram

Between 2007 and 2015, I traveled with small groups of Armenians from the diaspora who were “returning” to a place they had never been. Each one was seeking the hometown or village lost to their own parents or grandparents who had survived the Armenian genocide of 1915. And so, although we were traveling mostly in the east of modern Turkey, it was “Historical Armenia,” their lost Ottoman Armenian homeland that they saw outside the windows of their mini-buses.

From the map of Historical Armenia traveled by pilgrims, in House in the Homeland ©Carel Bertram

For the most part, these “return travels” have been led by Armen Aroyan, who dedicated his life to this difficult quest, and whose help was sorely needed. Driving through eastern Turkey, he could lead us on unmarked and unpaved roads, and following his own knowledge or instincts, could find villages now emptied of Armenians, possibly emptied of any architectural remains at all, and whose names had been changed to erase their Armenian past.

*Pilgrims search for their houses. Left to Right: Marash, Sivas, Marash. Photos by the author, Carel Bertram*

Together with some few precious hand-drawn maps used to locate former houses, these travelers carried luggage filled with “survivor items”: photographs, title deeds, insurance receipts, and letters sent from a lost place in the “before time.” One traveler, Mary Ann, brought a copy of a 1911 painting of her ancestral town of Yozgat made from memory by her great uncle who had left for Philadelphia in 1910. I used it as the cover for my book.

Each of these items had a story to tell and a claim to make. But most of all, these travelers carried stories, ones they had heard from their older family members about this place, making their attachments especially profound. For them, their own town or village represented “the homeland,” and if they found it, they hoped to find their ancestral house, which they considered its beating heart.

Because all were seeking spiritual solace, most called these journeys pilgrimages, and referred to themselves as pilgrims. Having traveled with them, I do, too. The result of my journeys with them is A House in the Homeland, Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory, (Stanford University Press), which shows the many ways by which they created a pilgrim’s reward. Grounded in an ethnographic methodology, A House in the Homeland is based on a unique archive and a compelling theoretical structure with its own vocabulary and poetic vision. Fittingly, its publication date coincides with April 24^th, the day set aside to commemorate the Armenian Genocide.

An Ethnographic Methodology and a Unique Archive

I travelled on over a dozen pilgrimages to “Historical Armenia” with Armen Aroyan and thus watched well over 100 individuals experience their homeland towns and villages. Some actually found their houses, but many found only a fragment – a gate, foundations, a tree or a fountain, or even the house’s footprint.

*Bob and Steve stop at the entrance to Yozgat, confirming its existence—and that they had arrived.* *Photo by Armen Aroyan*

Two cousins, Bob and Steve, did not have sufficient clues to find their ancestral house in the town of Yozgat, but an ethnographic museum in a historically Armenian neighborhood worked as a proxy. It seemed close to the descriptions that they had heard about it, and its status as a museum meant they could enter. Inside, in a room that had no guard, they hid a photo of the family who had escaped several years after the genocide. The museum held no information about any Armenian connection.

Pilgrims on other trips did the same thing, but I could not understand these actions fully just by watching or, as it turned out, by their telling me that they “had brought their families home.” Spending at least ten days with each pilgrim group allowed for many conversations as well as a building of trust. But what allowed my ethnography to be so productively granular was the sustained conversations that followed, many still ongoing, and many leading to permanent friendships. While working on A House in the Homeland, I could make phone calls or send texts or emails to many pilgrims, including the cousins, Bob and Steve, as I tried to untangle and contextualize the story behind their transgressive act.

*Bob in front of the ethnographic museum in Yozgat that became the cousins’ proxy house. Photo by Steve Barsamian*

Over time, Bob and Steve sent me a variety of materials, but only in later conversations did I learn that they owned an unpublished oral history of their survivor uncle Avedis, one of the relatives who had finally escaped from Yozgat. On reading it, I found it to reveal an astonishing family history that became a full chapter in my book, for it made clear that their poignant act, while seemingly so similar to others who had sequestered secret photos, pointed to a distinctive meaning that served their individual spiritual needs. Only my large archive of pilgrim experiences allowed for such similarities to emerge, and only its depth allowed these to be evaluated in the context of the pilgrims’ memory stories, which is what these photos represented.

An archive of this size holds a lot of stories, but I was able to enlarge it even further by adding the experiences of several hundred other pilgrims with whom I had not traveled. This was done through their descriptive books, journals, memoirs, blogs, letters, and creative works. Many of these travelers were among the several thousand pilgrims who had traveled with Armen Aroyan over the years, and my information about them includes some of the videos ^⁠he took of their pilgrimages, now housed at the University of Southern California’s Institute of Armenian Studies. Important, too, were the articles that they sent him for his collection of pilgrim experiences, The Pilgrim Speaks, which is currently unpublished. Furthermore, I was able to contact many of these people who often became important pen-pal informants, some even friends, widening the breadth and deepening my stratified archive’s record of individual, shared and communal memory and sensibilities.

Some of these materials document pilgrimages that predate these contemporary trips. In A House in the Homeland, I also analyze the journeys of actual survivors, whom I term “natives”– to separate them from the “descendants,” the children and grandchildren who form the central part of my observations and insights. Although the survivors who wrote these pilgrimage memoirs were gone, I was able to speak with many of their children. Thus, this archive documents the affective reach of homeland for two dispossessed cohorts, one just before and one closely following its loss.

Memory, Memory-Stories, Assembled and Re-assembled Memory

The houses that descendant pilgrims searched for evoked all the emotions held by exiles forced from home: warmth, wholeness, fear, trauma and rage. But what drove the urge to find them was memory. Yet it was clear, almost by definition, that a memory of their houses or of the genocide was only applicable for the earliest pilgrims, those native pilgrims who had once lived in those houses. By having information from both groups, however, I was able to construct a new category of memory that differentiated pilgrims who were the direct descendants of these survivors from the survivors themselves. I term this descendant category memory-stories because the memories these descendants brought with them were stories that they remembered hearing from their relatives from the survivor generation. Furthermore, because the descendant pilgrims themselves had no firsthand memories of the houses and places they sought, the emotional burden ascribed to those lost houses was in large part a resonance of the pilgrims’ emotional attachment to these survivor family members. Additionally, these stories, told and heard in the diasporic host-land, which, in this study was usually the United States, meant that these memory-stories were as place-related as those of the survivor generation; but rather than being linked to villages, they were linked to places like Racine, Watertown, Fresno, Glendale, Philadelphia, and New York City. Most critically, then, this approach addresses both survivor memory and descendant memory-stories as wholly autobiographical, bringing to light how the autobiographical content of the descendants’ memory is always in construct with the host-land.

The accumulation of these memory-stories is what makes up what I term each descendant’s “assembled memory,” the affective history of their homeland that they have assembled as their received truths across generations. For Bob and Steve, the memory of their house came from memory-stories from their survivor parents and grandparents that told of how most of their individual families, having perished, lived together in Yozgat for several years after the genocide in relative affluence, but in painfully compromising circumstances that included living as Muslims.

The photo that was left by the cousins in their proxy house Yozgat. Media, Pennsylvania, before 1953. 3rd from left: Steve’s grandmother, Makhrouhi. 5th from left, Bob’s mother, Armenhouie. Photo by Armenhouie’s brother, Avedis

Gesturing to Mircea Eliade’s work on the sacred and Gaston Bachelard’s on the poetic reverie in which memory operates, I suggest that the pilgrims’ memory-stories seem to “erupt” (Eliade would say “irrupt”) into consciousness when pilgrims find their houses, or the places where they must once have been. As these stories activate and then flood their reverie, the place is given a sacred quality as it invites interactions with their elders whose spirits are there, but whose stories they know from the diasporic host-land. It is in this transcendent opening that rituals emerge. For example, on arriving in the southern Anatolian village of Hasanbeyli, Alidz found that memory-stories arose to identify the sacred realm of her house —that “was from my childhood inscribed on my soul,” —through a treasury of stories heard from her grandmother when they lived together in Beirut. This led to a flood of daydreams and reveries:

I’m sitting next to my grandmother

my eyes on her sewing basket and colorful wools

I’m eight years old.

Alidz, led by Armen Aroyan and traveling with her cousins, performed a pilgrimage ritual that I call “communion,” in which they shared a meal and prayers with the spirits of their grandparents at the place where they had lost their past. Having made Hasanbeyli into the village where they shared communion with their family, they returned with a new memory added to the one of violent loss, and softening some of the rage they almost could not bear.

Rituals, then, are one of the ways that, when these memory-stories arrive at the place where they had taken place, the pilgrims’ actions cause memory to be re-assembled.

Bob and Steve’s ritual was the placing of their photo as an ex-voto: an expression of gratitude that their family survived spiritually, able to live again and flourish as Armenians in Pennsylvania. That is, their action was not meant to intervene in the lives of their ancestors, magically allowing them to reclaim the lives they had been denied. Instead, it was meant to impact the meaning —and thus their memory— of place by bringing the history of the house up to date. When the cousins left Yozgat, it was with a feeling of elation, for their house now held the photograph of a healthy, reconstituted family as visual proof of the miracle they had become.

In this way, as pilgrims make their past homes present, A House in the Homeland identifies the many prongs of pilgrims’ agency, but especially as they insert themselves into a positive narrative of the house, which forever more will include their own affective experiences. For some, for example, the ancestral house was identified as theirs by a sudden sign from an elder’s spirit, for some, singing their ancestors’ beloved songs in their ancestral houses made them believe that their ancestors were singing with them. It is these experiences that actuate the re-assembling of memory, for as pilgrims become actors in their house’s narrative, the story includes them, too.

On returning home, the cousins hosted an extended family reunion, with a slide presentation that offered their family an updated Yozgat, now to be imagined and remembered with a particular house that radiated the faces of their Pennsylvania family. It was only by being in Yozgat that the cousins’ memory-stories could activate a transgressive agency capable of intervening in the arc of their homeland history, and one that could be take root in the future.

A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory

The Book: A UT Story

The foundation of my work is my archive of over 400 pilgrimage experiences, plus extensive contextualizing historical research. But for the picture of the pilgrims’ engagement to emerge, I would need time to organize my material, compare earlier pilgrimages to what I knew of later ones, and explore my hunches. Fortuitously, I was selected as a Fellow at the Institute for Historical studiers at UT Austin, for the academic year 2013-14. There, under the supportive direction of Seth Garfield, its fellows gathered to further each other’s work on the theme, “Trauma and Social Transformation.” I already had a group of Austin friends and colleagues, as I had been a lecturer, sponsored by UT’s Center for Middle East Studies and the Department of Art and Art History for the three years following the earning of my doctorate in 1999. My dissertation, then unknowingly, had been a preparation for A House in the Homeland, for I had written about vernacular Ottoman architecture, especially those beautiful houses like the ones that Bob and Steve’s Ottoman Armenian merchant families had lived in.

While teaching in Austin, I honed my dissertation into a book that followed how, as the Ottoman empire lost its footing, and Western ideas and concrete apartment houses were taking over the landscape, those beautiful houses began to grow in the Turkish imaginary as an icon of lost Ottoman Turkish values. When I left UT Austin for San Francisco State University, Imagining the Turkish House, Collective Visions of Home was in the good hands of Jim Burr who saw it to publication in 2008 by the University of Texas Press. It was my first effort of tracing the history of the attachment between memory and place.

During my 2013-14 fellowship year in Austin, as I conceptualized A House in the Homeland, it seemed that the Armenian pilgrims I had come to know had much in common with their Turkish counterparts in Imagining the Turkish house. Both were products of the tumultuous end of the Ottoman empire, and for both groups, continuity with traditional values was often rooted in their ancestral houses. But Bob and Steve’s house and the house of every pilgrim who searched for their own, had not been lost to the exigencies of time but to traumatic exile, and to the brutal deaths of their families. Furthermore, modern Turkey had denied Armenians a link to their own history, first by permanent expulsion, second by denying that there had even been a genocide, and third, although this is hard to reconcile with the second, by the nation’s relentless propaganda that branded the pilgrims’ ancestors as traitors to the state, asserting that the Armenians had somehow deserved their fate. Thus, the pilgrims’ houses were at the center of not merely a transformative, but a catastrophic historical experience. A House in the Homeland shows how countering displacement and trauma by poignant performances in their home spaces made their experience part of an affective historical analysis.

*The author in an Armenian house in the Anatolian town of Kharpert. The house is now an ethnographic museum. Photo by a passer-by.*

Writing about this process for “Not Even Past” brings this journey full circle. Not only are these words of William Faulker, and the title of this monthly offering from UT’s Department of History, apt for many historians, but they are almost prescient to the many like myself who speak to a universal need to bring the past into the present, whether to heal its wounds or to do the hard work of intergenerational continuity. Certainly these words are true for the Armenian pilgrims chronicled in my book: With luggage filled with family documents and photographs, they established a soulful sense of personal ownership of what history had denied them; by performing rituals of their own creation, they animated their houses’ spiritual powers; and by singing its songs and dancing its dances in the places of their origins, they linked their ancestral houses to their host-land homes, where they had learned them and where they will live on. Moreover, by inserting themselves into the origins of their stories, they built new memories into their pasts, and forged new connections for their future. They could not heal the genocide, an impossible quest, but, perhaps, they could create a past they could live with.

Carel Bertram is Professor Emerita in Middle East and Islamic Studies, Dept. of Humanities, San Francisco State University. Her MA in Near Eastern Studies was taken at the University of California at Berkeley, her PhD in Islamic Art History at UCLA. Trained in the visual culture of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman era, she uses art, architecture, cities, literature, ethnography and oral histories to study how we use space and place to represent ourselves in the world; and also how it is that the memory of places creates a particular historical consciousness, especially when remembering a home lost to time or exile.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022)

February 2, 2022

by Bryan Port

Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

While most Americans are likely to think of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in connection with the Vietnam War, Johnson himself wanted to be remembered in terms of his domestic achievements in the form of the Great Society. Lacking in many accounts of LBJ are his policies towards the rest of the world. In The End of Ambition Mark Atwood Lawrence brings into focus U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, by focusing on the third world, with the notable exclusion of Vietnam, during LBJ’s tenure. Few scholars are better positioned to undertake this study. Lawrence is currently the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum and an accomplished scholar specializing in the Vietnam War and more broadly in the history of U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s. As an historian steeped in the politics of the era, Lawrence addresses an important shortfall in scholarship on the Johnson Administration and U.S. foreign policy in general.

Lawrence begins by considering the legacy bequeathed to LBJ by John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). Johnson began his presidency by committing to JFK’s agenda and maintained much of his team. This proved problematic as JFK had often failed to establish clear objectives or priorities and seemed to lack a fixed set of guiding principles. In Lawrence’s words the Kennedy administration was a “conglomeration of tendencies, rather than [an] executor of a core set of ideas.” Lawrence reviews the Kennedy Administration’s approach to four countries—Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia—and one region—Southern Africa—to provide context for his investigation of the Johnson administration’s approach. Supporters of Kennedy might object to Lawrence’s critical portrayal of the JFK administration as lacking context and depth. However, considering Lawrence’s focus on LBJ’s foreign policy pertaining to the third world, he does an admirable job in providing the right amount of context critical to a nuanced exploration of LBJ’s approach to the third world, without overwhelming the reader.

LBJ’s ambitions in the domestic context were clear, as was his desire to focus on domestic affairs over foreign policy. In line with this basic intent, the Johnson administration adopted a distinct approach to the Third World that, for better or worse, resolved the ambiguities of JFK’s administration. LBJ sought to lower U.S. ambitions in the Third World and reduce risk while shoring up U.S. control over global affairs by establishing or bolstering cooperative regimes. Despite the judgment of many, including LBJ himself, that he lacked foreign policy expertise, LBJ’s approach to international affairs was rooted in intellectual tendencies distinct from those of JFK, not ignorance. Where JFK sought to transform, LBJ sought to manage. Still, Lawrence points out that LBJ was more visionary than JFK in areas that today we refer to as transnational issues. Further, while LBJ’s ambitions in foreign policy may have been tempered by his desire to focus on domestic affairs, he nonetheless displayed the state-building impulse of the 1930s in both the domestic and foreign arenas. This might be expected based on LBJ’s admiration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and LBJ’s desire to bring to full fruition the wider new deal program.

Five case studies form the heart of Lawrence’s book, covering U.S. policy toward Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. Central to LBJ’s foreign policy in each of these case studies was a desire to minimize U.S. burdens so as to not further distract from efforts in Vietnam as well as Johnson’s broader goal of advancing the Great Society program. This was the key driver in the LBJ administration’s bringing to power, or enhancing relations with, often authoritarian regimes that could effectively govern and reduce the potential for conflict or communist advances while acting in concert with U.S. interests more broadly. In Brazil, LBJ presided over transformative events and constructed a new relationship with a military regime that effectively dismantled Brazilian democracy. The administration’s patterns and policies in Brazil informed his approach to the Third World for the duration of his tenure. These tendencies included favoring the development of constructive change and democracy over the long-term by countering the danger’s posed by communist movements.

A general labeled "anti democratic rulers" says to President Johnson: "Where I'm in charge, there's absolutely no danger of democratic government being subverted." — This cartoon by Herb Block was published in the Washington Post on May 3, 1965, a few days after U.S. Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to bolster a friendly regime. The cartoon hints at the Johnson administration’s attraction to reliable authoritarian leaders across the Third World. Source: The Herb Block Foundation

With India, LBJ shared Kennedy’s hope that resistance to Chinese expansion would serve as a basis for cooperation, but by early 1966 he was losing hope for reasons including India’s lack of support for U.S. actions in Vietnam. In LBJ’s approach toward India we see another principle emerge, the emphasis on economic development more so than military assistance. This certainly held true in the case of U.S. policy toward Iran. There was also a China angle in enhancing relations with Tehran as a hedge against Islamabad’s improving relations with China.

In Indonesia the rise to power of the military led to the “evisceration of the world’s third-largest communist party.” Still, among the countries explored, Indonesia was the most resistant to U.S. influence. The Johnson administration wisely opted for a low-key approach, playing the long game by building influence in select elements of the Indonesian military and society. LBJ and his team viewed Indonesia as a success story that gave American leaders a renewed confidence that the Vietnam War was achieving important results even absent a clear military victory. Johnson felt that if the United States had not taken a stand in Vietnam that the countercoup in Indonesia in 1965 and the defeat of communism would not have come to pass.

A meeting of the National Security Council on January 7, 1964, reached consensus on the need to keep providing aid to Indonesia despite Sukarno’s provocations. CIA Director John McCone sits at the far end of the table, with Budget Director David Bell to his right and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to his left. Around the table in a clockwise direction are Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, an unidentified official, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Source: LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

Even though Southern Africa held less strategic importance to the United States, it provoked more political controversy. This was based on intersections with the U.S. domestic context, specifically civil rights. Here Lawrence’s case study differs in that it involves a region, not just a nation, though Rhodesia is the primary focus. Despite the differences, the same patterns and policies were clearly in evidence including a desire to minimize U.S. direct involvement, particularly any type of military involvement. Vietnam was certainly a consideration, but one can also appreciate a sense of realistic assessments and expectations regarding the importance of the region and what U.S. power could accomplish. Although one could argue that an appreciation of U.S. constraints emerged only due to Vietnam, such a judgment seems to underestimate LBJ’s priorities. It is likely that LBJ would have opted for such an approach even absent Vietnam as his priority was the Great Society. In fact, Lawrence’s work supports the contention that LBJ had across a broad basis a preference for restraint overseas and action on the home front.

Lawrence not only covers this history of foreign policy during a critical period in American history, but he also considers patterns and precedents. The title of the book may be mildly misleading in this regard. Lawrence asserts that the United States is shaped by the competing impulses of worldmaking and self-interest. In this context Lawrence asserts that the United States has faced multiple inflection points in which it curbed its worldmaking ambitions in favor of a narrower pursuit of its self-interest. It might be more accurate to say that the United States tempered its ambition, but that the pattern that Lawrence alludes to in the ebbing and flowing of American ambition remains intact and returned with a vengeance in the 1990s.

Lawrence’s volume raises many important issues including the relationship between domestic and foreign policy that in total represent the national interest. There are few case studies as potentially rich in this regard as LBJ’s basic dilemma – Vietnam vs the Great Society. Such a study would provide additional context and understanding of the priorities and rationale guiding how the Johnson administration faced the rest of the world, aside from Vietnam. For scholars of the Cold War, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, and U.S. foreign policy toward the third world more generally, Lawrence’s The End of Ambition makes an invaluable and much needed contribution.

Bryan Port is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and a civil servant with the Department of the Army assigned to U.S. Army Futures Command as a strategist. He is a historian of the United States focusing on U.S. intellectual history. His research interests include the construction and application of the idea of national interest as well as grand strategy. Bryan holds a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University and a M.S. in National Security Strategy from the National War College. His ongoing research centers on American progressive leaders and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century.

Four Books I Recommend from Comps – Law, Knowledge, and Empire in the Middle East and North Africa

November 19, 2021

by David Rahimi

Before moving to the final dissertation stage of the PhD, graduate students in History must first pass their comprehensive exams (also known as orals, qualifying exams, or comps). These are designed in part to show mastery of a student’s chosen teaching and research fields. Experiences vary depending on how the student and their committee members hope to use comps, whether it be preparing for teaching fields or laying extensive historiographical groundwork for the dissertation. Most students describe the typically year-long affair and its final moment as stressful, taxing, and sometimes surreal. It took me three days to process fully that I had passed the oral and written examinations even though the committee tells you immediately whether you did or not. Still, there are plenty of bright moments during comps. You will likely have few better opportunities to immerse yourself in so many incredibly varied books in your career at once. Comps is great time to savor the breadth and depth of past and present scholarship, its peaks and valleys, and conceive how you see yourself joining these conversations.

I completed my own comps in Spring 2019. I spent the preceding year reading 363 books and a few articles in the histories of Iran, the Middle East, the British Empire, and the French Empire in North Africa. The following books are recommended not necessarily because I agree with everything in them, but because they have an ability to speak beyond their own field and encourage refining one’s own thoughts on critical concepts and categories of analysis.

**1. Burke III, Edmund. The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.**

The Ethnographic State explores the creation of the Moroccan archive, understood here as anything written in French about Morocco and its inhabitants from 1880-1930, which organized knowledge into categories meant to give the French power and control over society. Its chief product was the reified analytical construct of “Moroccan Islam”. Moroccan Islam emphasized the Moroccan monarch’s titles of sultan, khalifa, and imam alongside the monarch’s magico-religious powers. This and the other categories of knowledge served a new “scientific imperialism” that relied on a form governmentality of intelligence gathering and expertise. In unpacking the Moroccan archive, Edmund Burke argues that Orientalism itself has a history, disagreeing with Edward Said and Michel Foucault that such a discourse can be completely totalizing, since this makes it difficult to explain multiple episodes of Moroccan resistance and also the discursive crisis among the French between 1900-1904. Edmond Doutté (at least in his early writing) and Eugene Aubin rejected overly simplified and dichotomized views of Moroccan society. They saw order where others might see chaos in Moroccan Islam and society. Still, the Orientalist stereotypes eventually won out, as typified in French scholarship which depicted an “eternal struggle” between Arab royal authority and lawless Berber dissidents that needed French management (81). French knowledge proved quite illusory, often undone by its own republican and militant laicite assumptions as seen in its repeated inability to foresee popular opposition from the ‘ulama and lower classes allied against the French system.

**2. Cuno, Kenneth. Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015.**

Modernizing Marriage pushes back against the received opinion that negligible change occurred in Egyptian family life and structures before World War I. Kenneth Cuno, instead, argues that significant, incremental changes took place in portions of the middle and upper classes that widely influenced Egyptian society between 1847 and 1920. Emerging from data drawn from censuses, demographic sources, archives, and juridical literature, the text identifies key shifts including the idealization of companionate marriage, greater demands for women’s education, and an emphasis on the nuclear family as the building block of society and the state. These ideas owed much to the Enlightenment and local Egyptian debates about family life rather than to European criticisms or so-called traditional, Islamic values. Precolonial Islamic jurisprudence saw the family as patrilineal, placed little emphasis on the role of children, and did not stress an ideology of domesticity for women as in the West. These debates and changes took place within a process of Hanafization, which refers to how law codes became standardized according to a new synthesis of Hanafi legal thought that borrowed from the other three Sunni legal schools. New reference manuals like Muhammad Qadri Pasha’s 1875 code reflected the transformation of Muslim family jurisprudence into positive law in a process that speaks to other colonial spaces like in British India and French North Africa. Rigid, legal codification, which made Muslim family law comprehensible to foreigners and Egyptians trained in the French legal tradition, replaced the flexibility of older Islamic and customary legal customs and practices, with mixed results for women overall.

**3. Darwin, John. The Empire Project: the rise and fall of the British World System 1830-1970. Cambridge University Press, 2009.**

The Empire Project is a long, ambitious treatment of two daunting and complex questions: what exactly was the British Empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and what accounts for its successes and ultimate unraveling? John Darwin presents both a readable and thought-provoking account of a tricky subject. Darwin uses the term world-system over empire, preferring the way it captures the often fraught commercial, demographic, military, and communicative interdependence of Britain’s imperial domains. While empire-making is often associated with some planned strategy, world-system helps better reflect how “British expansion was driven not by official designs but by the chaotic pluralism of British interests at home and of their agents and allies abroad” (3). This British world-system required specific conditions to flourish: a passive East Asia, a European balance of power, and a strong but non-aggressive United States. The most devastating moment for Britain’s world-system came between 1938 and 1942 amid the Great Depression, increased tariffs, and more anti-free trade policies that hindered the empire’s economic wellbeing. The Second World War finally shattered all of the necessary conditions as the United States steadily – and somewhat begrudgingly at times – assumed Britain’s mantle even as Labour tried building a new, more democratic, and development-minded world-system. The 1956 Suez debacle plus the crushing financial costs and pushback from colonial nationalists and new local interests alongside shifting Cold War power balances, however, revealed that Britain could no longer influentially act unilaterally or in small alliances as it once had.

**4. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.**

Professing Selves is a pioneering work on transsexuality under Muhammad Reza Shah and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This largely sociological and ethnographic book considers how sexual and gender subjectivities were shaped by a cultural-legal context that shamed and criminalized homosexual desire and practice, while permitting and subsidizing transsexuality. Additionally, it examines how persistent state regulations and religio-cultural codes and rituals regarding acceptable gendered behavior and comportment impacted these subjectivities. Historian and sociologist Afsaneh Najmabadi emphasizes technical and vernacularized biomedical, psychological, legal, and religious discourses of the 1940s to 2000s, such as Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1984 fatwa permitting sex-changes. Combined with a growth of new institutions like the Tehran Psychiatric Institute, these discourses served to set some guiding boundaries between acceptable trans persons and purportedly deviant homosexuals. Ultimately, Najmabadi argues that challenges for non-heteronormative persons in Iran come more from social and cultural norms, such as an imperative to marry, rather than from the state. The issue of whether one is trans or homosexual “becomes a question of not some inner truth but of figuring out and navigating one’s relationship-in-conduct vis-à-vis others” (298).

David A. Rahimi is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His current research focuses on the growth of consumer capitalism and its impact on daily life in Iran during the reign of Muhammad Reza Shah (1941-1979). He is particularly interested in how Iranian and foreign development programs and NGOs, like the Franklin Book Programs, helped promote institutional and structural changes in society and the economy. Originally from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, David graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.A. in History and Political Science in 2014. He received his M.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies from the same institution in 2016.

It’s all Connected: Introducing Filmmaker Adam Curtis

April 7, 2021

By Yoav Di-Capua

Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (BBC, 2021, 7 hours in 6 parts).

Meet Adam Curtis. Age: 66. Gender: Male. Race: White. Place of Birth: Dartford, UK. Marital Status: Unknown. Education: Oxford. Profession: Well…, here is where things get a bit complicated. Originally, Curtis saw himself as a historian but, for reasons which will soon become apparent, that did not quite work out. So, instead, he ended up making films for the BBC. Lots of them. And yet the title of BBC journalist and filmmaker does not quite capture the man. Nor does it encapsulate his rise to prominence. In the 1980s, Curtis’ work was considered fringe. Indigestible to many, it was tolerated by some and intensely loved by few. He was an obvious outlier. But gradually, since the late 1990s, his unique outlook has gained respect. With that success, he became a filmmaker at large with no direct boss to report to and a steady budget to work with. This rare freedom brought out the best in him, and by the early 2000s, Curtis was something of a cult figure, whose work is pirated as soon the BBC broadcasts it. After making it big across the pond, he was slowly discovered by the Americans, who began inviting him to film festivals, giving him awards and writing generously about his brilliance. They too struggled to account for the exact nature of his films. They draw you in, but what are they about, really? One answer is that no one really knows: Curtis’ films are about everything, and about nothing in particular. Indeed, his work defies easy characterization, and it borders on being so unreviewable that critics normally resort to an automatic 5-star verdict. I wish to alert the reader that this review is no exception.

*Adam Curtis (right) with David Thomson answers questions after the showing of Power of Nightmares in 2005. Source: Steve Rhodes*

Curtis’ oeuvre revolves around the human modern condition and while it includes footage of China, Africa, North America, the UK, Russia, and the Middle East, he does not need to travel far. A short commute to the enormous 80-year-old BBC archive suffices. It is, most likely, the biggest television archive anywhere in the world, and Curtis can do whatever he wants in it. This past January he described his working method to the New Yorker (yes, they have finally discovered him, too), which consists of watching thousands of hours of raw, unedited material in fast-forward mode until an image sparks his interest. Then, he takes it slow, and digs in. This careful curatorial act – which is performed by him rather than by a fleet of aspirational assistants – results in visual material which, though very familiar, feels entirely new and foreign to the eye. Then comes an unconventional soundtrack that produces a similar effect, so that even his take on the all-too-familiar Trump presidency feels entirely new, as if dealing not with the most-documented presidency in history but with a distant tribe in the Amazon encountering the camera for the first time.

Next comes the signature script, which is a frontal assault on linear narration and the British cult of “common sense.” Here, Curtis juxtaposes Grand history with the biggest G possible with individual experience set on the tiniest scale imaginable, down to the level of the atom. It is a filmmaking craft built around juxtapositions of scale, from neurological webs in the brain to global networks and back to the inner world of the self. All along, this journey is void of straightforward arguments and simple conclusions. Instead, it uses an associative and elusive mode of reasoning which is stitched together by “patterns.” Patterns that are so obvious and apparent to Curtis that it makes no sense at all to actually argue about them. Everyone can just see it, or maybe not. Probably not.

But that did not matter, as he would say, because by this time Curtis has became a phenomenon. We can trace the rise of Curtism to the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of big ideologies and state-synchronized collective action. Divesting from utopias, the 1990s globalized neo-liberal world of Pax Americana quickly replaced revolution with money and instant pleasure. Instead of “Workers of the World Unite!” we got the ubiquitous mode of “Unlimited Everything for Everybody Now!” in which self-absorbing radical individualism was hailed as the new king (the selfie of the selfie, if you wish). Curtis thrives in this matrix and is probably his most consistent explorer. We know it by its collective name the “End of History;” a term which perfectly captures the essence of Curtism.

Curtis has assembled an impressive record that both critics and admirers describe as fragmented, disjointed, avant-garde, experiential, nonsensical, incoherent but still, utterly brilliant, mesmerizing and genuinely captivating. So, what is going on here? Is Curtis a journalist, a historian, an experimental artist, all and/or none of the above?

With more than thirty films to his name, including the post-Cold-War classics Pandora’s Box (1992), The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), HyperNormalisation (2016) and now, the monumental seven hour magnum opus Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021), Curtis has assembled an impressive record that both critics and admirers describe as fragmented, disjointed, avant-garde, experiential, nonsensical, incoherent but still, utterly brilliant, mesmerizing and genuinely captivating. So, what is going on here? Is Curtis a journalist, a historian, an experimental artist, all and/or none of the above? For his part, Curtis insists he is a journalist whose exclusive subject is “power and politics.” It sounds simple and straightforward but it really isn’t. In journalism, the reader or viewer does not have to second-guess the scale and dimensions of the subject at hand. Here, when after many hours of watching my wife asked me whether I was finally done, I truly did not know what to answer. Am I? Is it over? And mind you, unlike the New Yorker, I am not a newcomer to the Curtis scene.

How did I hear of Curtis? Fifteen years ago, a Portuguese colleague recommended The Century of the Self, a classic Curtis film about how Freud’s theory of the unconscious was picked up by the American PR and advertising industry for the sake of mass marketing and Cold War population control. “Recommended” is not really the appropriate verb to the describe the actions of my colleague. To recommend Curtis is never the generic Netflix-nudge of “you must see the new whatever” – the “whatever” being something that will likely drain your soul and leave no cognitive trace in your brain aside from a certain numbness. To “recommend” Curtis is to gently follow-up with the recommendee, in the following days, weeks and months, prod when you need to, and be sure that the message sinks in. If she fails to engage – as recently happened with someone to whom I “recommended” Curtis – you have to leave your manners behind, double down on your efforts and be ready to press the matter further. Upon success, you then invite yourself to her virtual living room to start a conversation. By that point, if you choose your victims intelligently, the conversation will have a life of its own. In other words, to recommend Curtis is not to extend the casual invitation to share something that is reasonably good and popular. Rather, it is an initiation process into a cult. The kind of cult which never really works as, aside from all the admiration for Curtis’ genius visual extravaganza and idiosyncratic reasoning, it is never quite clear what you are actually worshiping. What are the films about? What do they mean? And why should we care? And this is exactly the point.

All Curtis films begin with the innocent and promising fairytale line “This is a story about …” only to find out 2-3 minutes later that there is no story, or that it has shifted and is about to change yet again, or that it was, all along, the wrong story and that you were actually duped. There is no beginning, middle, or end, just his signature speech pattern of smooth transitions from one “obvious” pattern to the next. Here are some classic lines: “At the heart of it….”, “but at the very same time…”, “they claimed….”, “but in the process…”, “But that did not matter…”, “But this was a fantasy…in fact…” and so on and so on. Did I understand anything the first time I watched his work? No, yes, it does not really matter because I was immediately mesmerized by the captivating aesthetics and the occasional brilliant insight. Let me show you how it works. Watch this trailer to HyperNormalisation. Now watch the Adam Curtis parody by “common sense” BBC viewers who have had enough (over there they pay for their public broadcasting). Now answer: Style over substance? Hyperbolic claims? Or, rather, a high-minded exploration of how we got from here to there, why, and who benefited? Who to believe? Do you want to watch more?

Let’s discuss the latest masterpiece Can’t Get You Out of My Head which I automatically award as many stars as Curtis would like. With this new production, Curtis has brought his craft to perfection. Like a good DJ, he drew on previous projects, mixing them with new material to create something familiar yet exciting, unexpected and mightily relevant. Released straight after the US elections, the first scene, hits the viewer with the image of President Obama and the subtitle “if you liked this, you will also like that,” following which President Biden makes an entry. But though accessible from the very first minute, that does not mean you can just go ahead and watch the whole 10 hours straight on. If you just turned 21 and are going to your Curtis neighborhood pub for the first time, don’t empty the best and most expensive bottle of scotch in one long sip just because you can. Take it easy and start with something lighter like The Power of Nightmares, about how American neo-conservatives and Islamic jihadis jointly made the 9/11 world in which we are still living. Or even Pandora’s Box, subtitled A Fable from the Age of Science about Cold War technocratic rationality, system analysis, game theory and the impending rule of algorithms. Anticipating the current era of Big Tech mind-shaping and soul-bending – and well ahead of the game – Curtis made this one in 1993. It might strike you as slightly outdated but this is alright, as you will find here many of the vintage themes of a good Curtis movie and begin to train your eye and brain. Besides, your liver is probably not yet ready for the strong stuff. Come back tomorrow, and in the meantime watch this quick BBC introduction, from Curtis’ Oh Dearism (2009) about the meaninglessness of mainstream television news media.

Welcome back. Meet some of the characters in Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Every Curtis film has a unique set of characters. Some are large-scale familiar actors like the Libyan ruler Muamar Qadafi, Chairman’s Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and Vladimir Putin. Alongside them, but on equal footing, you will find the rapper Tupac Shakur (2Pac) and his Black Panther activist mother Afeni Shakur. Then, you will be introduced to forgotten men and women like 1960s model turned novelist, Sandra Paul and the black slumlord executioner-turned-freedom-fighter-conman and murderer Michael X. Next in line are ordinary people like transgender activist Julia Grant, a British citizen who, during the 1970s, fought the psychiatrist establishment on camera to allow her a sex change operation. Also on board is the celebrated behavioral economist and Nobel Prize laurate Daniel Kahneman, American cultural subtour Kerry Thornley who, during the 1960s, presided over “Operation MindF***”, which spread conspiracy theories just to see what would happen (answer: a lot). You can also meet people you’ve never heard of, like Kremlin master political manipulator Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov. Or, for instance, someone you have heard of, like al-Qaida jihadi and resident of Guantanamo Bay prison Abu Zubeida who, following a brain injury while fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, was “trapped in a perpetual now haunted by fragments of memory.” When interrogated by the CIA he turned the mental mishmash that included, among other things, Rambo III, into prime “intelligence” that satisfied his captors but was otherwise a piece of fiction. You will also meet innocent Irish convicts “The Birmingham Six”, British imperial archeologist and spy Gertrude Bell, distinguished members of the Ku Klux Klan and – last but not least – pharmaceutical industrialist Arthur M. Sackler and his family of drugs. There are also some impersonal characters such as “governments” “the CIA” “the Banks” “the Elites” “valium” and OxyContin.

Together, and in no particular order, these characters successfully carry sizable themes. As his most complete work to date and by his longest, Can’t Get You Out of My Head showcases themes such as mass dissociation of the middle class from the real world, de-industrialization, the slow (and then very fast) rise of China, 1960s counterculture, the rise of global systems, the dot com crisis, the 2008 crisis, populism, AI and algorithmic governance, the Iraq war as a video game detached from the realities at home, the crack epidemic and urban gangs, the gender revolution, the Saudi fairytale reality, apocalyptic terrorism, humanitarian aid, Chaos Theory, how the CIA overthrew 66 foreign governments, metadata, and James Bond.

Zipping from one theme to another to follow the pattern and flow of power, Curtis presents moments of sheer cinematographic brilliance. In one such scene, a camera slowly enters the compound of jihadi men in Peshawar, Pakistan, and moves slowly between them zooming in and out on their faces to the soundtrack of “The Lady in Red” by Chris De Burge (apparently, Abu Zubeida’s beloved track). You don’t need more than that in order to understand the madness of it all. Another memorable moment comes as the camera follows an Iraqi journalist in one of the biggest sandstorms recorded in Iraqi history, just days before the American “Operation Desert Storm.” These 50 seconds anticipate the disaster better than any learned explanation. In another sequence, we move from Pakistan to 2Pac’s visions of revolution and then straight to the Eiffel Tower and the French Revolution and then to the collapse of the Soviet utopia. There are scenes in which Curtis does try to provide a learned explanation, for example of the subprime mortgage crisis, but ends up delivering a superficial statement about the complexity and intelligibility of the computer networks that caused the problem. In such moments, Curtis moves from the sublime to the farfetched in the space of a few minutes. If you get tired and want to get to the end of it quickly, watch episode six, which is the most coherent of them all, but also the one that can largely stand on its own. The series ends with a quote from the late radical anthropologist David Graeber that more or less captures Curtis’ life-long motto: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

His work, he argues, looks behind the fake world we live in, where nothing is as real as it seems, to reveal how powerful actors impose modes of being and systems of thought and action on the rest of us. Sometimes these actors come from the right (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) and sometimes from the neo-liberal Left (pick your villain).

Do not mistake this final line by an emerging guru of the alternative Left as an indication that Curtis is taking sides in politics. This is a strictly metapolitical affair. Curtis himself believes that all he does is chronicle phenomena that exist outside the ubiquitous categories of public perception. That we fail to make sense of the liquid we all swim in and the air all breathe. His work, he argues, looks behind the fake world we live in, where nothing is as real as it seems, to reveal how powerful actors impose modes of being and systems of thought and action on the rest of us. Sometimes these actors come from the right (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) and sometimes from the neo-liberal Left (pick your villain).

If, by the end of this long review cum introduction to Curtis, I must say something concrete about him, it is that he is the master and prince of a radical postmodern documentary style. It is a style that has no ordered Enlightenment narrative but just a pure and powerful effect that passes as truth and rings as such with no trace of American-style conspiracy theories for which he has no patience at all.

It is all fascinating and very historical. But it is not history. And yet, now, when Curtis has finally made it in America, it might pass and come to be viewed as historical truth. In fact, I am curious to see which university will start the first Adam Curtis Program in Critical Visual Arts. I predict it will be NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, but UT Austin, with its associative SXSW ambience, may surprise me too. I look forward to the first class to graduate from this program and convene the inaugural “We Are all Adam Curtis” conference, to which I expect an invitation as a keynote speaker. And as for you dear reader, welcome to the cult and don’t expect it to make much sense.

Statements, Resources and Events Responding to the Mass Shootings in Atlanta

March 22, 2021

From the editors: Not Even Past joins the wider University of Texas community in our horror at the recent mass shootings in Atlanta. We express our solidarity with the messages and statements below and have included details of important events and workshops focused on confronting anti-Asian racism. The events in Atlanta cannot be separated from a long and painful history of anti-Asian racism in the United States that has been exacerbated over the past year. This page includes resources and books that shed light on this long history. It is an evolving resource that will be frequently updated.

Messages and Statements

To the Asian American students, staff, faculty of UT and beyond:

You are loved and cared for in this moment of heightened racist and misogynistic violence against our communities. The anguish, sadness, vulnerability, and rage you feel following the massacre in Atlanta demand full recognition. Contained in them is a truth not only about the pandemic era, but about the making of the United States. Asian Americans have long been enlisted as the scapegoats who bring to fruition reactionary nationalism, patriarchy, displaced economic resentment. These goals were achieved by rendering Asians in the United States perpetually “alien” and therefore unworthy of citizenship and entry to the country during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During World War II they took the form of the unconstitutional imprisonment of Japanese Americans. As de-industrialization led to economic and urban decline during the 1980s, these goals were exercised against Asian immigrants who were said to be stealing American jobs. In the post-9/11 period the goal of creating a new and expanded homeland security state was achieved through the vilification of and violent attacks against those of South and Central Asian descent, particularly those who hail from Islamic-majority countries.

That Asian Americans are again being used as scapegoats during another watershed moment should not come as a surprise to anyone. This is especially true when we consider that the former president of the United States, with his proclamations of COVID-19 as the “China Virus,” played a key role in recruiting Asian Americans for this role. Some will try to argue that this was not an act of racism but of free speech or “individual resentment.”Similarly, there are those who will try to convince you that the killings in Atlanta were motivated by something other than white supremacy, racism and sexism— as if a discussion of mental instability should eclipse the discussion of intersectional, structural oppression. These disavowals point to another recurring aspect of the historical injuries inflicted on Asian Americans: our oppression is always doubted, if not outright denied. Our oppression is too often rendered invisible and unimportant. The point of this short message is to assert just the opposite. The Center for Asian American Studies recognizes that the violence we experience is real and unrelenting. As best we can we, and in the most appropriate ways possible, our goal is to provide support for our community, especially for those who feel alone and unrecognized in this moment. Here are some initial steps/resources are listed below.

Sincerely yours,

Center for Asian American Studies
Department of Asian Studies
Center for East Asian Studies
Asian/Asian American Faculty Staff Association
Center for Women’s & Gender Studies
South Asian Institute
LGBTQ Studies
Latina/o Studies Department
Black Studies Department
Native American & Indigenous Studies

This last year has been punctuated with incidents of hate directed against the Asian and Asian American community and ending in the terrible events in Atlanta on March 16, 2021. Our hearts ache today with our Asian and Asian American students, faculty, staff, and friends.

We in the Department of History join the Center for Asian American Studies in calling for recognition of this violence and the deep wounds inflicted by Anti-Asian racism and hate. As a department and as historians, we reaffirm our commitment to teaching the long and painful history of anti-Asian racism in the United States and to exposing the deep roots of prejudice.

We stand today and always with members of the Asian and Asian American community and we express our solidarity with the statements made by the Center for Asian American Studies and the American Historical Association. There is much that can be done and learned from this terrible moment.

Sincerely,

Department of History

Not Even Past will link to additional statements here:

Statement on Violence against Asians and Asian Americans, Immigration and Ethnic History Society

AHA Statement on Violence against Asians and Asian Americans (March 2021)

Statement from the Association for Asian American Studies

Statement from the Association for Asian Studies

Events and Community Resources

Confronting Anti-Asian Racism: A Bystander Intervention Workshop

When: Monday 3/29 @ 1:30PM or Tuesday 3/30 @ 2PM

Registration: https://utexas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1B5zaNuhacugGz4

Description: This digital workshop is open to all current UT students, staff and faculty with limited capacity via ZOOM. Confronting Anti-Asian Racism is a 1.5 hour interactive workshop that will lead participants through the history of anti-Asian xenophobia in the US as it relates to the present day Asian American experience. This historical context will provide a foundation for attendees to practice identifying and interrupting anti-Asian bias through the BeVocal bystander intervention model. The workshop requires active participation in small groups and working through real-world scenarios of microaggression and covert/overt anti-Asian racism.

Coordinated by Sahtiya Hammell, UT’s Bystander Intervention Program Coordinator, and Tony Vo, CAAS assistant director.

#StopAsianHate Rally & Vigil

When: April 17 from 4-6pm

Description: Join the rally to #StopAsianHate at Austin City Hall! We stand with Asians across the country in solidarity to condemn anti-Asian racism in all forms. Masks and social distancing required.

Asian Voices @ UT and Community Newsletter
A drop-in group called Asian Voices @ UT meets every Tuesday from 4:45-6:15 p.m. In tangent with the group, there is also a newsletter with mental health and community resources that is identity-affirming. Students can sign up for the newsletter, which includes information on how to sign up for the group’s Zoom.

Virtual Office Hours via The Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS)
Amy Tao-Foster of CMHC has traditionally held office hours at CAAS where students can drop in for support and community, or ask questions about mental health and other resources. She will hold office hours from 1-1:50 p.m. on Tuesdays. Students who are interested can email Amy to schedule a Zoom meeting for office hours.

Counseling Appointments for Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi American (APIDA) Students
Staff and faculty can also refer students directly to Amy Tao-Foster as the Diversity Counseling and Outreach Specialist. If students are hesitant to call CMHC to request an appointment, they can be referred directly to Amy at 512-475-6943. If she is unable to answer, they can leave a message with their name, EID, and phone number, and Amy will be able to call them back to set up a phone or video counseling appointment.

Coping with Racial Trauma
Dr. Connesia Handford, also holds a workshop series for students of color on Mondays from noon to 1 p.m., where they can learn helpful tools and techniques for coping with racial trauma. Students can sign up here.

Resources

Readings on the history of anti-Asian racism and how to be an anti-racist ally, compiled by Jennifer Ho (University of Colorado Boulder)

Antiracist Toolkit, focused on the action areas of educating and assessing ourselves; examining and revising our work; and enacting change. Created by the Department of Asian Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Coronavirus and Racism: Asian-Americans in the Crossfire,” July 2020 episode of Asia Matters podcast featuring AAS President Christine R. Yano (University of Hawaii at Manoa) and Jennifer Pan (Stanford University)

Christine R. Yano, “Racing the Pandemic: Anti-Asian Racism amid COVID-19,” from The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi and published by the AAS Asia Shorts book series

“Black and Asian American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List,” created by Black Women Radicals

“Confronting Prejudice: How to Protect Yourself and Help Others,” from OnlinePsychology@Pepperdine, the Online Master of Psychology program from Pepperdine University

Documenting Anti-Asian racism

“In response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020. The center tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders throughout the United State”

https://stopaapihate.org/

Podcasts and conversations

This is Democracy – Episode 140: Asian American History and Exclusion

A conversation with Dr Madeline Hsu

Books – The Long History of Anti-Asian Racism

Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans

Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.

But the Chinese fought back—with arms, strikes, and lawsuits and by flatly refusing to leave. When red posters appeared on barns and windows across the United States urging the Chinese to refuse to carry photo identity cards, more than one hundred thousand joined the largest mass civil disobedience to date in the United States. The first Chinese Americans were marched out and starved out. But even facing brutal pogroms, they stood up for their civil rights. This is a story that defines us as a nation and marks our humanity.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520256941/driven-out

The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion

This classic study offers a history of anti-Japanese prejudice in California, extending from the late nineteenth century to 1924, when an immigration act excluded Japanese from entering the United States. The Politics of Prejudice details the political climate that helped to set the stage for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and reveals the racism present among middle-class American progressives, labor leaders, and other presumably liberal groups.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520219502/the-politics-of-prejudice

Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear

The “yellow peril” is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture—dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia.

Written by two dedicated scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, this is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1508-yellow-peril

Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War

Through intellectual vigor, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.

At once political and deeply personal, Cho’s analysis of U.S. neocolonialism and militarism under contemporary globalization brings forth a new way of understanding—and remembering—the impact of the Korean War.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/haunting-the-korean-diaspora

Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration

For decades, a fog of governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence kept the victims the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II from understanding their experiences. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition with the twin goals of educating the general public and encouraging former inmates to come to grips with and tell their own history.

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming the past. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also analyzes how the dual act of recovering—and recovering from—history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.

Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (Asian American Experience

A Family Fight on the Bosporus: The Ashkenazi Jews of the Ottoman Empire

March 15, 2021

By Isabelle S. Headrick

In 1884, a twelve-year old boy got into a fight with his parents. Pious Ashkenazi Jews from the manufacturing city of Lodz in Poland, they were traveling by ship to make a new home in the Holy Land. Once in Constantinople, unbeknownst to his parents, Wolf Finkelstein stepped off the ship and into a rowboat. He then delivered an ultimatum to his mother and father: either they would allow him to remain in the city or he would throw himself into the Bosporus. His (presumably reluctant) parents left the boy in Constantinople to fend for himself, which he did. Within a few days, he found a job as an apprentice to a tailor; within a few years, at the age of eighteen, he started his own tailoring business, then, over the next few years, went bankrupt, started more businesses, married, and had four daughters.

Who were the Jews of the Ottoman Empire? The prototypical Ottoman Jews were those Ladino-speaking residents of the Greek and Anatolian cities of Salonica, Smyrna, and Constantinople (now Thessaloniki, Izmir and Istanbul) bordering the Aegean, Black and Mediterranean Seas. They were the descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese refugees who had fled the Inquisition and the mass expulsions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of them carried Spanish surnames such as Cuenca, Perez and Tarragano.

Wolf Finkelstein's Business Card — *Wolf Finkelstein’s Business Card*

But the Ottoman Empire was also a cosmopolitan empire; and there were also Berber-speaking Jews in North Africa, a few tens of thousands in the Palestinian holy cities of Jerusalem and Safed, merchants in the port cities of Beirut and Benghazi, and the enormous, Arabic-speaking community that, at 53,000, constituted one-third of the population of Baghdad.

After almost a century of near-exclusive focus on the culturally and intellectually fertile world of Yiddish- (and French, German, Russian, and Polish-) speaking Ashkenazi Jews dwelling in the vast region between Eastern France and Western Russia, the last few decades have witnessed an explosion in the study of Jews from predominantly Muslim lands. Collapsed under the name of “Sephardi-Mizrahi” studies (Sephardi, meaning Spanish, Mizrahi, meaning “from the East”) this includes Jews from a 3500-mile expanse stretching from Morocco to Iran.

Indeed, the steady increase in numbers at the Sephardi-Mizrahi Caucus lunch at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies testifies to the fact that Sephardi-Mizrahi studies has gone from being the neglected stepchild to the cool new kid of Jewish studies. And with good reason, as this exciting scholarship has opened not only new cultural understandings of Jews but has deep implications for theorizing the complex relationships between Jews and Islamic legal frameworks, European colonialisms, religious minorities’ belonging to the nation-state, and trade, family and educational networks.

But the construction of this field—which deserves all the attention it receives—has so far paid scant attention to the way that Ashkenazi and Sephardi fates overlapped and were intertwined. One group that is little-mentioned in the history of Ottoman Jews are the Ashkenazim who were drawn to and settled in the Ottoman Empire—drawn to it for economic opportunity but also to escape the pervasive discrimination and threat of violence that were particularly present in the late-nineteenth-century Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. In fact, these reasons were not so different from those for which their cousins migrated to New York City around the same time.

The presence of these Ashkenazi Jews is not new information, in fact the Galata neighborhood in Constantinople had at least three Ashkenazi synagogues. French Ashkenazi Jews from Alsace-Lorraine with names like Brasseur emigrated to Beirut; Russian Ashkenazim with names like Hochberg created new lives in settlements like Ness Ziona in Palestine.

And perhaps none of this should be surprising or even an issue. After all, to a Yiddish-speaking Jew from Ukraine or Hungary, Constantinople was no farther geographically, culturally and linguistically than it would have been to the Arabic-speaking Jew in Baghdad or Aleppo. The categories of Ashkenazi and Sephardi mattered in some ways, but almost certainly not in the way that the organization of luncheons at the AJS conference might indicate.

By the time Serafina Hirsch arrived in Constantinople in her early twenties, she had already crossed so many boundaries armed with her prodigious ability to learn languages (she knew fourteen) and adapt to new settings, that Constantinople was, in all likelihood, just one more strange and different place. Semi-orphaned at a young age, she moved around Central and Southern Europe, from the home of one older sibling to another. At a young age, she was working as an impresario for a small Jewish orchestra, traveling and booking venues around the Balkans. She spent three years in Budapest learning French and made her way to Constantinople sometime around 1900, where she worked for a time as the French teacher to the daughters of a wealthy Turkish general.

It was during this time that Serafina met Wolf. Precisely how, we don’t know, but perhaps it was through one of the Ashkenazi synagogue communities in Galata, or else through mutual friends. Perhaps they met in a café or in any number of one of the venues young people socialize in exciting, cosmopolitan cities, in the same way that their daughter would meet her future husband in late 1920s Berlin.

Either way, they married in 1901, and the following year, Serafina gave birth to their first child, Edith, in the garden of a house overlooking the sea in Salonica (in the garden, as she was carried out of the house during the birth in the middle of an earthquake). The couple’s linguistic flexibility was such that these two Ashkenazi Jews not only hired a Greek servant but spoke Greek to one another, and Greek was Edith’s first language. Their second daughter was named Renée. Wolf’s tailoring business foundered, and the family left their Constantinople neighborhood of Pera and moved to Smyrna. Perhaps Wolf’s lack of success with his small businesses presaged the final collapse of an empire that was, unbeknownst to him, in severe decline even when he arrived.

And then, twenty-two years after Wolf had fought with his parents, Serafina and he moved again, taking the two small girls to another capital of another empire—France. The girls, along with the two sisters who were born there, would attend French schools, absorb French culture, and hereafter identify themselves as French even though they never did obtain French citizenship. Edith, in particular, loved l’école and spent hours copying scenes from French history into notebooks. The girls spent summers living with French peasants in Normandy and Auvergne, or with their parents at the sea near Calais.

*Finkelstein family at Le Crotoy circa 1912-13.*

But the Ottoman Empire continued to mold their experiences. Edith’s dark hair and olive skin drew attention in the family’s Paris neighborhood of Montmartre, and she was called “Turquoise” (Turk) and “Youpine” (dirty Jew) as both racial and antisemitic slurs. The early twentieth-century French version of Mean Girls told her to go back to her country and eat macaroni. (“Why macaroni?” Edith wondered, “I’m not Italian.”) More ominously, as a Turkish citizen, Wolf was imprisoned in a concentration camp for several months at the beginning of World War One and after his release was forced to relocate to neutral Spain. He left Serafina to manage the family’s tailor shop amid unfriendly neighbors and to send the four terrified young girls to live in the French countryside away from the German shelling of Paris, supervised by a twelve-year-old Edith.

As soon as World War One ended, Serafina and the girls joined Wolf in the “capital” (New York) of yet another empire (the United States). From this point forward, the Finkelsteins’ lives were defined economically by America and culturally and linguistically by France and Europe. Just as it did for most of the Ashkenazi Jews who had at some point or another, had made lives and homes within the Ottoman Empire, the empire ceased to have not only political and legal, but cultural and economic meaning for them. Those Jews who stayed did not fare well, and tens of thousands within its former borders were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust. Many other former Ottoman Jews from communities in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey emigrated, and in so doing, re-oriented themselves to new cultures and economies in the United States, Israel, France, and Latin America.

*Serafina and daughters at Ellis Island*

Wolf and Serafina were each drawn to the Ottoman Empire by its vitality and the opportunities that its cities seemed to promise. In this, they were like thousands of Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking Jews who were pulled into its orbit but who left when the actual opportunities could not support a growing young family. How their stay there would end was not something that could have been known to them when Serafina gave birth to Edith overlooking the sea in Salonica, or when two young Ashkenazi Jews met in the bustling and cosmopolitan capital of a declining but still-vital empire, or when a twelve-year-old boy made the decision to thwart the will of his parents and break from their destinies by stepping into a rowboat. Either way, the Ottoman Empire, by pulling them in and pushing them out, shaped their future, leaving the aspiring historian who is their great-granddaughter to attempt to imagine those crucial moments of choice and determined motivation.

Isabelle S. Headrick is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on the global modern education movement and its interaction with Iranian, Jewish, global French, and family histories. She wishes to thank Daniel Headrick and Kate Ezra for sharing their historical and photographic sources.

IHS Workshop: “Royal Power and a Piece of Bread: Sufi Discipleship and Dargah Worship in the Maratha Empire” by Rupali Warke, University of Texas at Austin

December 15, 2020

In 1707, after the death of the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the power and authority of the Mughals who ruled over the greater part of South Asia for about two hundred years started to disintegrate. The weakening of the imperial center altered the socio-political conditions, which led to the rise of strong regional powers who aspired to fill the political vacuum. The Maratha empire established by Shivaji in 1674 was an important post-Mughal state which grew in this period and posed a formidable challenge to the British political ambitions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Conventionally, historians of early colonial and modern India have viewed the rise of Shivaji and the Maratha state as an assertion of Hindu religious orthodoxy. It has been argued that symbolic acts such as the coronation ceremony of Shivaji popularized the notion of caste and Brahmanical caste hierarchy among the people in an unprecedented way which led to hardening of caste and religious boundaries. This paper will critique and revise the historical interpretations that associate Maratha polity with religious orthodoxy and the Brahmanization of Indian society by highlighting a parallel tradition of Indo-Islamic Sufi discipleship and Dargah worship practiced and patronized by the Maratha aristocrats and the masses.

Rupali Warke earned her Ph.D. in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Dr. Warke is a historian of early modern and modern South Asia, specializing in history of gender, colonialism, and political economy. Her other research interests include popular culture and contemporary politics in South Asia. She holds an M.A and M.Phil. in history from Jamia Millia Islamia University, in New Delhi. In 2018, she received a Continuing Fellowship from the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School at UT Austin. In 2016 she won the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Rajendra Vora Fellowship. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies in 2020-2021. Read more about her work here.

Responder:
Donald R. Davis, Jr.
Professor and Chair, Department of Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World by Ussama Makdisi (2019)

November 20, 2020

by Carter Barnett

In his most recent book, Ussama Makdisi provides a more accurate account of sectarianism and coexistence in modern Arab history. In so doing, he repudiates two historical narratives. The first narrative, common in media headlines, claims that sectarian violence is inherent to the religious landscape of the region. The typical counter-argument – the second narrative – describes the region as one of unparalleled toleration, with a history of communal harmony. According to Makdisi, both narratives are politically motivated and false.

Makdisi approaches sectarianism in the modern Arab world by surveying its evolution from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. He calls this period “the age of coexistence.” According to Makdisi, it was less an era of tolerance and harmony but one of persistent struggle for political inclusion. To better comprehend the age of coexistence, he also introduces a new term, the “ecumenical frame,” which he describes as the ongoing political project of valorizing coexistence and opposition to sectarianism. The ecumenical frame refers to three novel formulations: a body of thought that wrestled with secular political equality given the legacy of unequal Ottoman rule, a system of governance with traces of Islamic supremacy, and a legal order that balanced the constitutional secularity of its citizens with religiously segregated law. Makdisi argues that the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries witnessed the emergence of ecumenical thought amongst Arab Christians and Muslims alike.

Makdisi breaks the story of coexistence in the modern Arab world into two parts, beginning with its origins during the Ottoman nineteenth century. Opposed to the common narrative highlighting the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, Makdisi focuses on its inherent contradictions. The empire distributed privileges to religious communities despite upholding the superiority of Muslim over non-Muslim. Ultimately, Ottoman imperial rule favored obedience and loyalty to the sultan, irrespective of religious, ethnic, or linguistic identity. The calculus of Ottoman rule was severely challenged during the mid-nineteenth century by European colonialism and missionary intrusion. The Ottoman government responded by issuing numerous initiatives called the Tanzimat reforms. Makdisi documents episodes of sectarian violence between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects that occurred under the tremendous stress of transition in the Tanzimat Era. He acknowledges the sectarianism of the eastern Mediterranean, culminating in the massacres of 1860, while locating the concurrent origins of the antisectarian ecumenical frame within the writings of nahda (renaissance) intellectuals like Butrus Al-Bustani. Amidst the violence of 1860, Bustani called for transcendence, reconciliation, and ulfa (concord, familiarity), instructing his readership to turn away from sectarian fanaticism and towards patriotism and shared national identity. Makdisi’s familiarity with the Ottoman nineteenth century allows him to pay proper attention to voices like Bustani. He argues with precision and erudition as he presents the violence of 1860, spurring the writings of Bustani, as the crucible of the ecumenical frame.

Makdisi then shifts attention from the Ottoman nineteenth century to European colonialism in the early twentieth century by presenting an innovative comparison between the development of the northern and southern regions of the Ottoman Empire. He first attends to the Ottoman north, the Balkans and Anatolia, where state violence rendered the potential of the ecumenical frame irrelevant. In a poignant example of the amplification of violence, Makdisi shows how in 1821, during the Greek War of Independence, the Ottoman government hung the Greek Orthodox patriarch as a warning for non-Muslim subjects of the empire. One century later, during the destruction of the Christian quarters of Izmir in 1922, Turkish nationalist forces killed the Greek Orthodox Bishop Chrysostomos, allowing the mob to mutilate his body. While the Ottomans sought to bring the Greeks back under their governance, the Turks sought their elimination. According to Makdisi, the draconian practices of the Ottoman (now Turkish) north were not replicated in the Ottoman south, otherwise known as al-Mashriq or Greater Syria, where the ecumenical frame developed between 1860 and 1914. Ottoman subjects in al-Mashriq mutually discouraged sectarianism, viewing it as a problem of ignorance, which culminated in an emphasis on national unity between Muslims and non-Muslims. By bifurcating the Ottoman north and south, claiming a distinct evolution of the ecumenical frame in each, Makdisi generalizes the history of the entire Ottoman Empire. The borderlands between Anatolia and Greater Syria were gradual, not stark. However, Makdisi’s strategic decision to sever the history of Greater Syria from the atrocities of Turkish nationalism in Anatolia extends Arab ecumenism beyond its Ottoman origins.

In the second half of the book, Makdisi sketches the development of the ecumenical frame from its Ottoman origins to its politicization within the nascent Arab nation-states. He initially contrasts the manifestations of political ecumenism in Lebanon and Iraq, focusing on the views of Michel Chiha and Sati‘ al-Husri. Chiha, one of the architects of the Lebanese constitution, worked closely with French colonial authority to craft a communalist political culture. Husri, a prominent Arab nationalist thinker in Iraq, advocated alternatively for a secular nationalist culture in opposition to British colonial authority. As Makdisi explains, both political visions, despite their differences, originated in the ecumenism of the late Ottoman Empire. Chiha and Husri sought to overcome sectarianism and political exclusivity in Lebanon and Iraq respectively. Nonetheless, their ecumenical efforts were derailed with the establishment of the state of Israel. While Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq witnessed the logical continuation of the Ottoman ecumenical frame, novel sectarian conflicts between Arabs and Jews altered the trajectory of Palestine. The events leading to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 created new ecumenical identities as Palestinian nationalism coalesced under the banner of anti-Zionism rather than religion, class, clan, or geography. Makdisi ends his work with a melancholic yet hopeful tone for the broken but ongoing project of ecumenism in al-Mashriq.

Makdisi excels throughout the book in outlining the logical evolution of the ecumenical frame without choreographing its inevitability. He crafts a powerful and timely response to misrepresentations of the Arab world, which haunt contemporary politics. In doing so, he achieves a rare feat by seamlessly bridging the historiographical divide between the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. Readership within and outside of the academy will find this work useful as Makdisi’s ecumenical frame provides an empathetic and consequential perspective on the making of the modern Arab world.

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