Rethinking Gender and Humour in Nineteenth-Century Iran

This article examines two nineteenth-century Persian texts with significant implications for debates about gender relationships in Iran. Informed by a methodology associated with Quentin Skinner, the article questions some far-reaching conclusions made about these texts in previous studies, demonstrating the value of making methodologically transparent approaches to the study of historical texts. Versions of this methodology have been employed to present innovative interpretations of writings by such Western authors as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. However, the application of this interpretive approach to non-Western texts has been quite limited. I provide evidence of this methodology’s ability to improve our understanding of non-Western texts, particularly when they present hermeneutically rooted polemics. By reinterpreting the texts it examines, the article helps us to develop a better appreciation for the roots of modern Persian gender relations.     

Persian ‘Rashti jokes’: modern Iran’s palimpsests of gheyrat-based masculinity

Abstract

For almost a century, a Persian ethnic joke cycle has circulated among Iranians about the men and women of the northern Iranian city of Rasht, labelling them as cuckolds and promiscuous women. A foray into the historical background and possible (gendered) functions of these jokes is long overdue. I argue that the central motif of Rashti jokes is gheyrat—a gendered social construct based on a man’s sense of honour, possessiveness and protectiveness towards certain female kin—which remains pivotal to our understanding of the texts and the historical context of the jokes. Critically reviewing extant theories on the historical origins of Rashti jokes, I argue they have roots in two modern phenomena: (a) debates among turn-of-the-twentieth-century Iranian thinkers over women’s (un)veiling; and (b) Reza Shah’s methodical promotion of an Aryanist, pan-Persian ideology. Focusing on the gender-disciplinary functions of the jokes, I then show how some contemporary Rashti jokes are deployed to project and inscribe gender-hierarchical notions that clearly surpass the jokes’ immediate, ethnic targets by commenting on broad socio-political topics. Such instances suggest that as a culture-wide joke cycle, Rashti jokes may also reinforce a form of Iranian masculinity obsessed with gheyrat-motivated control and aggression.     

Elite Indigenous Masculinity in Textual Representations of Aboriginal Service in the Vietnam War

This article analyses three texts that feature Aboriginal soldiers or veterans of the Vietnam War as protagonists: the novel Not Quite Men, No Longer Boys (1999), the play Seems Like Yesterday (2001) and the Redfern Now television episode “The Dogs of War” (2013). In all three texts, military service in Vietnam inculcates among the protagonists sentiments constitutive of what Brendan Hokowhitu refers to as elite Indigenous masculinity—the mimicry and appropriation of white hegemonic masculinity. Constructing themselves as elite Indigenous males allows the Aboriginal soldiers/veterans to position themselves as superior to “other” Aboriginal males. Through the course of the texts, though, the protagonists come to realise that elite Indigenous masculinity is a myth because civilian (white) Australia will continue to judge them the same as other Aboriginal men. Through encounters with other Aboriginal men, the Aboriginal soldiers/veterans are able to reconceptualise their own masculinities and to accept the legitimacy of multiple Aboriginal masculinities.     

Social Alienation and Estrangement in Four Stories by Palestinian Writer cAlā Ḥlayḥal

This article examines the novella al-Sīrk (2001) and three short stories (?Zawjī Sā'iq Bā?', 2008, ‘Ta^cāyush’, 2008 and ‘al-Sajjāda’, 2003) by contemporary Palestinian writer ^cAlā ?lay?al (Ala Hlehel). These texts manifest a preoccupation with the breakdown of human relationships and related themes of failed communication and miscommunication between people. These themes articulate the alienation, isolation and estrangement of individuals from one another, from community and society. The purpose of the present study is an analysis of the portrayal of social decay, alienation and estrangement in these texts, revealing structural expressions of degeneration, as well as a deterioration of interpersonal relations articulated by stymied communication, miscommunication and neglect, often expressed textually through irony and hypocrisy. These particular works were chosen because of their preoccupation with the themes at hand, and also because these are masterfully written stories in their own right deserving critical analysis. While ?lay?al's stories resound with the theme of alienation which has marked Palestinian literature from its formative stages onwards, they reject a staunchly committed stance and do not issue moral imperatives or political slogans. The nuances of these texts are examined in light of other works of Palestinian literature, and especially considering the intertextual references therein.     

Opening and Closing: Coexistence and Competition in Associations Based on Futuwwa in Late Medieval Anatolian Cities

This article suggests that the futuwwa articulated by Shihāb al-Dīn ‘Umar al-Suhrawardī (1144–1234) created a paradigm of exclusion and inclusion for late medieval Anatolian urban confraternities. This largely faith-based construct was developed in the Seljuk capital of Konya and reduplicated in futuwwa treatises that were composed in Armenian, Persian and Turkish in the region. The multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-religious cultural environment of the late medieval Anatolian city provided an opportunity and, possibly, a necessity for futuwwa associations to draw boundaries around their associations. It is uniquely through the study of the city as a unit that we will be able to understand the huge cultural and religious transformations that were taking place in Anatolia during the late medieval period. Study of futuwwa associations as regulating urban populations provides a window of insight into the ways in which groups of men attempted to define themselves in juxtaposition with others.     

A Contemporary Writer from Afghanistan: Akram Osman and His Short Stories

Akram Osman is one of the most outstanding contemporary Afghanistani writers. 1 ^?1 Although the commonly-accepted international term is Afghan rather than Afghanistani, in Afghanistan the term Afghan is synonymous with the Pashtoon ethnic group as far as non-Pashtoons are concern. The political strength of the Pashtoons led to them using the word Afghan to describe all ethnic groups; but this is resented by the many other ethnic groups in Afghanistan. In addition, the term Afghanistani is widely used inside Afghanistan. Therefore, I have chosen to use the word Afghanistani to describe the inhabitants of a multi-ethnic modern nation-state called Afghanistan. View all notes His short stories represent a current of modern Afghanistan literature in which an imported Western genre is mixed with indigenous literary traditions to become a mirror reflecting important issues and human needs in Afghanistan society. His works are divided into satirical short stories, stories of manners and diaspora stories which are not only pioneering in these types of Afghanistan literature, but also among the best to be created in modern Afghanistan. Among other particulars, his use of a form of a language based on folk traditions distinguishes his work from those of his contemporaries. Osman portrays a historical and artistic picture of Afghanistan social classes and their characteristics. Osman's stories display artistic merit and are of anthropological interest; and they have also become popular short stories in their own right appealing to the mass of Afghanistan society.     

Property and Human Rights in Cyprus: The European Court of Human Rights as a Platform of Political Struggle

It has become accepted that, during the Soviet period, Turkey ‘ignored the plight’ of the Crimean Tatars, who were brutally deported to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944. This narrative of Turkish indifference with respect to the Crimean Tatar ‘question’ overlooks a corpus of material that tells something of a different story. This corpus is literary. The Crimean Tatars figured centrally in Pan-Turkist poems and pulp fiction novels as protagonists whose victimization by the Communist regime was represented in order to provoke outrage and action, not silence and passivity. These literary texts seek to elicit in the reader what can be called ‘irredentist solidarity’, a convergence of fellow-feeling that involves a total identification of the Other as the same.     

ECOWAS protagonists for peace: An internal perspective on policy and community actors in peacemaking interventions

ABSTRACT

Despite an increasing academic interest, ECOWAS peacemaking interventions have largely been approached from a top-down perspective. This tends to highlight the roles played by high-level mediators who use ECOWAS and its instruments as the basis for their interventions. Deeper analyses of the undercurrent intra-ECOWAS processes and the role played by community actors, in particular the ECOWAS Commission and its cooperation with civil society organisations, are rare. Yet it is both the high-level policy and the community actors that constitute the protagonists of ECOWAS peacemaking. This article examines the roles of both protagonists in the planning and conduct of ECOWAS peacemaking. Based on secondary sources and insider accounts, it argues that, although policy actors have so far been dominant, community actors play a complementary role, which often goes unnoticed. This is illustrated with empirical examples of ECOWAS peacemaking interventions from the Liberian war in 1990 to the recent case of the Gambia.     

Tammsaare’s Constructions of Femininity in Light of Weininger’s Concept of Sex Difference

The texts of Estonian literary classic A. H. Tammsaare (1878–1940) can be read as mediating contradictory fin de siècle discourses of modernity. The emergence of these discourses was the effect of an accelerated process of socioeconomic modernization. This article analyzes constructions of femininity in Tammsaare’s literary texts through his women protagonists. The construction of these protagonists can meaningfully be traced to the increasingly insistent presence of women in the public sphere throughout Europe and in Estonia at the period of fin de siècle. Although Tammsaare’s texts speak by means of feminist discourses, his constructions of femininity lean toward the negative, misogynistic pole of these reactions to emancipated and “new” women. His analysis of womanhood often refers to the misogynist theory of gender in Otto Weininger’s popular treatise Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Sex and Character. An Investigation of Fundamental Principles), which came out 1903.     

Assessing the Sources of Classical Arabic Compilations: The Issue of Categories and Methodologies

The complex nature of medieval Arabic compilations, with their evidence of manifold pieces and layers of diverse (older) text material, has been puzzling to many scholars of Islam. It has even caused some researchers to question the authenticity and credibility of information contained in these texts—and their value as historical sources—altogether.

An inquiry into the theoretical controversies at issue here constitutes the starting point of this article. Additionally, we will look at the categories and terms more frequently used in Western studies of the sources of Arabic compilations from about the eighth to the eleventh century Common Era (CE). The second part of the article offers an extensively annotated catalogue of categories and terms. This terminology, it is hoped, will help advance the assessment of classical Arabic compilations, for it takes the actual circumstances of the transmission of knowledge and the working techniques of compilers in medieval Islam into proper consideration. In conclusion, the paper illustrates how the proposed categories and terms are to be applied. It will become clear that the application of this kind of refined source-critical examination of individual classical Arabic texts is instrumental to a better understanding of medieval Muslim scholarship in general.     

The Evolution of Western Aid for Palestinian Civil Society: Bypassing Local Knowledge and Resources

This article casts a sceptical eye on the seemingly glowing reputation of the United States amongst the elites of Greater Syria during the First World War era. It argues that although this reputation was based on genuine appreciation of good deeds performed by Americans in the region, it was also based on a mistaken impression of the nature of America's global role in this era and was most likely not as emphatic as it sometimes appears in the historical record. In doing this, the article seeks to raise questions about the place that such utterances should occupy in histories of the modern Middle East.     

Continuity in Islamic political philosophy: the role of myth

There is an essential continuity between Islamic political philosophy in the Middle Ages and today. Political philosophers in the Middle Ages explained and justified the use of mythical stories by rulers to motivate the whole of the community to behave in appropriate ways. They argued, basing themselves to a degree on their understanding of Plato, that not everyone is capable of really comprehending the reasons for certain aspects of political necessity, and so they should be led to obedience of civil law by being told stories which represent in more vivid and imaginative form the rewards and penalties which exist with respect to the law. It has often been argued that these philosophers, ranging from al‐Farabi to Ibn Rushd, were dissimulating their genuine heterodox views on the relationship between Islam and the state by arguing for the use of stories and allegories to persuade the masses that they ought to act in particular ways, while the intellectual élite can be provided with rational explanations for political action. It will be argued that contemporary and recent political writers in the Islamic world of the Middle East speak and write in a manner very similar to that of their medieval predecessors, especially when it is a matter of distinguishing between an élite and the common people, and some resemblances between political and social conditions today and in the medieval world of Islam will be drawn to try to account for this similarity and continuity.     

Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee

This article develops a framework for reading the maroon in literature, drawing on the maroon’s historical and contemporary significance in the Caribbean, as well as its continuing resonance for writers and thinkers. The maroon’s separateness or withdrawal, I argue, is characterized by a spatial distance that also engenders a challenge to the authority and temporality of the colonial regime or the apartheid state. I turn to Alejo Carpentier and J.M. Coetzee to offer readings of their novels through the lens of marronage, analyzing their protagonists’ flight, labor, and “idleness” as newly legible dimensions of resistive waiting. The strategies of marronage encourage new readings of the formulations of freedom and unfreedom, resistance and refusal in the literary texts, and create a “line of flight” between the Caribbean and South Africa.     

The Possibility of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought

While the vast scholarly fields of modern Jewish thought and modern Jewish intellectual history effectively include no texts by Jews who are of non-European origin, the domain of modern Middle Eastern intellectual history includes no writings by native Middle Eastern Jews. Aiming to help remedy this dual void, this article presents the core premises and argumentation of several pre-1936 Middle Eastern Jewish intellectuals. In filling in some of the contours and details of this rich—but significantly underexplored—history, it posits that a distinct Jewish intellectual school that unambiguously understood itself to be quintessentially Middle Eastern has been present since the beginning of European Zionism in the late nineteenth century. What contemporary scholars commonly recognise as post-1970s Mizrahi (Eastern) thought is thus better understood as an outgrowth of a Middle Eastern Jewish intellectual formation predating 1948.     

The political aspirations of Indian Muslims and the Ottoman nexus

This article introduces the story of Yusuf al-Marzuk (1895–1957), a Kuwaiti merchant who created a thriving network in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and India. This network was part of the vast, undocumented activities of Kuwaiti merchants. They were uncovered by rare British reports. Yusuf's economic power enabled him to participate in the struggle of Kuwaiti elites to achieve political power vis-à-vis the Kuwaiti rulers, the Sabah family. This article demonstrates the importance of the trading networks with respect to the economic and political developments that shaped the region before the relatively well researched oil period.     

Pleading for a place in modern Egypt: negotiating poverty and patriarchy, 1908–1913

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the petitions of a poor woman, Jalila Sa?d, who sought educational opportunities and property from the Egyptian government between 1908 and 1913. Her interest in procuring a ‘place’ for her sons and her family in modernizing Egypt reflects the ways in which non-elites were able to participate in and move within the major physical and discursive public spaces of the era. This study argues that even those at the very edges of society were not categorically marginalized; rather, they were negotiating the dominant spatial hierarchies of their time in attempts to better their circumstances. This ability to navigate and participate in the prevailing discussions and institutions of the time demonstrates that even the most marginalized elements of Egyptian society were quite integrated into the project of ‘modern Egypt’, even if they did not always reap its benefits.     

Memories,Drama and Dreamers: Proposals to Address the Representation of the Latin World in the Face of the Telenovela Crisis

The broadcast of the Latin American telenovela in the United States has been approached from many perspectives. One approach is the study of how the Latin reality is perceived through stories, themes and iconographic elements. This article analyses the different forms of representation of reality as promotors of the identification, production of mental images and memory to maintain the interest of the spectators. A series of initiatives have been proposed so that the stories are more in line with the tastes and expectations of a complex, multicultural and multigenerational audience.     

Cross-dressing and sex change stories in Spanish illustrated magazines (1928–1936)

During the 1920s and 1930s, the impression that the boundaries between the sexes were increasingly blurring was pervasive in many parts of the world. In Spain, sexual ambiguity often became the focus of public discussions on the upheaval of the traditional gender order. As part of this phenomenon, stories of cross-dressers made good copy in popular illustrated magazines such as Nuevo Mundo, Mundo Gráfico, Estampa, and Crónica, which were the top-sellers of their kind during the interwar period. By analyzing a group of cross-dressing and sex change stories from these periodicals – the way they were told and interpreted – I shed light on the ways in which the perceived fluidity of gender was constructed in a medium that reached a relative large segment of the Spanish population. The journalistic pieces I consider manifested different reactions to sexual ambiguity that ranged from the condemnatory to the matter-of-fact. Regardless, they all contributed – implicitly or explicitly – to undermine essentialist arguments underpinning the ideology of separate spheres of action for men and women. On occasion, these texts put forth an intimation, avant la lettre, of Judith Butler’s notion of the performativity of gender.     

Official Language Policies in Multilingual Societies: Evidence from the United States,South Africa,and Canada

This paper explores the resonance between Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands and McCarthy’s fifth novel Blood Meridian through a discussion of how scenes of violence are represented and rationalised in these two texts. Where Coetzee is impatient of realism and preoccupied with history as a discourse, McCarthy’s narrative seems photorealistic in its evocation of the real, but this effect is destabilised by stylised formal features and the trickster figure of Judge Holden. It is shown that in Coetzee’s egocentric protagonists the desire for detached power over others is expressed in the fantasy of an unchallenged gaze that conveys a broader anxiety about authorship and the writing of history, while in McCarthy’s text the narrator’s contextualisation of the characters’ violence against a harsh and indifferent desert environment limits psychological insight and underscores the impernanence of any historical record. Holden and Jacobus Coetzee, finally, are shown to be akin in enabling the metafictional reflections of these two novels.