ABSTRACT This article examines the concept of co-governance in the context of reforestation in post-war Lebanon. Specifically, it considers this concept in relation to the Lebanon Reforestation Initiative (LRI). Co-governance arrangements are understudied in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, let alone in Lebanon where environmental impacts from climate change and unregulated development are having significant effects. The article highlights the significance of co-governance to the LRI’s reforestation operations and conceptually sheds light on the many simultaneously moving parts and expertise that must be deployed if Lebanon is to bring back its forests, including those of the emblematic cedar.

ABSTRACT The history of Christian missionary activity in the Middle East is vast and rich, informing the development of European domination over the Ottoman Empire and the colonial expansions of the twentieth century from Egypt to Iraq. But on the tip of such long-term and geographically expansive narratives always stood the very human subjects whose lives were transformed by encounters with missionaries. These stories call upon historians to be scrutinised in their local and period-specific contexts and to reveal how religious conversions, and the forms of resisting them, were experienced and understood by societies living through them. This article offers a microhistory of a forgotten and seemingly insignificant story of the conversion of a young Muslim man that occurred in 1931 in the city of Gaza, southern Palestine. A nationwide scandal at first, the story had sunk into oblivion within several years, overshadowed by the fateful history of mandate Palestine and Gaza in particular. However, if microhistories intentionally aim to extract the meaning of past lifeworlds from the mundane and forsaken, the conversion of ‘Ali al-Khilfawi emerges to be quite telling. By recounting contemporary ways of making sense of this event, the article suggests three arguments that refute the common understanding of conversion as a manifestation of inter-religious struggle. Gazans, and Palestinians writ large, were not seeing conversion this way. Instead, Gazans understood conversion as a result of specific political circumstances and personal choices, rather than as a direct consequence of the mission itself. Secondly, while the mission is often taken to be an arm of colonialism, in protesting against conversion, Gazans utilised the very language and regulations introduced by the British government. These were means of curbing and criminalising the Palestinian struggle against Zionism and imperial rule. By using them, Gazans utilised a colonial instrument against itself. And finally, if the conversion of a Muslim man could have been an opening for sectarian strife, the Palestinian understanding of religious struggle tended to be within one’s own religion, and in this case, within Christianity rather than versus Muslims.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the discursive construction of secular martyrdom in contemporary Arab discourse by analysing 215 Arabic public martyr texts in which martyrdom was used in non-religious contexts. Theoretically grounded in notions of memory [Castelli, E., 2004. Martyrdom and memory. New York: Columbia University Press] and embodied martyrdom [DeSoucey, M., et al., 2008. Memory and sacrifice: An embodied theory of martyrdom. Cultural sociology, 2 (1), 99–121]. The analysis shows that Arab secular martyrdom is employed to memorialise people who lost their lives as a result of political assassination, while performing a public duty or expressing dissenting political views, or who were victims of tragic disasters or killed as journalists while covering conflicts. These secular martyrs are discursively constructed as victims of oppression, injustice or bureaucratic failure and neglect. While religious references are used in these texts, they can be seen as formulaic expressions that do not confer religious meanings upon the martyrdom event. However, their use points to the fluidity of martyrdom within the religious-secular dichotomy and the non-fixity of this binary. The discursive construction of Arab secular martyrdom offers support to a theoretical conceptualisation of secular martyrdom in terms of collective memory, sacrifice, victimhood and bodily suffering.

ABSTRACT While the Ahli Arab Hospital of Gaza – formerly the CMS Mission hospital – has been the focus of public attention due to the 17 October 2023 explosion on its premises and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, less attention has been given to its history. Very little information is publicly available. This article addresses that gap, aiming to bring texture, nuance and depth to contemporary discussions. Taking a narrative approach, this article poses two questions: first, how did the social, political and religious contexts of the hospital’s founding period shape its identity and role in the community? Second, how did it fare in World War I and the political transition that followed it? This article argues that Anglican Missionaries from the Church Mission Society (CMS) established the hospital in 1881 with the motivation and inspiration of their evangelical faith. After facing resistance from the local population, the missionaries won people’s trust through medical service. Their work was boosted after local leaders gave their endorsements and British imperial agents offered support. The situation changed rapidly, however, during World War I and the Ottoman entry into the war on the German side. The missionaries were expelled and the hospital was closed and eventually destroyed. Yet, after British victory, the missionaries were granted permission to resume services and rebuild the hospital.

ABSTRACT This article explores the struggles over Ottoman sovereignty in Yemen from the October 1918 armistice to the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in October 1923. The governor-general (vali), Mahmud Nedim, and Imam Yahya, the principal local ally of the Ottomans, succeeded in upholding Ottoman sovereignty over most of highland Yemen against the Armistice terms, the Treaty of Sèvres, and their local and British rivals, while receiving the political backing of the Ottoman resistance movement in Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal. Efforts of the vali, the imam, and the British to prevent ordinary Ottomans from leaving and entering Yemen were at the centre of these struggles. This changed in 1923 when Mustafa Kemal and Yahya turned to state-building projects emphasising post-Ottoman forms of sovereignty. I thus highlight several aspects of ordinariness. First, the continuation of daily governmental routines in Yemen was a key element of Ottoman efforts to resist British attempts to impose a post-Ottoman political order. Further, Yemeni Ottomans and Ottoman officials were reduced to different degrees of ordinariness because the disintegration of the Ottoman state after the war often eliminated their sources of income. Finally, struggles against the consequences of the Armistice are often reduced to a ‘Turkish War of Independence’ and the actions of policy makers in administrative centres, like Istanbul and Ankara. Studying the end of the Ottoman Empire from the vantage points of Yemen’s ‘spatial ordinariness’ as an imperial borderland and of ordinary Ottomans disrupts this ‘methodological nationalism’ and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the post-Armistice years.

ABSTRACT In the Middle East, as elsewhere, the protracted transition from empire to nation-state was accompanied by a brutal tide of ethnoreligious homogenisation. One of the more dramatic examples was the destruction of the Arab world’s millennia-old Jewish communities. While this destruction is often discussed only in reference to the creation of the State of Israel, this article proposes a complementary model for understanding it, a model predicated on these Jews’ status as ordinary, not exceptional, inhabitants of the Ottoman world, and the disruption caused by the end of the Ottoman empire and its replacement with European colonial rule. Using interwar Aleppo as a case study, this article demonstrates how the end of the Ottoman system of religious communities led to an extended period of dysfunction for Aleppo’s Jewish communal institutions. Under the French Mandate, this dysfunction left Aleppo’s Jews unable to contend with a succession of crises, including a three-way competition for the community’s loyalty between French administrators, Arab nationalists and the Zionist movement. This dysfunction set the stage for the community’s terminal crisis – the 1947 pogroms.

ABSTRACT Relying on a biographical approach that reconstructs the life and work of Johannes [Hovhanness/Յովհաննէս] Jakob [Hagop/Յակոբ] Manissadjian [Manisacıyan/Մանիսաճեան] (1862–1942), a highly successful scientist at the Anatolia College (Merzifon/Marsovan/Մարզվան), who established a meteorological station and a natural history museum with an extensive collection of specimens, the paper traces the routes of disappearance, dispersal and ruination of indigenous lives, people, and knowledge within the context of the Armenian genocide. Drawing on documents from Ottoman, German, and American archives, I stress the potential of biographical methods to study the processes and structures of mass violence targeting the Ottoman Armenians, as well as to foreground the agency and subjectivity of genocide survivors. The article also focuses on post-genocide scientific (dis)engagements of Manissadjian in light of Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘after Auschwitz’ discussions and from the perspective of indigenous knowledge production. In particular, his two ‘archival acts’ in the post-genocide context, the ‘Catalogue’ of the collection of the Anatolia College Museum that he prepared as ‘the former Curator’ and his small pamphlet entitled Proverbs of Turkey, which provided an ethnographic portrait of Anatolia, were his humble acts of saving a treasure trove of knowledge that was in danger of becoming debris.

ABSTRACT While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has been no attempt to retrieve and assess the work of Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), author of two remarkable English-language novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987). Exploring and contextualising Antonius’s contribution to this literary corpus, this article examines the cultural, political and linguistic forces shaping her writings. It begins by tracing the fusion of Anglophile mimicry and anti-colonial resistance typical of her parents – George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening (1938) and Katy Antonius, Mandatory Jerusalem’s leading socialite. While her parents funnelled their Levantine-cosmopolitan options into a distinctive Palestinian identity, the Nakba compelled their daughter to take the opposite trajectory, leaving Palestine to pursue cosmopolitan possibilities elsewhere. The article’s second section thus considers her work in 1960s and 1970s Beirut, first as a journalist and editor, committed to developing a critical discourse on Western Orientalism, and subsequently as an activist and spokesperson, advocating the Palestinian cause. Probing how these biographical and professional strands shaped her fiction, the final section demonstrates how the first novel’s Anglophile fascination with the coloniser’s mindset is replaced, in the second novel, with a decided focus on Palestinians’ perspectives. Echoing Albert Hourani’s critique of the ‘Politics of Notables’, Where the Jinn Consult thus offers a loving yet bitter account of her parents’ generation, complacent and ineffectual in the face of looming catastrophe.