How should Jewish settlers live in the new environment? This question preoccupied early Zionist professionals, seeking to employ science in the service of Jewish “acclimatization.” This article focuses on the work of a specific man of science: nutrition scholar Moshe Wilbushewich, who lived and worked in Palestine since 1924 until his death in 1952. Much of Wilbushewich’s work in the interwar period was devoted to investigating the question, how to compensate for the physical inferiority of Jewish- compared to Arab workers, through nutrition and psychotechnics. As a scholar of nutrition, he performed scientific analyses of ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian kitchen and encouraged Jewish settlers to adopt some of them to make their nutrition more adjusted to the conditions of the land, and hence more “rational.” As I show, although Zionist experts embraced an environmental approach to “revitalizing” Jewish bodies, their perceptions were nonetheless shaped by assumptions about racial difference and hierarchy– between Arabs and Jews, and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.

This article focused on the erotic encounters between male characters in the Ottoman frontier epic of the Battalname that led to conversion to Islam. It argues that these moments of eroticism between two male warriors parallel other literary and cultural expressions wherein male-male eroticism was the norm. Romantic and erotic encounters in these frontier epics have focused on the much more limited cases of female-male interactions, obscuring the fact that these were more often the exception. While male-male eroticism has been largely studied for elite literary works, narratives considered to be expressions of folktale have been treated as if they belong to separate cultural worlds. I show that some of the language of eroticism and conversion had strong parallels between the two forms of cultural expression and thus highlight the normalized all-male space of eroticism both in the Ottoman frontier and in nascent Ottoman urban culture.

Beginning in the mid-1940s, superstar Layla Murad (1918–95) mobilized her contacts with the press and used her social capital as a respected artist to formulate and publicize her account of how her father and the entire family decided she would become a professional singer. Her accounts contradicted one another, as these three statements in 1946, 1948, and 1954, respectively.

During the 1980s, Egyptian football stadiums became the stage for two strikingly different events. The first occurred during the 1982–83 season when Al Ahly team fans launched a verbal attack on Zamalek’s star player, Hassan Shehata, following the arrest of his sister-in-law, actress ʿAida Riyad, on charges of prostitution. The extensive media coverage of the case provided Al Ahly supporters with provocative material, leading to chants that questioned the fidelity of Shehata’s wife and even the paternity of his child.1 In an attempt to quell the aggressive taunts, Al Ahly’s captain at the time, Mahmud al-Khatib, made a gesture of sportsmanship by holding Shehata’s hand and walking with him toward the stands, signaling solidarity.

The Egyptian singer-composer Shaykh Imam (1918-1995) holds an almost mythical place in the social imaginary of the Arab left. An icon of dissent, he rose to fame in the late 1960s with a stream of songs commenting on current events and criticising the failings of successive political regimes. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt with fans of Imam (all of whom were involved with student / leftist politics to varying degrees during the 1960s and 1970s) and a close listening of his repertoire, explores why this generation of the Egyptian left embraced Shaykh Imam so wholeheartedly, and why they remain so attached to his songs. I argue that identifying with Shaykh Imam was not only central in bolstering leftists’ claims to be the authentic representatives of the Egyptian nation, amidst many competing claims, but importantly enabled his listeners to perform national belonging of a more intimate kind.

On June 9, 1995, several stories surfaced in al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading newspaper. A conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a scientific study on the feeling of love and its chemical connections to the brain, and a meeting in Cairo between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to discuss the prospects for peace in the Middle East were among the day’s headlines. Buried at the very back of the periodical, obituaries filled an entire page. If readers managed to reach this point in the issue, the black-and-white photographs of four compatriots likely would have caught their eye, including one image of a man wearing a cap and sunglasses. Opening with a verse of poetry, this entry’s authors, the Egyptian National Forces (al-Quwwa al-Wataniyya al-Misriyya), announced the passing of Shaykh Imam ʿIsa, “the artist of the people” (fanān al-shaʿb).1

This article follows the history of migration from the mountain villages of the Jebel Nafusa in Ottoman Trablus al-Gharb (in today’s northwestern Libya) to the southern Tunisian island of Djerba in the early 20th century. It situates this local history of migration within the broader framework of Maghribi migration both before and during the colonial era in Libya (1911–43), while tracing the histories of two categories of migrants, in particular, manual laborers and Qur’an teachers (m’addibs). The article makes three claims: (1) Nafusi migration was as much the result of local historical circumstances as it was a response to colonialism; (2) the historical experience of migration of Nafusis differed according to social class; and (3) local circumstances shaped the dynamics of migrant integration in the Maghrib. In doing so, I demonstrate how Nafusi migration to Djerba both conforms to and diverges from the larger history of late Ottoman and colonial-era migration in Tunisia. By shifting the focus away from the colonial moment, I make the case for foregrounding longer-term regional connections and migrations that linked different spaces across the Maghrib and also attend to local histories and what they offer in the way of caveats and exceptions.

This article revisits and expands on my previous research on the entanglement of state power, nationalist ideology, lingering coloniality, and heritage production in Arab music in postcolonial Cairo since the late 1960s.1 It takes into consideration the intersection of politics and elite class positionality with Arab music heritage, an “absent presence” in my previous research and in much of the literature on heritage.2 I argue that the heritagization of Arab music transformed, re-signified and (re)positioned a largely mass-mediated musical practice that was embedded in urban popular culture into a highbrow expressive domain, a discourse of privilege that conferred cultural and social capital to music, musicians, and audiences.3

This essay is part of a larger research project on the intersection of music, animals, and social class dynamics in Egypt. It draws on a fieldwork encounter that I had in Cairo in April 2022 with Salih, a horse-carriage driver, and his horse Ziko (Fig. 1). Together, they operate what is known in Egypt as ḥanṭūr (pl. ḥanāṭīr), a lightweight four-wheeled horse-carriage, which, designed with a front seat for the coachman, one or two double passenger seats in the back, and a foldable leather hood, is often rendered as the Egyptian version of the English Victoria or the Italian Botticelle. Indeed, the ḥanṭūr is widely believed to have first been introduced to Alexandria in the mid-19th century by Italian immigrants, who constituted the city’s second largest European population at that time.

Published in 2009, the edited volume Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia represents one of the most important English-language resources for the study of music’s entanglement in the workings of power and power struggles in the modern Middle East and beyond. In the introduction, the editing author and British Iranian ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin identifies three “axes of difference” that organize the production of social divisions and hierarchies in the region: (1) gender, (2) religion, and (3) nationhood.1 Class, although stated as intersecting with these categories, is not explicitly listed. This absence is illustrative of a tendency that can be observed across much of contemporary scholarship on musical cultures in Egypt and the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA)/Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, in which class is regularly mentioned but, in contrast to questions of gender, religion, and nationhood, has remained underexplored.

This study examines the transformation of the Weather Change Wedding, a seasonal ritual once performed in Isparta, a city in present-day Western Turkey. Rooted in the symbolic marriage between the son of the cold northern wind, Poyraz, and the daughter of the mild southern wind, Lodos, the ritual aimed to alter the severe weather conditions that adversely affected the town. Initially organized by male-dominated guilds, with the participation of local notables and religious institutions, the ritual gradually evolved into a performance increasingly shaped by women. However, this transformation was not merely a matter of women filling a void left by men, nor did it represent a form of substitute agency. Rather, it was the result of a historically specific process shaped by structural changes, such as the rise of women’s labor in the carpet-weaving sector and demographic shifts triggered by World War I and the War of Independence, which tipped the gender balance toward women. This transformation, however, did not emerge as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms; it took shape within a gender regime in which those very norms were being renegotiated.

The Egyptian is joyful by nature, amused by the simplest things, and laughs loudly at the slightest jest. He lifts his turban and sings along at the slightest musical note. By contrast, the Lebanese-Syrian finds Egyptian music static and out of sync with his fast-paced, modern life. He prefers Western music for its dynamism and energy, which aligns with his lifestyle.

Zakariyya Ahmad (1896–1961) is one of the most prominent composers of modern Egypt. He is remembered today for having composed numerous songs for Um Kulthum (1904–75) and other lead Egyptian singers, and for his long collaboration with the colloquial poet and political satirist Bayram al-Tunsi (1893–1961). He also had a lasting impact on Egyptian vocal music in the early 20th century, a period defined by technological innovation and changing popular tastes. Although contemporary composers such as Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1902–91) were considered “innovative” for blending traditional Arabic music with Western musical elements, Zakariyya Ahmad was counted as traditional: he remained loyal to the maqām (a system of melodic scales) while striving to preserve and develop traditional musical forms with Arabic and Egyptian aṣāla (authenticity). In addition to his musical contributions, Zakariyya Ahmad also played an important role in the Egyptian cinema, both as composer and actor. He was also a political activist, composing songs around national concerns.1