This chapter offers concluding reflections, taking readers through three intersecting vectors that run through the book. The first establishes how the segmented labour markets of the region are embedded within global structures and processes, which in turn shape domestic and regional structures and the frames through which social relations and regulations unfold. The second vector suggests three historical junctures as especially important in shaping labour trajectories in the region: (1) the partial incorporation of Omani labour and transnational Asian labouring classes into global capitalism through colonial development; (2) the wider integration of Gulf economies and labour markets into global capitalism through the expansion of the oil industry; and (3) the increasing embeddedness of the region in neoliberal capitalism. Finally, the third vector explains the liberalising and nationalising dialectic in labour governance The heterodox approach of the book offers a direction for future scholarship on the GPE of labour, demonstrating both how empirically-grounded national and regional case studies can highlight and explain global patterns, as well as how the present and future of work in local spaces are entangled within the trajectories of global capitalist development.

This chapter is concerned with recentring labour in regional development accounts and framing the claim of the book that the labour markets of Oman and the region are global. Most development accounts articulate Oman’s labour market as an object of development, a self-contained unit to be regulated and deregulated toward developmental ends. Development policy and academic discourse, in short, treat the labour market as a bounded, local space with enclosed, segmented social relations. In contrast to this development planning imaginary, this chapter argues that the labour market needs to be interpreted in global context and with a view of how regulation and relations transpire within, between, and across segmentations. The labour market is a place in which you can clearly see the outcomes of global market pressures and the competing poles for labour’s management and (de)regulation. These come from within but also outside national and regional boundaries. In combination, by looking from the bottom up, the labour market offers a space where we encounter humans in the economy and can more clearly visualise the human impact of economic transformations and choices.

Contrary to many Israelis’ self-perceptions, the Israeli population has grown significantly and is similar to modest-sized European nations. Significant numbers of recent Russian-origin immigrants are classified as ‘Jews’ by the state but not by the rabbinate and, consequently, face problems of marriage and other bureaucratic-controlled situations. Some second- and third-generation Ethiopian Israelis have been upwardly mobile while racism continues. The number of foreign workers and African refugee seekers has grown even as they are exploited. In contrast, the local gay communities are more accepted among the secular majority. Issues regarding a multicultural future are discussed.

This chapter canvasses coalitions for and against pluralism that emerged with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It shows that while the early nation-builders pursued a unitary, ethno-nationalist project, Kemalism also entailed an “embedded liberalism” inherited from late Ottoman modernization, including resources for eventual democratization. Throughout the twentieth century, political actors sought to mobilize these resources toward pluralizing the political system across a series of critical junctures (e.g., the 1920s’ cultural revolution; the 1950 transition to multiparty democracy; successive coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980; and a 1997 “postmodern coup.”) Across these junctures, the chapter argues, there were only two pronounced periods of secularist/Islamist cleavages. More often, conflict was driven by significant, cross-camp cooperation and intra-camp rivalry. Tracing when and why pluralizing and anti-pluralist alignments succeeded or failed, the chapter captures a key dynamic: the installation of an ethno(-religious nationalist project – the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) – as national project, even as ideas and actors invested in pluralization continued to mobilize.

After nationwide protests in 2013, Turkey was convulsed by a “clash of Islamisms” on the one hand, and the breakdown of a peace process between Ankara and the Kurdish movement on the other. Driven by the fraught interplay of charismatic personalities, rousing ideologies, and an increasingly unstable regional context, these processes exacerbated the turns to illiberal governance and religious populism. Two key results of these processes were (i) the Erdoğan-led AKP’s pivot to an alliance with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and (ii) a failed coup attempt on July 16, 2016. A critical juncture in the fullest sense of the word, the coup attempt led to the consolidation of the ruling alliance around a renewed version of Turkish-Islamist synthesis.

In his Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that during the Enlightenment period, under the influence of Kantian ethics and aesthetics, European intellectuals came to understand aesthetic judgment, or “taste,” as something other than “truth.” Kant, Gadamer continues, legitimated a subjective universality of aesthetic taste that was devoid of any true knowledge of the object. In doing so, he made it impossible to acknowledge the truth claims of the “human sciences.” The consequences of this move, Gadamer points out, were far-reaching, removing all bodies of knowledge not based on “natural science” methodology from the domain of objective knowledge and casting them into the realm of subjective opinion. What is important for Gadamer here is the catastrophic impact of Kant’s analysis on the veracity of ethical truth claims. For me, however, what is interesting is its implications for aesthetic judgment itself. It meant that, for instance, aesthetic judgments about good and bad music – consonance and dissonance – were no longer statements of truth and by extension, no longer scientific. Rather, consonance and dissonance – and music in general – became matters of subjective opinion. For the medieval scholars whose works I have examined in this book, however, Kantian analysis meant nothing. Free from its restrictions, they understood music to be science, and aesthetic judgments of consonance and dissonance to be valid truth claims. At the outset of this book, I posed a series of questions about medieval Islamic understandings of science. Now that I have concluded my examination, it is pertinent to provide answers to those questions.

This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

Chapter 5 starts with the definitions of the note and the acoustics of sound production. Here, I first examine the acoustical underpinnings of the classical Greek writings on the subject and the impact they had on how the musical note was conceptualized. I then demonstrate that scholars of the medieval Islamic world approached their received wisdom with a skeptical eye and occasionally disagreed with their intellectual masters. These disagreements resulted in illuminating conversations about the nature of a musical note, how it should be differentiated from mere sound, and what role do acoustics of sound production play in these discussions.

Chapter 1 will examine the ontological and epistemological questions surrounding music in the knowledge system of the medieval Islamic world by exploring the philosophical system of Ibn Sina and his later followers, all of whose works laid the foundations for scholars of music in the centuries to come. In particular, I will address how mathematics was conceptualized vis-à-vis the cosmology of the falsafa tradition as the discipline that examined the existents whose existence was dependent on physical matter but could be conceptualized without the said matter. Through this conceptualization of music and mathematics, scholars of music were able to broaden their subject matter to cover topics from the melodic modes in vogue in their time to the poetics of music. At the same time, since everything in the universe was connected to one another, music was linked with many other scientific disciplines such as astronomy and medicine.

Chapter 6 discusses the definitions of ratios and intervals as different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between musical notes. Here, the author’s main interest lies in the two different ways in which the ancient Greek scholars of music, the Pythagoreans and the Aristoxenians, conceptualized the relationship between any given two notes. While the former understood notes as equal to numbers and thus conceptualized the relationship in the form of a numerical ratio, the latter understood them as points on a continuum and thus perceived the relationship as a geometrical distance between the two points on a scale. A third group of Greek scholars, the later Neoplatonic scholars, tried to reconcile the two approaches into a synthesis. It was this synthesis that Islamic scholars inherited during the medieval period.

This chapter recaps the books framework and findings. It shows how putting the logic of complex systems into conversation with qualitative and multi-method tools enables us to read political contestation in a non-binary way. Thus, we capture the causal role of shifting coalitions for and against pluralism (understood as openness to “Others” who may look, speak, pray or love differently than we do). Applying this framework to a pivotal, Muslim-majority country, Contesting Pluralism(s) offers an alternative to Orientalist accounts of Turkey’s history and present. The conclusion then offers a roadmap for channeling the book’s original and timely approach to comparative research wherever the nexus of political religion, populist nationalism and pluralism is hotly contested from India and Italy to the United States.