When the Egyptian singer ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz passed away in 1977, a group of fans began meeting at his tomb to celebrate his memory and music. Since then, their gathering has become an annual multi-day event attracting thousands of the singer's devotees from across Egypt and the Arab world. This article explores the unique fan culture around ʿAbd al-Halim, tracing its emergence after his death and expansion into various ritual activities organized by fans. As I show, central to the affective power of Halim fandom is the sense that the singer is close and tangible. I examine how fan practices foster this feeling, but also argue that it is rooted in the music ʿAbd al-Halim made during his lifetime. Investigating Halim fandom, this article offers a new ground-level perspective of how ordinary people in the region interact with music, popular culture, and each other.

This article explores the turn to human rights of Tunisian Maoist activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many of these Tunisians later became human rights activists. I argue against prevailing views that ideological changes toward human rights in the late 1970s were the result of paradigmatic ideological shifts or the demise of socialist, anti-imperialist thinking, or an outcome of international human rights norm diffusion. Doubt or loss of faith in some or all parts of Marxism-Leninism led to a diversity of ideological transformations that were complex and hybrid. Drawing on interviews with former Tunisian Maoists, as well as on their writings, the article outlines the political and ideological environment in which they operated. It describes their solidarity work for political prisoners and explores their encounter with Amnesty International as well as the Tunisian League for Human Rights in its first years of existence, showcasing how multiple approaches to human rights existed among the activists.

Although translation and commentary are often treated as distinct, separable activities in literary and intellectual history, the Persian tradition of Qur'an exegesis demonstrates that they are best understood in relation to each other. Introducing the concept of hyper-exegesis as a mode of interpretation that approximates translation, we examine the dialectical relationship between translation and commentary by focusing on how Persian exegetes have dealt with the so-called “disjointed letters” (ḥurūf muqaṭaʿāt). The disjointed letters inaugurate twenty-nine chapters (sūras) of the Qur'an. We show how six Persian translator-exegetes (the anonymous author of Tarjama-yi Tafsir-I Tabari, Isfarayini, Surabadi, Nasafi, Maybudi, and Razi) used commentary in response to their understanding of the Qur'an's inimitability. Persian translators’ confrontation with the disjointed letters are presented here as a case study of the ways in which translatability and commentary overlap and enrich each other. As a contribution to translation studies and literary theory, this research reveals how untranslatability is situated at the core of the translational enterprise, and how commentary functions as a mode of translating the ineffable.

In the mid-16th century, the Ottoman government sought to expand its tax revenue from Egypt through a controversial initiative to levy taxes on endowments (waqf). The controversy produced a diverse range of responses from Ottoman scholar-bureaucrats, such as Ebussuud Efendi, who supported the initiative; Egyptian scholars, including Ibn Nujaym and al-Ghayti, who opposed it; and the Ottoman governor, who worked to resolve it. Despite the opposing positions of the diverse actors, shariʿa served as the common medium for the articulation and negotiation of their opinions and helped produce a compromise that became foundational for the Ottoman tax regime in Egypt. In this episode, shariʿa constituted an instrument of governance. Such a role for shariʿa differs from its conception as an autonomous field of scholarly interpretation, or the understanding of it as an inclusive normative system encompassing rules emerging from both the interpretative activities of scholars and the definitive edicts and orders of rulers. Shariʿa did not constitute the endpoint of rulemaking; rather, it provided the shared language of terms and concepts through which different actors participated in the process of formulating rules.

The Ottoman state and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople during the mid-19th-century Tanzimat reform era relied on ethno-confessional and gendered differences, new administrative organization, and coercive institutions like the police to centralize and expand their power. Yet Armenian men and women used those same tools of power to seek justice in ways that created instances of disorder for their families, local community, the church, and the Ottoman state. Attending to the voices and experiences of Armenians through untapped petitions from Erzurum, Mush, and Van, this article highlights the ways in which provincial Armenians interacted with and navigated their diverse ethno-confessional milieus.

On November 21, 1914, Ahmed Cemal Pasha departed Istanbul's Haydarpaşa railway station for Damascus. A few weeks prior to his departure—after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary on October 29—Enver Pasha, the minister of war, invited Cemal Pasha to his mansion. At this meeting, Enver Pasha requested that Cemal Pasha, who was then minister of the navy, take up the post of governor-general of the Greater Syrian provinces and assume command of the Fourth Army. Cemal Pasha enthusiastically accepted Enver Pasha's offer to, in his words, “prepare for and carry out an attack on the (Suez) Canal, and also to maintain security and internal order in (Greater) Syria.”1 He secured his existing ministerial post in addition to gaining full authority as the commander of the Fourth Army and governor of the Greater Syrian provinces. Before his train departed from Haydarpaşa, Cemal Pasha addressed the crowd who had gathered there to see him, describing his mission as the “divine but extraordinarily difficult” duty of “saving Egypt from British invaders.”2

This roundtable explores how recent social and political upheavals in Turkey have impacted ethnographic research in and about the region. We propose that an analysis of ethnographers’ experiences in contexts of disruption and uncertainty can offer important insights into both research methodologies and contemporary politics and society in Turkey. The past twenty years have been a time of transformation and, arguably, disruption in the Republic of Turkey. In 2003, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) rose to power under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As the following decade heralded a period of rapid economic growth and development, social and political changes also began to reshape institutions in consequential ways. In 2008, top military leaders were charged with participating in a conspiratorial deep state in what would come to be known as the Ergenekon trials. While these prosecutions were framed by the ruling party as critical to securing democratic governance in Turkey, they also marked a turning point in the AKP's efforts to secure and consolidate its hold on the state. After the AKP won its third general election in 2011, their efforts to consolidate power grew, and over the following decade Turkey would devolve from being recognized as a model Middle Eastern democracy to an illiberal democracy and finally an authoritarian regime. This political transformation was punctuated by key events, from the 2013 Gezi Park protests and the attempted coup of July 2016 to the resumption of armed conflict with the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê PKK) in 2015 and the government's crackdown on Academics for Peace.

When researchers think of access disruptions, they tend to think of factors exogenous to a field site, those emerging from nationwide events or global crises. Especially in semiauthoritarian contexts, such as Turkey, where ongoing historical contestations (over human rights, minority rights, and freedom of expression) as well as current political polarizations have created a volatile institutional and social environment, ethnographers are more likely to find their fieldwork disrupted. In this essay, I draw attention to a different kind of disruption, one that arises from the endogenous character of the local field site. In particular, I discuss the impact of low interpersonal trust on fieldwork. While gaining access and establishing trust are universal challenges in ethnographic research, the issue is particularly a formidable one in Turkey.

What is ethnography in times of war? How does war shape the conditions and possibilities of ethnographic research? How do the exigencies of daily life in a war zone ultimately prescribe and restrict what kinds of research can be done? In the following essay, I reflect on my experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Turkey in unexpected wartime conditions. During the two years that I spent in the field, a series of local and national crises disrupted a fragile peace that had lasted for the previous few years. Confronted with disaster after disaster, I was continually compelled to reevaluate my project—interrogating my research questions, changing my research methods, and assessing whether I would be able to continue my research at all. The war defined my time in the field and dictated the possibilities and limitations of the work that I was able to do. While I had planned to examine earlier histories of violence, ultimately the contemporaneous war and its effects on daily life, the politics of memory, and the landscape became a central focus of my fieldwork.

What is perceived today as “living in an unknown moment” with global pandemics and ecological disasters has long become the “new normal” that structures everyday life at the margins of Europe and the Middle East, particularly in places with rising authoritarian regimes. As scholars working in and on Turkey, for instance, we have witnessed or experienced firsthand several moments of crisis over the recent years. We have seen the collapse of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane; PKK) in 2015 and the resulting surge in state violence in Turkey's Kurdistan, the 2016 coup attempt against the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) government by the Gülen movement, and the long-standing suppression, criminalization, and incarceration of dissent affecting, among others, students, politicians, journalists, and academics. These divergent yet interlinked moments of crisis have reshaped and often complicated, if not completely stopped, our research as ethnographers of Turkey. These moments of crisis have also pushed us to develop creative strategies and analytics to continue our fieldwork and provided opportunities to hone our research questions and methodologies in more nuanced ways.

Any fieldwork is inherently filled with tension arising from two fundamental yet conflicting obligations: first, the need to treat the field as an already constituted research object, and second, the requirement to continuously reframe, remake, or essentially reconstitute this object during the fieldwork. This double bind places the fieldworker in a blurred position, navigating between the certainty of the former and the uncertainty of the latter. My fieldwork on Istanbul's private security market in Turkey was no exception. While approaching the market as an already constituted research object, I also had to cartographically unfold it as I explored it. My research specifically examined how security, as a peculiar good and service, was translated into a market object in Turkey's private security industry. Despite its relatively recent emergence in 2004, the industry has experienced tremendous growth. By 2019, 1.6 million people had completed private security training, 1.1 million had obtained licenses, and around 320,000 were actively employed in the industry. This translates to nearly 3 in every 100 working-age individuals being trained, almost 2 in 100 licensed, and 1 in 200 working as private security guards.

In a seminal essay, Lila Abu-Lughod addresses “The Romance of Resistance,” suggesting that widespread scholarly interest in unlikely and quotidian forms of resistance is romanticizing. Rather than identifying resistance as proof of the ineffectiveness of systems of power, she contends that scholars might more productively consider how resistance is embedded in, and can serve as a diagnostic of, power. Writing in a Foucauldian vein, she reminds “where there is resistance, there is power.” If Abu-Lughod cautions against romanticizing resistance, in this response I take up a similarly critical stance toward disruption. Following Abu-Lughod's formula and drawing on my own experience as an ethnographer of music and sound in Turkish modernity, I suggest that where there is disruption, there is order, and that disruption might therefore become a site for diagnosis of order.

When I entered graduate school in September 2016, Turkey was mired in a series of successive crises. I had spent the first half of the year living in Istanbul, writing about the country's reception of Syrian refugees as a journalist and researcher. During that stretch, a series of suicide bombings and, in my last week in the country, an attempted coup, were formative for the way I made sense of future fieldwork in Turkey. I surmised that it would be wrought with unpredictability. My research interest in Syrian refugees’ access to Turkey's state services was itself marked by uncertainty. This uncertainty was tied to the nature of Syrians’ explicitly temporary legal status within Turkey and the broader domestic and geopolitical context that shaped the contours of Turkey's refugee policy. Given these layers of unpredictability both endogenous and exogenous to my research interest, I planned to design my research with uncertainty as an analytical focus.