This issue is focused on reframing analytical categories in ways different from how scholars have used them, and mechanisms of power in juxtaposition to how states intended them. We open with two articles on “Reading in Translation.” Anne-Marie E. McManus's “Scale in the Balance: Reading with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (‘The Arabic Booker’)” focuses on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, or IPAF. Founded in 2007 with funding from Dubai and based on the more well-known Man Booker Prize, the IPAF is awarded to one Arabic novel each year. The prize supports that novel's translation into English and catapults it from the national domain into a global marketplace of readers whose reading practices, McManus suggests, have already been shaped by the postcolonial Anglophone novel. Arguing that methods inherited from postcolonial studies are inadequate for addressing these modes of reading and interpretation (i.e., the national and the global), McManus develops a comparative “scale-based method” combining insights from postcolonial and world literary theory and from area studies, which she brings to bear on two IPAF-winning Egyptian novels: Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis) and Saud Alsanousi’s Saq al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk). In her analysis of these literary works, McManus shows us why “a stark either/or between national and world literary frames . . . cannot apprehend the ways in which a movement between them is institutionalized in bodies such as the IPAF, nor can it grapple with the implications for reading.” “Reading with the IPAF,” she suggests, requires instead “a resituation of national frames, institutionally and hermeneutically, within the nodal relation the IPAF represents.”

This article brings area studies approaches to Arabic novels into dialogue with world literature through a critical engagement with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize launches Arabic novels out of national fields and into a world marketplace whose reading practices have been shaped by the Anglophone postcolonial novel, canonized by the IPAF's mentor: the Booker Prize Foundation. Against this institutional backdrop, the article develops a scale-based method to revisit the intersection of postcolonial tropes and national epistemologies in two winning IPAF novels: Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis, 2007) and Saud Alsanousi's Saq al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk, 2013). By interrogating the literary and political work performed by comparative scale in these novels, the article argues that dominant applications of theoretical methods inherited from postcolonial studies fail to supply trenchant forms of critique for Arabic novels entering world literature. Bridging the methods and perspectives of area studies with those of comparative literature, this article develops new reading practices that are inflected through contemporary institutional settings for literature's circulation, translation, and canonization.

In 1970, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center in Beirut published an Arabic translation of The Zionist Idea, an anthology of classic Zionist texts compiled originally by Arthur Hertzberg in 1959. This article compares how the two versions present the biographies and motivations of key Zionist ideologues. It suggests that, in contrast to Hertzberg, the PLO researchers tended to present Zionism, especially at its roots, as a Jewish religious movement. Attempting to discern what might lie behind this conception of Zionism, the article considers the significance of the religious backgrounds of the leadership of the PLO Research Center and of those involved in the translation project. It argues that the researchers’ concern about the status of Christians as a religious minority among Palestinians and other Arabs and certain deeply rooted Christian ideas about the nature of Judaism may help account for the particular view of Zionism that the Research Center developed in its—and in the PLO's—foundational years.

Similar to ruling elites in Western Europe, the Ottomans were preoccupied with foreign “public opinion” regarding their state. Historians have devoted attention to Ottoman state efforts at image building abroad and, to a lesser degree, related attempts to influence the European mass press. Yet, an in-depth study of this subject is lacking. This article turns to one of the prime, though largely neglected, actors in Ottoman foreign policy making: the sultan's diplomats. Through a case study of Ottoman envoys to Belgium, it demonstrates how foreign “press management” evolved and was adapted to shifting domestic and international political circumstances. Increasingly systematic attempts to influence Belgian newspapers can be discerned from the reign of Abdülhamid II onward. Brokers between Istanbul and “liberal” Belgium's thriving newspaper business, Ottoman diplomats proved essential to this development. Ultimately, however, Ottoman efforts to counter Belgian (and European) news coverage of the empire had little impact and occasionally even worked counterproductively, generating the very Orientalist images they aimed to combat in the first place.

This article traces the emergence of the early afternoon ẓuhr prayer as a key project of subject formation during the second half of the Anwar al-Sadat period (1976–81). Drawing on three Islamic magazines of differing ideological orientation (Muslim Brotherhood-Islamist, Salafi-Islamist, and state-sponsored), all containing letters to the editor and fatwa requests, it charts contestation among religious elites and the reception of their programmatic visions. Specifically, the article explores the performance of this daily prayer as a hybrid practice that disrupted the temporal and spatial claims of a state-sponsored bureaucratic order to produce national subjects within public schools and bureaucratic institutions, even as it reproduced the state's emphasis on temporal precision and social order. Based on these texts, this article challenges previous scholarly narratives that place Islamist projects of subject formation on the fringes of secularism and previous studies of Islamist mobilization that posit a separate social universe of Islamist activism.

This article adopts the theoretical framework of complex realism to trace the evolution of the Islamic Republic of Iran's foreign policy and developmental activities in Africa between the 1980s and the 2000s. Contrary to common assumptions, the deradicalization of the Islamic Republic's foreign policy in Africa began not under the moderates in the early 1990s, but under the conservatives in the mid-1980s. This period marked the first time that the Islamic Republic instrumentalized development to advance its strategic interests in Africa—a policy that has continued despite the factionalization of Iran's political elite. Based on one year of archival research and interviews in Iran, this article is the first to investigate the history and activities of the Islamic Republic's rural development organization, Construction Jihad, in Africa. It posits that development, instead of arms or ideology, has enabled Iran to make the farthest inroads into the continent due to Africa's sizeable agrarian economies, widespread rural poverty, and formidable developmental challenges.

During the Iraqi refugee crisis of 2007–10, international humanitarian organizations appeared for the first time in the Syrian domestic arena. These aid providers interpreted the position of Iraqi refugees in Syria according to a liberal conception of state–citizen relations that did not accord with the Syrian government's actual approach to Iraqis. Guided by this liberal frame, humanitarian organizations introduced biopolitical programs into the Syrian domestic context. Through new forms of population management, they solicited forms of behavior from Iraqis that were different from those required by Syrian state authorities. Drawing on the concept of biopower and using ethnographic material drawn from long-term research in Damascus in 2009–10, this article sheds light on an important political development in Syria shortly before the outbreak of social unrest and on the social changes that international humanitarian aid may transport.

The study of human rights has gone through many phases, and the boom in the scholarly industry of human rights studies has yielded many subspecialties, including human rights in particular regions and the intersections of human rights with different religious traditions. One principal area of discussion likely to be of interest to readers of this journal has been the question of Muslim women's human rights and the role of religion in this respect. The problem was often presented as primarily an ideological one, a conflict between a local tradition, Islam, and the global demands for human rights.

The preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes a peculiar hierarchy between rebellion and human rights. The preamble affirms that “whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.” According to the declaration, rebellion against oppression and tyranny is an act that individuals can only be compelled to pursue, and only once other choices are exhausted. Rebellion descends upon the oppressed “man” from without and he cannot refuse it. It is a force that takes over desperate men. Human rights, in turn, police against rebellion by prevailing in the law. They are the preferred weapon against two extremes: oppression and rebellion. And if rebellion is the space of compelled political action, human rights is the space of uncompelled, free, and authentic action against oppression and tyranny.

Dominant narratives of the Eastern Mediterranean's 20th century exclude the study of Western humanitarianism and refugee survivors of the 1915 genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. Reasons for this exclusion abound. At the forefront is the abject nature of the human beings who populate that history, something which often induces revulsion on the part of historians in the present: these were people who left little of the appealing and elegant traces left by a Beiruti journalist, a Damascene urban notable, or an elite Constantinopolitan feminist. They appear as an undifferentiated mass of survivors of intense violence, disease, and starvation who are bereft of any agency; slaves, and serially raped and pregnant teenagers in bureaucratic documents stored at the League of Nations archive or packs of feral emaciated street children roving the narrow alleyways of Aleppo's old city in the paternalistic memoirs of Western relief workers—usually American or Scandinavian female healthcare professionals. Their own voices are obscured, showing up in the occasional self-published autobiography written by an elderly genocide survivor for his grandchildren, or in handwritten accounts and letters in lost dialects inherited by descendants unable to read them.

With a more than sixty-seven-year displacement, the Palestinian refugee case is an extreme instance of a widespread phenomenon: the need for humanitarian organizations that are oriented toward emergency to respond to circumstances that are “protracted.” Humanitarian practice does change as needs on the ground change, but long-term need and displacement poses both definitional and practical challenges for this work. The broad trajectory of Palestinian refugee experience has moved from “crisis” to chronic needs—what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “cruddy” conditions. Povinelli specifically contrasts suffering that is “catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” with that which is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy.” Palestinians share experiences of poverty and immobility with others around the world who are part of what is sometimes referred to as the “precariat.” It is this sort of suffering, which often persists below the threshold of an “event,” that Povinelli terms cruddy.

As I write, the Syrian migrant crisis is boiling over and the Arctic Circle has become the latest precarious route desperate Syrian refugees are braving in their pursuit of security and shelter. A young Syrian woman is interviewed on the Norwegian evening news. Earlier this year other members of her family had fled to Germany. She stayed in Syria, waiting to hear from them before setting out herself. When she finally managed to get a call through to her family, they recounted the humiliating agonies they had endured on their journey through Turkey and advised her to find another route. She decided to take the new migration route to Europe, the safer and less expensive Arctic route, as far as possible from the horrors of war. She doesn't go into the details of her long journey, other than to say that she has been hungry for a couple of years, often dizzy from hunger. As she is interviewed in the polar night, she stands in front of a building decorated with Christmas lights, a Bethlehem star in each of the windows, skinny pines covered in frost in the background, snow on the ground: “I don't mind that my ears are frozen and that I can see my breath. I want to be safe and have a dignified life. Get a proper education, work, and be able to feed myself.” The camera shows other Syrian families with young children, single men and women, and girls and boys, traveling alone. Volunteers from the “Refugees Welcome to Norway” (RWTN) association distribute warm clothes, nappies, prams, toys, coffee, tea, sandwiches, and traditional Christmas cakes.

The term humanitarianism finds its roots in 19th-century Europe and is generally defined as the “impartial, neutral, and independent provision of relief to victims of conflict and natural disasters.” Behind this definition lies a dynamic history. According to political scientists Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, this history can be divided into three phases. From the 19th century to World War II, humanitarianism was a reaction to the perceived breakdown of society and the emergence of moral ills caused by rapid industrialization within Europe. The era between World War II and the 1990s saw the emergence of many of today's nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations. These organizations sought to address the suffering caused by World War I and World War II, but also turned their gaze toward the non-Western world, which was in the process of decolonization. The third phase began in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, and witnessed an expansion of humanitarianism. One characteristic of this expansion is the increasing prominence of states, regional organizations, and the United Nations in the field of humanitarian action. Their increased prominence has been paralleled by a growing linkage between humanitarian concerns and the issue of state, regional, and global security. Is it possible that, in the 21st century, humanitarianism is entering a new (fourth) phase? And, if so, what role have events in the Middle East played in ushering it in? I seek to answer these questions by focusing on regional consultations that took place between June 2014 and July 2015 in preparation for the first ever World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), scheduled to take place in Istanbul in May 2016.