This issue centers on two predominant themes: space, boundaries, and belonging from the end of empire to the early nation-state era; and the relationship between political discourse, political praxis, and values. The first section, “Belonging, Boundaries, and Law,” opens with Asher Kaufman's article, “Belonging and Continuity: Israeli Druze and Lebanon, 1982–2000,” on the spatial perceptions and practices of communities in the Middle East under the nation-state. Kaufman observes that only over the past few decades have scholars of the post–World War I order in the region begun to question “the ‘nation-state’ as the natural geographical and political unit of analysis.” Using Druze citizens of Israel before, during, and after Israel's occupation of South Lebanon as his case, he readjusts the lens toward substate, suprastate, and trans-state dynamics. Until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Druze communal and religious networks had spanned the whole of bilād al-shām, but these were radically interrupted by Israel's emergence as a bounded polity whose borders with its neighbors were reputedly sealed. This rupture precipitated the emergence of an Israeli Druze community that, isolated from broader Druze communal life and institutional frames, was expected to be loyal to the new state. Eschewing a national frame, Kaufman reveals how Druze, despite these obstacles, actually maintained “crossborder ties through marriage, licit and illicit trade, and religious practices.” Paradoxically, it was Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its eighteen-year occupation of the South that allowed for a resumption of pre-1948 spatial practices, though these were complicated by Israeli Druze's multiple and sometimes conflicting allegiances. Such practices, restricted again after the Israeli withdrawal of 2000, continued in limited fashion until the start of the Syrian Civil War, which has propelled Israeli Druze to organize politically in support of Druze in Syria. Observing that the Druze continue to live in state and suprastate spatial scales, Kaufman proposes “using the concept ‘hybrid spatial scale’ as a tool for studying communities such as the Druze that operate on multiple territorial scales.”

This article analyzes spatial perceptions and practices of Druze citizens of Israel before, during, and after the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in 1982−2000. It argues that the opening of the Israel–Lebanon border in 1982 and its closing in 2000 had three effects: it generated internal social, political, and cultural changes within the community in Israel; it changed the relationship of the Druze with the State of Israel; and it reestablished strong ties with their coreligionists in Lebanon and Syria. Drawing insight from the field of border studies, the article shows how Druze citizens of Israel live concomitantly in state and suprastate spatial scales, forming a third, integrated or hybrid, spatial scale. The article proposes using the concept “hybrid spatial scale” as a tool for studying communities such as the Druze that operate on multiple territorial scales.

In 1919, a new amir in Afghanistan named Aman Allah Khan launched an ambitious campaign to reorder his government into a constitutional monarchy. By 1923, Afghanistan had ratified its first constitution, supplemented by scores of legal and administrative codes. Whereas the latter have long been attributed to European borrowings or Kemalist imitation, this article uncovers two neglected features of Aman Allah's reformist project to argue that the making of Afghanistan's 1923 Constitution presents a distinctive path of state building in the region: Islamic legal modernism. First, by upholding the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence as the basis of Afghan substantive law, Amir Aman Allah sought a cohesive national judiciary through the codification of fiqh, not European civil law. Second, by synthesizing the expertise of a diverse cast of Muslim scholars and professionals—from Afghan clerics to Ottoman and Indian technocrats recruited to Kabul—he attempted to avert a rift between “Islamic” and “secular” lawmaking.

This article examines the impact of the Ottoman Empire's battle against legal imperialism on the status of Central Asians in its domains, specifically after the promulgation of a nationality law in 1869 that classified them as foreigners. It traces how the threat of Muslim colonial subjects attaining European consular protections led to the emergence of a “Central Asian protection question”: whether Afghans, Bukharans, and Chinese Muslims had legitimate claims to European legal nationality and, by extension, capitulatory privileges. Through a number of case studies, the article shows how the Ottoman Foreign Ministry fused international legal norms and pan-Islamic claims to arrive at the position that Central Asians from informally colonized lands were not “real” subjects of European empires, and that they were under the exclusive protection of the caliphate. This strategy, I argue, undermined the creation of an Ottoman citizenship boundary and opened up a complex field of inter- and intraimperial contestation about who was a foreigner. In contrast to positive associations with legal pluralism in this period, Central Asian migrants and pilgrims who were protected by the caliph but not recognized as Ottomans or European subjects found that they could not benefit from practices such as forum shopping and affiliation switching. And while the notion of foreignness remained subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations across the empire, I argue that nationality as a legal category was incontrovertibly becoming a defining feature of these foreign Muslims' rights and status in the sultan's domains.

Concerns about lying and sincerity in politics are common in most societies, as are concerns about conspiracy theories. But in the occupied Palestinian territory, these concerns give rise to particular kinds of effects because of the conditions of Israeli occupation. Political theorists often interpret opacity claims and conspiracy theories as responses to social disorder. In occupied Palestine, disorder and instability are standard. Opacity claims and conspiracy theories therefore require a different kind of analysis. Through an examination of the semiotic ideology of sincerity, especially as it has emerged in the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, this article argues that opacity claims act as a form of nationalist pedagogy, at once reinforcing the basic principles of sincerity of action and word, and encouraging a wariness of political spin.

Do public policy debates between activists from different ideological camps in a nondemocratic and illiberal system bridge social divisions or deepen them? Focusing on three controversies regarding family law in Jordan, we argue that activist groups rarely talk to each other in public, and when they do, their discourses aim primarily at mobilizing support within their own camps rather than addressing each other's concerns. Through media analysis, discourse analysis, and in-depth field interviews, we find much polarization and few attempts to build bridges, but also limited though very suggestive exceptions. Those exceptions rely less on public and democratic mechanisms and more on entrepreneurial state actors working quietly, talking opportunistically to each side, and emerging as powerful institutional actors. Authoritarian states can provide sites of deliberation, but deliberation seems to lead to principled agreement beyond the platitudinous only when an institutional actor within the state takes the initiative to get involved.

Maritime history has grown exponentially in recent years. Seen as a remedy to the ideological straightjackets of nation-state and area studies paradigms associated with modernization theory, a methodological orientation towards the sea offers the historian the advantages of an interactive transnational approach, and places matters of the environment and material culture before stories of kings and battles. Crucially, it focuses on flows, routes, mobility, and exchange rather than fixed identities and linear trajectories.

I first encountered the Indian Ocean on the shores of Makran. I thought I was at land's end, Asia's edge. The ocean hadn't entered my thoughts except as non plus ultra, an ending void. The map said Baluchistan, and I had come to find the Baluch. But I soon found Africans and Zikris, palm-frond huts and Omani passports, old soldiers (or mercenaries) from an overseas foreign legion and smugglers of whiskey, opium, and pharmaceuticals. Now China has built a port there; then, less than twenty years ago, they were still making dhows, subtle smuggling ships. Yet it was far from romantic. It was a rough and hard place where traders and fishers eked a marginal existence from the watery edge of a dust-powder desert. Karachi was thirty-six hours by bus then truck. But Pakistan was an abstract and suspect idea; locals talked more of Muscat. A year or two later, in the Tihama of Yemen, I watched as boatloads of Africans (refugees? job hunters? all men at any rate) ran ashore through the surf. My Arab colleagues, all from the highlands, said they arrived every day, and spoke ill of them. A while after that, in Muscat, I listened with curiosity to Arabic laced with Urdu (or was it Hindi, or Gujarati? They were just nouns, Wanderwörter: terms that travel). In Iran, it was different sounds of the ocean I heard when urban friends gave me tapes of bandarī, the music of the ports.

In 1762, a ghost ship appeared off the Tunisian coast between Tabarka and Bizerte during the spring equinox, notorious for treacherous weather. According to a local chronicler: “Perceived in the distance was a ship with masts but no flag flying that approached the shore, then drew away. It was the month of April [1762] and unusually cold . . . the next morning, we saw the vessel veer toward land while a violent tempest raged.” Wrecked on the rocky shoreline, it funneled unimaginable wealth to pastoralists, villagers, and scavengers from far and wide. The ship proved to be without passengers or crew whose fate remains unknown until this day.

There are few figures as universally beloved and yet recognizably “Middle Eastern” as Sindbad. The text of Sindbad's seven voyages travel easily across continents and languages and many of the tales blur imperceptibly into those of Homer's The Odyssey and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Yet this swashbuckling adventurer is also firmly situated in the world of Abbasid Iraq and the Indian Ocean world. Sindbad is clearly identified as a good Muslim and respected Baghdadi merchant, and while fantastical, there are recognizable geographic and cultural markers that locate his voyages within the Indian Ocean world. This iconic character of Arab popular culture pushes us to contemplate how easily the Arab world flows into that of the Indian Ocean.

The study of the Middle East is witnessing a sea change (excuse the maritime metaphor). The traditional geographic poles of Middle East studies (Turkey, Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq) stand firm, but are now facing a challenge from places once thought to be peripheral to the historiography: namely, South Arabia and the Gulf. The rising tide of scholarship on those areas is due in large measure to the opportunities that now present themselves in resituating them historically, and thinking about them as part of broader transoceanic worlds. This reorientation has made itself clear in the growing number of publications that wrestle with the Middle East's maritime frontiers—especially in the sister disciplines of history and anthropology. Here I limit myself to just one of those disciplines—history—and chart out the waves of contact between historians of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. I offer no argument, but rather a survey of where the field has been and the opportunities that lie ahead.

What can we gain by looking at maritime spaces? Does this enable us to work towards a global history of the Middle East that moves beyond at times arbitrary geographical and disciplinary borders? In this essay I argue that maritime spaces might be particularly suitable for exploring the boundaries of Middle East studies and their interconnection with global history. By implication, the study of Middle Eastern maritime connections might be especially well fitted to develop new and more complex global histories. To make this point, a specific and perhaps unusual maritime site in the Middle East will be assessed. The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and quickly turned into a major artery of traffic between Europe on the one side, and Asia, East Africa, and Australia on the other. More importantly for our purposes, it is located at the very heart of the Middle East, where Africa and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (and with it the Indian Ocean world), and water and desert intersect.

Over the last few years there has been much scholarly interest in sectarianism and minorities in the Middle East. New scholarship has appeared against the backdrop of communal violence in Iraq triggered by the US-led invasion, the intensifying Saudi–Iranian rivalry, the rise of extremist groups such as ISIS that have made sectarian violence a centerpiece of their ideology, and the ongoing Syrian Civil War.