Near and Middle Eastern Studies

he question over the provenance and depth of a separatist Armenian consciousness in ineteenth century Anatolia is one that continues to divide Ottoman historians of all persuasions. his essay title suggests that not only was a distinct ethnic identity and social milieu for Eastern natolias' Christian community in this period beyond question, but also that oppositional ferment nd political mobilisation on the grounds of that identity is indisputable. The contentiousness of his claim holds power to this day as it informs issues with which modern Turkey and all other egional players, including Russia, continue to grapple. It has debatably has helped maintain the mage of the Caucasus as a troublesome, ethno-religious flashpoint, for both East and West ever ince, while the American Missionary impetus itself can be said to have set much of the frame of eference in which US-Turkish relations still operate.

The debate over the veracity of the Islamic banking and finance industry, and its true adherence to Qu'ranic scripture is one that appears to gain more traction, and attract more dissent, as its' wealth and influence grows. Moreover, discord on this issue seems to run highest within Muslim majority jurisdictions themselves, illustrating perhaps the gap between the lofty principles of an enterprise still in its infancy, seeking to base itself on the relationship between man and God, rather than man and market, and the often messy reality on the ground.

An examination of the rise of parallel Islam and underground adherence practices during the seventy years of Soviet control in Central Asia, that allowed Islam to covertly flourish and also enabled the Muslim faith to reconstruct itself into a source of ethnic distinction and identitarian mobilisation against perceived autocratic and colonialist control, the legacy of which persists in the post Soviet space.

The study of the Islamic Middle Period, while in practical terms problematic, remains critical to our understanding of much of contemporary Islam; the conditions in which it attained preeminence among world faiths during the so called " Golden Era " , the shaping of it's theories surrounding science and progress, and more generally it's impact on the muslim faith as it is practiced today. Karamustafa's " God's Unruly Friends " is a thrilling account of the dervish orders of the period, the obduracy and violence of which, with their enforced hermeticism, ruthless embrace of the dogma of poverty and apparent renunciation of all social and legal norms, have lost none of their ability to shock almost a millennium later. Being derived from the Persian word " darvish " meaning poverty, from the outset, the Qalander and Haydari wandering dervish orders caused consternation and almost uniform denunciation throughout medieval Islam, not least from the elite of the established Sufi orders themselves. With testimony based on eye-witness accounts of early occidental travellers such as the papal ambassador Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo in 1404 and later in 1501 by the Italian nobleman and Ottoman captive Giovan Antonio Menvino, we are told their behaviour " elevated the aesthetic principles of mendicancy, itinerancy, celibacy and self mortification to new heights... in such a way as to render deviant behaviour as the ultimate measure of true renunciation. " (p2) They were routinely dismissed as " the riff raff of society… imposters and ignoramuses " (p5) and more disparagingly, in light of their often highly theatrical attempts at alms raising, " swindlers and opportunists of the ignorant and credulous masses. " (p8) Perhaps for the contemporary reader the impact of these accounts of the early to middle period dervish orders comes from their very antithesis to our own commonly held readings of Islam in the modern world; highly institutionalised, politicised, unbending and prohibitive. Therefore this area of Islamic history holds great potential for critical re-readings of muslim historiography itself. However as Karamustafa makes clear, " the relegation of the anarchist dervishes to the sphere of popular religion and low culture " (p5) has been pervasive over the centuries, explained away through " a watertight separation … between the high normative and official religion of the elite on the one hand and " low " antinomian and popular religion of the illiterate masses on the other. " (p5) This division has consciously sought to strip the dervish orders of their significance and render them inconsequential to the wider understanding of Islam as a practiced religion. Indeed by the sixteenth century the outspoken Ottoman Sufi Vahidi even argued that " he (the darvish) is out of the sphere of hope, while the infidel is still in the circle ​ by fear of God​ , and by God the infidel is far superior to him. " (p9) Certainly aggressively renunciatory orders and the cult of the " wandering holy man " are common to almost all world religions, while dervish religiosity as the author states, has never truly dissolved and holds considerable sway over a sizable constituency of muslim intellectuals then as now, precisely because of its rejection of societal norms and strong antinomian principles, not in spite of them.

An examination of the reasons for Europe’s monopolistic funding of the Ottoman railway project in the late Hamidean era. This includes it's impact on diplomatic relations between the Empire and the Great Powers, its role in the proliferation of foreign debt and the subsequent crisis of legitimacy at the Sublime Porte and ultimately in the dissolution of the state itself and the rise of the CUP.

Over the summer of 2018 the state of the Turkish economy has come to global attention in a way that
could not have been anticipated when I began work on this paper earlier in the year. The near collapse of the lira and threat of a chain of corporate debt failures weighing on the banking system has once again raised the prospect of a major recession returning Turkey to the economic malaise of previous decades. Yet at the time of writing, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi continues to defy market logic by fiercely resisting a hike in interest rates to cool growth and inflationary pressure.

Such intransigence is baffling observers around the world. However I will argue that what we are seeing in
the AKP and President Erdoğan’s stance is no simple bid for continued fiscal liquidity by a government wedded to “big project” and clientelist spending. While these are no doubt serious considerations, I believe what we are witnessing now in the policies of Adalet Kalkınma is something far more nuanced, namely a return to the core values forged in the Millî Görüş movement during islam’s political ascendency in the sixties and seventies. These views received their first mobilisation window in the Türk Islam Sentezi following the military coup of 1980, but only now with the establishment of the AKP, as the most successful political operation in the modern Republic’s history, does the party elite feel embolden to truly begin enacting on these convictions, which must be read in the context of the AKP’s bid to establish islam as a major political force in the new multipolar world order. I will conclude that it is precisely because of the disorder of recent times that the need to understand the values shaping Adalet ve Kalkınma’s economic agenda has become more pressing now than ever.

In Hittite Landscape and Geography Mark Weeden and Lee Ullmann have gathered 28 specialist authors to present an up-to-date account of research on the Geography of Late Bronze Age Anatolia (second half of the second millennium BC) using information both from cuneiform texts and from archaeological excavation and survey. The study of texts and archaeology require different specialisms. This is the first time an attempt has been made to present a co-ordinated monograph-length view of Hittite geography since 1959, and the first time that any work has tried to balance archaeological and textual data for the same geographical areas. The result is a foundational research tool which will put scholarship on Hittite Geography on a firm footing for the future.

In Mittani Palaeography, Zenobia Homan analyses cuneiform writing from the Late Bronze Age Mittani state, which was situated in the region between modern Aleppo, Erbil and Diyarbakır. The ancient communication network reveals a story of local scribal tradition blended with regional adaptation and international political change, reflecting the ways in which written knowledge travelled within the cuneiform culture of the Middle East.
Mittani signs, their forms, and variants, are described and defined in detail utilising a large digital database and discussed in relation to other regional corpora (Assyro-Mittanian, Middle Assyrian, Nuzi and Tigunanum among others). The collected data indicate that Mittanian was comparatively standardised – an innovation for the period – signifying the existence of a centralised system of scribal training.

The experience of forced migration can lead to profound social transformations among the persons who have been displaced. Among the multiplicity of factors engendering such change, attention must be given to the impact of
international aid and development programmes designed to benefit refugee or returnee communities.
This paper constitutes a case study of one such situation by focusing upon the
experience of persons forcibly displaced as a result of the armed conflict which took
place in northern Mali between 1990 and 1995. Many of the refugees involved belonged to an ancient nomadic culture and, until their exodus, had had only sporadic contact with the services aid agencies and modern governmental institutions are able to provide.
The findings of the article are principally based upon interviews conducted with some
200 returnees at selected sites in the Timbuktu and Kidal regions of northern Mali in the summer of 1998. The article concludes with a number of recommendations concerning the design and implementation of refugee and returnee assistance programmes in a developmental context.

Classical Arabic Ḥadīth literature is largely composed of micro-narratives recording the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muḥammad. This study seeks to examine their literary form by focusing on selected examples listed in the canonical Ḥadīth compendia under the heading of adab, a term which may be rendered here as “practical ethics” but which is also commonly used to designate classical Arabic belles-lettres. While the latter is a type of literature quite distinct from the literature of Ḥadīth the texts here studied point to a certain interface between them. The ethical dimension of adab as it appears in Ḥadīth is examined further in the light of Haydon White's theory on the relation between narrativity and law. Contrasting the micro-narrative of Ḥadīth with the “macro-narrative” of the epic provides further insight into its approach to adab and serves to highlight its distinct literary and religious aesthetic.

This article seeks to gain a better understanding of a famous ode by the ‘Abbāsid court poet al-Buhturī (d. 897) by comparing it with two other works which exhibit a similar thematic development. One is an extract from The Aeneid by Virgil (d. 19 BC), the other a poem by Wilfred Owen (d. 1918). The three texts emanate from imperial identities (Roman, Arab and British) in a state of crisis, which in turn paves the way for cathartic encounters with an alien other that each involves an act of recognition. The comparison uncovers certain similarities in the psychological impact of this encounter and thereby throws a new light on the carefully crafted structure of al-Buhturī's ode. The experience described by the three texts emerges as an expression of man's universal quest for his lost self, and its recovery—however momentarily—in the very heart of his supposed foe.