Books by Isa Blumi
This book examines the role of imperial narratives of multinationalism as alternative ideologies ... more This book examines the role of imperial narratives of multinationalism as alternative ideologies to nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East from the revolutions of 1848 up to the defeat and subsequent downfall of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in 1918. During this period, both empires struggled against a rising tide of nationalism to legitimize their own diversity of ethnicities, languages and religions. Contributors scrutinize the various narratives of identity that they developed, supported, encouraged or unwittingly created and left behind for posterity as they tried to keep up with the changing political realities of modernity.
Beyond simplified notions of enforced harmony or dynamic dissonance, this book aims at a more polyphonic analysis of the various voices of Habsburg and Ottoman multinationalism: from the imperial centres and in the closest proximity to sovereigns, to provinces and minorities, among intellectuals and state servants, through novels and newspapers. Combining insights from history, literary studies and political sciences, it further explores the lasting legacy of the empires in post-imperial narratives of loss, nostalgia, hope and redemption. It shows why the two dynasties keep haunting the twenty-first century with fears and promises of conflict, coexistence, and reborn greatness.
Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World, 2013
Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history exper... more Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history experienced through these refugees living in the Middle East, the Americas, South-East Asia, East Africa and Europe. This book explores the tensions emerging between those trying to preserve a world almost entirely destroyed by both the nation-state and global capitalism and the agents of the so-called Modern era.
In this selection of Chapter 5 and Conclusion, the Ottoman empire's subjects, often themselves refugees from other parts of the Islamic world by the 1870s under European imperialist rule, mobilize, often with surprising results. In East and Central Africa, Ottoman subjects mobilized a campaign to send missionaries to convert large numbers of indigenous peoples, a good decade prior to the arrival of Belgium, British, German and Italian merchants/agents of empire. These selections also reflect on how Ottoman migrants from Syria/Palestine adapt to their new lives in South and Central America (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Honduras). Finally it considers the consequences of Ottoman imperial collapse on those who did migrate and wished to return to their homelands in the 1920s. In the case of Palestinians, they were largely stopped by Zionist/British authorities from returning, further frustrated by the League of Nations declaring Palestinians in the Americas were Ottoman subjects and thus "Turks" by international standards and no longer permitted to travel to Palestine, their homelands.
War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars 1912-1913 and their Sociopolitical Implications, 2013
(Includes Introduction authored by Blumi and Yavuz to the larger volume)
War and Nationalism pres... more (Includes Introduction authored by Blumi and Yavuz to the larger volume)
War and Nationalism presents thorough up-to-date scholarship on the often misunderstood and neglected Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The wars represented a pivotal moment that had a long-lasting impact on the regional state system and fundamentally transformed the beleaguered Ottoman Empire in the process. This chapter invariably also suffers from this methodological weakness in that it too mobilizes a narrow selection of events (at the expense of excluding others) in order to suggest possible interpretations of so-called origins and enduring legacies of the 1912–13 Balkan Wars. A major impediment to analyzing the disparate events identified as contributing to the Balkan Wars’ long-term consequences is in some part the result of focusing on specific administrative zones — the mountainous borderlands of Kosova, İşkodra, Serbia, and Montenegro known here as the Malësi e Madhe — without fully engaging seemingly peripheral events beyond these locales.
This special issue draws on work from young scholars concerned with the impact recent waves of Is... more This special issue draws on work from young scholars concerned with the impact recent waves of Islamophobia has affected the lives of Muslims in Europe. Isa Blumi authored the introduction and chapter one entitled:
“Nothing New: Islamophobia by Default in Postwar Europe”.
Works in this issue are drawn from conference held in January 2017 in Istanbul, organized by Dr. Mehmet Hacisalihoglu and supported by IRCICA.
http://www.yildiz.edu.tr/media/files/etkinlikler/islamophobia-program.pdf
Contributions in special issue include articles by:
Ali Hüseyinoğlu
Peter Polak-Springer
Elena Lukinykh
Leyla Yıldırım
Ali Çaksu
Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us About the World, 2018
Since March 2015, a Saudi-led international coalition of forces—supported by Britain and the Unit... more Since March 2015, a Saudi-led international coalition of forces—supported by Britain and the United States—has waged devastating war in Yemen. Largely ignored by the world’s media, the resulting humanitarian disaster and full-scale famine threatens millions. Destroying Yemen offers the first in-depth historical account of the transnational origins of this war, placing it in the illuminating context of Yemen’s relationship with major powers since the Cold War. Bringing new sources and a deep understanding to bear on Yemen’s profound, unwitting implication in international affairs, this explosive book ultimately tells an even larger story of today’s political economy of global capitalism, development, and the war on terror as disparate actors intersect in Arabia.
Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19 th century (1789-1914) as... more Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19 th century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State moves the study of the modern empire towards a comparative, trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers: Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of the Ottoman
http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230110182#otherversion=9780230119086
This book focuses on th... more http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230110182#otherversion=9780230119086
This book focuses on the western Balkans in the period 1820-1912, in particular on the peoples and social groups that the later national history would claim to have been Albanians, providing a revisionist exploration of national identity prior to the establishment of the nation-state. It offers new methods to disentangle otherwise anachronistic references to ethno-national identity politics from a much more complicated, dynamic and heterogeneous Balkan world prior to World War I. Using archives from Istanbul, Tirana, Rome, Paris/Nantes, London, Washington, Berlin, Cairo, and Vienna, this book aimed to help initiate (not settle) debates about how we best chart dynamics within a Balkan world prior to the state-building projects of the 20th century.
“The Great Powers’ Fixation on Ottoman Albania in the Administration of the post-Berlin Balkans, ... more “The Great Powers’ Fixation on Ottoman Albania in the Administration of the post-Berlin Balkans, 1878-1908.” Omar Turan (ed.) The Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878. [Ankara: METU Press, 2006]:187-196.
This is a DRAFT (therefore with some typographical, grammar and spelling errors) of Chapter 4 of ... more This is a DRAFT (therefore with some typographical, grammar and spelling errors) of Chapter 4 of Chaos in Yemen (Routledge 2010). This chapter discusses the origins of the rebellions and its supporters in Northwest Yemen, known today inaccurately as exclusively the Huthi movement. Please note that the page numbers in this draft DO NOT correspond to the ones in the published book (91-115).
"In the first half of the 20th century, throughout the Balkans and Middle East, a familiar story ... more "In the first half of the 20th century, throughout the Balkans and Middle East, a familiar story of destroyed communities forced to flee war or economic crisis unfolded. Often, these refugees of the Ottoman Empire - Christians, Muslims and Jews - found their way to new continents, forming an Ottoman diaspora that had a remarkable ability to reconstitute, and even expand, the ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity of their homelands.
Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history experienced through these refugees living in the Middle East, the Americas, South-East Asia, East Africa and Europe. Isa Blumi explores the tensions emerging between those trying to preserve a world almost entirely destroyed by both the nation-state and global capitalism and the agents of the so-called Modern era."
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 Prelude to Disaster: Finance Capitalism and the Political Economy of Imperial Collapse
2 Resettlement Regimes and Empire: The Politics of Caring for Ottoman Refugees
3 Traveling the Contours of an Ottoman Proximate World
4 Transitional Migrants: The Global Ottoman Refugee and Colonial Terror
5 Missionaries at the Imperial Ideological Edge
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
War and Nationalism presents thorough up-to-date scholarship on the often misunderstood and negle... more War and Nationalism presents thorough up-to-date scholarship on the often misunderstood and neglected Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The essays contain critical inquiries into the diverse and interconnected processes of social, economic, and political exchange that escalated into conflict. The wars represented a pivotal moment that had a long-lasting impact on the regional state system and fundamentally transformed the beleaguered Ottoman Empire in the process.
This interdisciplinary volume stands as a critique of the standard discourse regarding the Balkan Wars and effectively questions many of the assumptions of prevailing modern nation-state histories, which have long privileged the ethno-religious dimensions present in the Balkans. The authors go to great lengths in demonstrating the fluidity of social, geographical, and cultural boundaries before 1912 and call into question the “nationalist watershed” notion that was artificially imposed by manipulative historiography and political machinations following the end of fighting in 1913.
War and Nationalism will be of interest to scholars looking to enrich their own understanding of an overshadowed historical event and will serve as a valuable contribution to courses on Ottoman and European history.
In this work, written in 2003 and newly republished, I seek to reassess some common misconception... more In this work, written in 2003 and newly republished, I seek to reassess some common misconceptions about the history of the Ottoman Empire. Having compared and contrasted events transpiring in Ottoman administered Albania and Yemen, this early work took up the question of studying communities on the so-called periphery of Ottoman society. Rather than being marginal, this book argues such people are part of the greater Ottoman society and shows that studies of the provinces can provide valuable insights for historians. The chapters of the book are tied together by reflections on being a history writer while using each individual chapter to offer some unique and almost forgotten aspect of Ottoman history.
"Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19th century (1789-1914) as... more "Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19th century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Foundations of Modernity moves the study of the modern empire towards a comparative, trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers: Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of the Ottoman Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as the only source of change and highlights the progression of modern imperial states while emphasizing a kind of pre-globalization cosmopolitanism largely erased by discourses of modernity.
As such, the book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the study of modern state power and the social consequences to the interaction between long-ignored "historical agents" like pirates, smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge to conventional methods of historical and social scientific analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk about Modernity. "
Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism
Here is a synopsis of the book: "Chaos in Yemen challenges recent interpretations of Yemen’s com... more Here is a synopsis of the book: "Chaos in Yemen challenges recent interpretations of Yemen’s complex social, political and economic transformations since unification in 1990. By offering in late 2009 (when I completed the manuscript) a different perspective to the violence afflicting the larger region, it explains why the ‘Abdullah ‘Ali Salih regime, even after his formal "retirement" from politics, has become the principal beneficiary of these conflicts.
Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach, the author offers an alternative understanding of what is creating discord in the Red Sea region by integrating the region’s modern history to an interpretation of current events. In turn, by refusing to solely link Yemen to the "global struggle against Islamists," this work sheds new light on the issues policy-makers are facing in the larger Middle East. As such, this study offers an alternative perspective to Yemen’s complex domestic affairs that challenge the over-emphasis on the tribe and sectarianism.
Offering an alternative set of approaches to studying societies facing new forms of state authoritarianism, this contribution speaks to students and scholars of the Middle East and the larger Islamic world, Conflict Resolution, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.
"
You will find chapters 1 and 2 to this book that focuses on the western Balkans in the period 180... more You will find chapters 1 and 2 to this book that focuses on the western Balkans in the period 1800-1912, in particular on the peoples and social groups that subsequent national histories would later identify as Albanians, providing a revisionist exploration of national identity prior to the establishment of the nation-state. Isa Blumi posits that such an identity was politically mobilized, and, that prior to the 1912 Balkan war it was culturally opaque and ideologically fluid. In relation to the competition among various state and power structures, be it in the shape of great power intervention, attempts at building new states, or the Ottoman political center, Blumi shows that Ottoman reforms were successful in encouraging most state subjects to commingle local interest with the fate of the empire itself, meaning that parochial concern for the survival of the immediate community, as it transformed over time, was directly linked to the survival of the Ottoman state.
Reviews of Books by Isa Blumi
Asian Review of World Histories, 2020
Inderjeet Parmar's review of Destroying Yemen (UC Press, 2018)
This is a compelling analysis... more Inderjeet Parmar's review of Destroying Yemen (UC Press, 2018)
This is a compelling analysis of a tragic but unfolding story. It is a deeply humane, passionate, conviction-led, historically rich analysis. It is rigorously researched, detailed, complex. It collapses so many “divides” in scholarly considerations of “weak” states and polities on the so-called periphery ver-sus so-called core states. It gives agency to the peoples and groups of what are often seen to be marginal states and societies, rarely discussed in relation to world politics or global political development. It explores how central the peripheral is to the strategies of the metropolitan core states or, as Blumi terms it, Western empire. It is an analysis that pulls no punches but excoriates and connects the scholarly, intellectual, and political knowledge-makers to the structural and military violence of the empire and its Middle Eastern allies that have seen Yemen as an economic and strategic prize. It is a work of the heart and head, painful for the author to write and the reader to read. But as war, disease, and disaster ravage Yemen, and unyielding popular resistance to outside forces continues, the book is a must-read for anyone claiming to know and understand the world we live in today, regardless of their field of scholarly research. One can only empathize with an author (and his subject) who begins with a frank confession that he has only been able to complete the study based on his “spiritual radar” and prevalent “sense of guilt” that he “cannot do more” to help the people of Yemen. This is no ivory-tower scholar.In another recent scholarly work of scholarly distinction, Paul Chamberlin presents the global arc of bloodletting during the Cold War, from China in the late 1930s, through East and Southeast Asia, and into the Middle East. The sheer levels of largely Western imperial violence starkly laid out in The Cold War’s Killing Fields (2018) – the bloodbaths in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, among others – should lay to rest any remaining notions about the “Long Peace” since 1945, the fruits of the liberal international order. Blumi’s book complements Chamberlin’s analysis by locating Yemen in regional and global networks of trade, scholarship, art, literature, and philosophy, showing that little-known, if not forgotten, and “backward” Yemen has played an out-sized role in the making of some of the key contours of the modern world.Blumi’s argument is that Yemen is both agent and victim of modernization, globalization, and neoliberalism, not to mention unbridled military aggres-sion by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and their Anglo-American suppliers and sponsors. Their purpose and goal is, primarily through market and military forces, to drag Yemen into the twenty-first century of “freedom,” postmodernity, and openness. That is, to transform Yemen into another cog in
Middle East Journal, 2018
It is not easy to write a review of Isa Blumi's new book, Destroying Yemen. It is particularly tr... more It is not easy to write a review of Isa Blumi's new book, Destroying Yemen. It is particularly tricky for a social anthropologist like myself, that is, the representative of a discipline that Blumi uses to lash out against at habitually as harshly. Blumi's book begins with the sentence "This was a difficult book" (p. xi), and indeed he seems to have written it in a fit of rage. As a historian, Blumi has presented profound studies on the Ottoman history of Yemen, and Destroying Yemen too takes the current crisis in Yemen as the reference and starting point for his forays into Yemeni history in order to uncover the roots of the country's conflict.
Arab Studies Quarterly, 2019
Review of Destroying Yemen (UC Press, 2018) In Arab Studies Quarterly 41.1 (2019): 121-125.
Review of 2011 book, Reinstating the Ottoman by S. Aydemir
Review of Isa Blumi's Chaos in Yemen (2010) reviewed for Review of Middle East Studies (2013)
Uploads
Books by Isa Blumi
Beyond simplified notions of enforced harmony or dynamic dissonance, this book aims at a more polyphonic analysis of the various voices of Habsburg and Ottoman multinationalism: from the imperial centres and in the closest proximity to sovereigns, to provinces and minorities, among intellectuals and state servants, through novels and newspapers. Combining insights from history, literary studies and political sciences, it further explores the lasting legacy of the empires in post-imperial narratives of loss, nostalgia, hope and redemption. It shows why the two dynasties keep haunting the twenty-first century with fears and promises of conflict, coexistence, and reborn greatness.
In this selection of Chapter 5 and Conclusion, the Ottoman empire's subjects, often themselves refugees from other parts of the Islamic world by the 1870s under European imperialist rule, mobilize, often with surprising results. In East and Central Africa, Ottoman subjects mobilized a campaign to send missionaries to convert large numbers of indigenous peoples, a good decade prior to the arrival of Belgium, British, German and Italian merchants/agents of empire. These selections also reflect on how Ottoman migrants from Syria/Palestine adapt to their new lives in South and Central America (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Honduras). Finally it considers the consequences of Ottoman imperial collapse on those who did migrate and wished to return to their homelands in the 1920s. In the case of Palestinians, they were largely stopped by Zionist/British authorities from returning, further frustrated by the League of Nations declaring Palestinians in the Americas were Ottoman subjects and thus "Turks" by international standards and no longer permitted to travel to Palestine, their homelands.
War and Nationalism presents thorough up-to-date scholarship on the often misunderstood and neglected Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The wars represented a pivotal moment that had a long-lasting impact on the regional state system and fundamentally transformed the beleaguered Ottoman Empire in the process. This chapter invariably also suffers from this methodological weakness in that it too mobilizes a narrow selection of events (at the expense of excluding others) in order to suggest possible interpretations of so-called origins and enduring legacies of the 1912–13 Balkan Wars. A major impediment to analyzing the disparate events identified as contributing to the Balkan Wars’ long-term consequences is in some part the result of focusing on specific administrative zones — the mountainous borderlands of Kosova, İşkodra, Serbia, and Montenegro known here as the Malësi e Madhe — without fully engaging seemingly peripheral events beyond these locales.
“Nothing New: Islamophobia by Default in Postwar Europe”.
Works in this issue are drawn from conference held in January 2017 in Istanbul, organized by Dr. Mehmet Hacisalihoglu and supported by IRCICA.
http://www.yildiz.edu.tr/media/files/etkinlikler/islamophobia-program.pdf
Contributions in special issue include articles by:
Ali Hüseyinoğlu
Peter Polak-Springer
Elena Lukinykh
Leyla Yıldırım
Ali Çaksu
This book focuses on the western Balkans in the period 1820-1912, in particular on the peoples and social groups that the later national history would claim to have been Albanians, providing a revisionist exploration of national identity prior to the establishment of the nation-state. It offers new methods to disentangle otherwise anachronistic references to ethno-national identity politics from a much more complicated, dynamic and heterogeneous Balkan world prior to World War I. Using archives from Istanbul, Tirana, Rome, Paris/Nantes, London, Washington, Berlin, Cairo, and Vienna, this book aimed to help initiate (not settle) debates about how we best chart dynamics within a Balkan world prior to the state-building projects of the 20th century.
Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history experienced through these refugees living in the Middle East, the Americas, South-East Asia, East Africa and Europe. Isa Blumi explores the tensions emerging between those trying to preserve a world almost entirely destroyed by both the nation-state and global capitalism and the agents of the so-called Modern era."
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 Prelude to Disaster: Finance Capitalism and the Political Economy of Imperial Collapse
2 Resettlement Regimes and Empire: The Politics of Caring for Ottoman Refugees
3 Traveling the Contours of an Ottoman Proximate World
4 Transitional Migrants: The Global Ottoman Refugee and Colonial Terror
5 Missionaries at the Imperial Ideological Edge
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
This interdisciplinary volume stands as a critique of the standard discourse regarding the Balkan Wars and effectively questions many of the assumptions of prevailing modern nation-state histories, which have long privileged the ethno-religious dimensions present in the Balkans. The authors go to great lengths in demonstrating the fluidity of social, geographical, and cultural boundaries before 1912 and call into question the “nationalist watershed” notion that was artificially imposed by manipulative historiography and political machinations following the end of fighting in 1913.
War and Nationalism will be of interest to scholars looking to enrich their own understanding of an overshadowed historical event and will serve as a valuable contribution to courses on Ottoman and European history.
As such, the book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the study of modern state power and the social consequences to the interaction between long-ignored "historical agents" like pirates, smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge to conventional methods of historical and social scientific analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk about Modernity. "
Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach, the author offers an alternative understanding of what is creating discord in the Red Sea region by integrating the region’s modern history to an interpretation of current events. In turn, by refusing to solely link Yemen to the "global struggle against Islamists," this work sheds new light on the issues policy-makers are facing in the larger Middle East. As such, this study offers an alternative perspective to Yemen’s complex domestic affairs that challenge the over-emphasis on the tribe and sectarianism.
Offering an alternative set of approaches to studying societies facing new forms of state authoritarianism, this contribution speaks to students and scholars of the Middle East and the larger Islamic world, Conflict Resolution, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.
"
Reviews of Books by Isa Blumi
This is a compelling analysis of a tragic but unfolding story. It is a deeply humane, passionate, conviction-led, historically rich analysis. It is rigorously researched, detailed, complex. It collapses so many “divides” in scholarly considerations of “weak” states and polities on the so-called periphery ver-sus so-called core states. It gives agency to the peoples and groups of what are often seen to be marginal states and societies, rarely discussed in relation to world politics or global political development. It explores how central the peripheral is to the strategies of the metropolitan core states or, as Blumi terms it, Western empire. It is an analysis that pulls no punches but excoriates and connects the scholarly, intellectual, and political knowledge-makers to the structural and military violence of the empire and its Middle Eastern allies that have seen Yemen as an economic and strategic prize. It is a work of the heart and head, painful for the author to write and the reader to read. But as war, disease, and disaster ravage Yemen, and unyielding popular resistance to outside forces continues, the book is a must-read for anyone claiming to know and understand the world we live in today, regardless of their field of scholarly research. One can only empathize with an author (and his subject) who begins with a frank confession that he has only been able to complete the study based on his “spiritual radar” and prevalent “sense of guilt” that he “cannot do more” to help the people of Yemen. This is no ivory-tower scholar.In another recent scholarly work of scholarly distinction, Paul Chamberlin presents the global arc of bloodletting during the Cold War, from China in the late 1930s, through East and Southeast Asia, and into the Middle East. The sheer levels of largely Western imperial violence starkly laid out in The Cold War’s Killing Fields (2018) – the bloodbaths in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, among others – should lay to rest any remaining notions about the “Long Peace” since 1945, the fruits of the liberal international order. Blumi’s book complements Chamberlin’s analysis by locating Yemen in regional and global networks of trade, scholarship, art, literature, and philosophy, showing that little-known, if not forgotten, and “backward” Yemen has played an out-sized role in the making of some of the key contours of the modern world.Blumi’s argument is that Yemen is both agent and victim of modernization, globalization, and neoliberalism, not to mention unbridled military aggres-sion by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and their Anglo-American suppliers and sponsors. Their purpose and goal is, primarily through market and military forces, to drag Yemen into the twenty-first century of “freedom,” postmodernity, and openness. That is, to transform Yemen into another cog in
Beyond simplified notions of enforced harmony or dynamic dissonance, this book aims at a more polyphonic analysis of the various voices of Habsburg and Ottoman multinationalism: from the imperial centres and in the closest proximity to sovereigns, to provinces and minorities, among intellectuals and state servants, through novels and newspapers. Combining insights from history, literary studies and political sciences, it further explores the lasting legacy of the empires in post-imperial narratives of loss, nostalgia, hope and redemption. It shows why the two dynasties keep haunting the twenty-first century with fears and promises of conflict, coexistence, and reborn greatness.
In this selection of Chapter 5 and Conclusion, the Ottoman empire's subjects, often themselves refugees from other parts of the Islamic world by the 1870s under European imperialist rule, mobilize, often with surprising results. In East and Central Africa, Ottoman subjects mobilized a campaign to send missionaries to convert large numbers of indigenous peoples, a good decade prior to the arrival of Belgium, British, German and Italian merchants/agents of empire. These selections also reflect on how Ottoman migrants from Syria/Palestine adapt to their new lives in South and Central America (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Honduras). Finally it considers the consequences of Ottoman imperial collapse on those who did migrate and wished to return to their homelands in the 1920s. In the case of Palestinians, they were largely stopped by Zionist/British authorities from returning, further frustrated by the League of Nations declaring Palestinians in the Americas were Ottoman subjects and thus "Turks" by international standards and no longer permitted to travel to Palestine, their homelands.
War and Nationalism presents thorough up-to-date scholarship on the often misunderstood and neglected Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The wars represented a pivotal moment that had a long-lasting impact on the regional state system and fundamentally transformed the beleaguered Ottoman Empire in the process. This chapter invariably also suffers from this methodological weakness in that it too mobilizes a narrow selection of events (at the expense of excluding others) in order to suggest possible interpretations of so-called origins and enduring legacies of the 1912–13 Balkan Wars. A major impediment to analyzing the disparate events identified as contributing to the Balkan Wars’ long-term consequences is in some part the result of focusing on specific administrative zones — the mountainous borderlands of Kosova, İşkodra, Serbia, and Montenegro known here as the Malësi e Madhe — without fully engaging seemingly peripheral events beyond these locales.
“Nothing New: Islamophobia by Default in Postwar Europe”.
Works in this issue are drawn from conference held in January 2017 in Istanbul, organized by Dr. Mehmet Hacisalihoglu and supported by IRCICA.
http://www.yildiz.edu.tr/media/files/etkinlikler/islamophobia-program.pdf
Contributions in special issue include articles by:
Ali Hüseyinoğlu
Peter Polak-Springer
Elena Lukinykh
Leyla Yıldırım
Ali Çaksu
This book focuses on the western Balkans in the period 1820-1912, in particular on the peoples and social groups that the later national history would claim to have been Albanians, providing a revisionist exploration of national identity prior to the establishment of the nation-state. It offers new methods to disentangle otherwise anachronistic references to ethno-national identity politics from a much more complicated, dynamic and heterogeneous Balkan world prior to World War I. Using archives from Istanbul, Tirana, Rome, Paris/Nantes, London, Washington, Berlin, Cairo, and Vienna, this book aimed to help initiate (not settle) debates about how we best chart dynamics within a Balkan world prior to the state-building projects of the 20th century.
Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history experienced through these refugees living in the Middle East, the Americas, South-East Asia, East Africa and Europe. Isa Blumi explores the tensions emerging between those trying to preserve a world almost entirely destroyed by both the nation-state and global capitalism and the agents of the so-called Modern era."
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 Prelude to Disaster: Finance Capitalism and the Political Economy of Imperial Collapse
2 Resettlement Regimes and Empire: The Politics of Caring for Ottoman Refugees
3 Traveling the Contours of an Ottoman Proximate World
4 Transitional Migrants: The Global Ottoman Refugee and Colonial Terror
5 Missionaries at the Imperial Ideological Edge
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
This interdisciplinary volume stands as a critique of the standard discourse regarding the Balkan Wars and effectively questions many of the assumptions of prevailing modern nation-state histories, which have long privileged the ethno-religious dimensions present in the Balkans. The authors go to great lengths in demonstrating the fluidity of social, geographical, and cultural boundaries before 1912 and call into question the “nationalist watershed” notion that was artificially imposed by manipulative historiography and political machinations following the end of fighting in 1913.
War and Nationalism will be of interest to scholars looking to enrich their own understanding of an overshadowed historical event and will serve as a valuable contribution to courses on Ottoman and European history.
As such, the book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the study of modern state power and the social consequences to the interaction between long-ignored "historical agents" like pirates, smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge to conventional methods of historical and social scientific analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk about Modernity. "
Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach, the author offers an alternative understanding of what is creating discord in the Red Sea region by integrating the region’s modern history to an interpretation of current events. In turn, by refusing to solely link Yemen to the "global struggle against Islamists," this work sheds new light on the issues policy-makers are facing in the larger Middle East. As such, this study offers an alternative perspective to Yemen’s complex domestic affairs that challenge the over-emphasis on the tribe and sectarianism.
Offering an alternative set of approaches to studying societies facing new forms of state authoritarianism, this contribution speaks to students and scholars of the Middle East and the larger Islamic world, Conflict Resolution, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.
"
This is a compelling analysis of a tragic but unfolding story. It is a deeply humane, passionate, conviction-led, historically rich analysis. It is rigorously researched, detailed, complex. It collapses so many “divides” in scholarly considerations of “weak” states and polities on the so-called periphery ver-sus so-called core states. It gives agency to the peoples and groups of what are often seen to be marginal states and societies, rarely discussed in relation to world politics or global political development. It explores how central the peripheral is to the strategies of the metropolitan core states or, as Blumi terms it, Western empire. It is an analysis that pulls no punches but excoriates and connects the scholarly, intellectual, and political knowledge-makers to the structural and military violence of the empire and its Middle Eastern allies that have seen Yemen as an economic and strategic prize. It is a work of the heart and head, painful for the author to write and the reader to read. But as war, disease, and disaster ravage Yemen, and unyielding popular resistance to outside forces continues, the book is a must-read for anyone claiming to know and understand the world we live in today, regardless of their field of scholarly research. One can only empathize with an author (and his subject) who begins with a frank confession that he has only been able to complete the study based on his “spiritual radar” and prevalent “sense of guilt” that he “cannot do more” to help the people of Yemen. This is no ivory-tower scholar.In another recent scholarly work of scholarly distinction, Paul Chamberlin presents the global arc of bloodletting during the Cold War, from China in the late 1930s, through East and Southeast Asia, and into the Middle East. The sheer levels of largely Western imperial violence starkly laid out in The Cold War’s Killing Fields (2018) – the bloodbaths in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, among others – should lay to rest any remaining notions about the “Long Peace” since 1945, the fruits of the liberal international order. Blumi’s book complements Chamberlin’s analysis by locating Yemen in regional and global networks of trade, scholarship, art, literature, and philosophy, showing that little-known, if not forgotten, and “backward” Yemen has played an out-sized role in the making of some of the key contours of the modern world.Blumi’s argument is that Yemen is both agent and victim of modernization, globalization, and neoliberalism, not to mention unbridled military aggres-sion by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and their Anglo-American suppliers and sponsors. Their purpose and goal is, primarily through market and military forces, to drag Yemen into the twenty-first century of “freedom,” postmodernity, and openness. That is, to transform Yemen into another cog in
Reflective of its continued importance to the larger region, the city has seen regular additions to its main administrative and religious studies infrastructure. For instance, the main gates outsiders use to enter Sana’a, the northern Bab al-Shaub and south-facing Bab Al-Yaman, date to the first Ottoman occupation in the 16th century. The highlight of the Islamic city, however, is the Great Mosque (originally built in 633), a short walk from the Bab Al Yaman. A magnificent amalgamation of architectural styles tracing back to the period of the prophet Muhammad, the Grand Mosque’s centrality to the development of Islam as a global religion is confirmed by archeological findings on its grounds and surviving scriptures found in its walls. This includes a famous, so-called Sana’a’ palimpsest, that scholars determine to be one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts. It conjoins non-Islamic fragments with early renditions of verses pre-dating the Holy Qur’an’s codification during the Uthman caliphate. The Great Mosque remained the largest in the city until the construction of the Al Saleh Mosque by the President of a unified Yemen in 2008, Ali Abdallah Saleh.
The survival and regular investment in refurbishing the Great Mosque points to the city’s key political and cultural role in the larger region. Along with the resulting unique urban characteristics is a corresponding migration of scholars and craftsmen over the centuries. The resulting communities drawn to the city over the ages reflects in the architectural patrimony that eventual gave each neighborhood its special connection to the diverse religious groups calling them home. This diversity of Muslim constituencies goes back to when the Prophet Muhammad sent his first delegation, led by his nephew ʿAli. The significance of ‘Ali’s delegation highlights the region’s importance to the early Muslim umma in Mecca, including the fact that Abraha, a Christian Yemeni king during the lifetime of Muhammad’s grandfather attempted to invade Mecca. More, Yemen’s Sassanian governor became an early convert to Islam, a choice many in Sana’a made after Ali’s delegation brought the Prophet’s message.
The growth of conversions within the first decades translated into a renewed political importance of the city as key families patronized the greatest scholars of the time. The resulting migrations of Muslims seeking an Islamic education there, including ʿAbd al-Razzāḳ b. Hammām b. Nāfī, (b.744-d. 827), apparently of Persian origin, correspond with the Sana’a’s incorporation into the imperial ambitions of most of the great Arab Muslim medieval states. During these occupations by empires originating in Egypt or Syria, a critical role of Sana’a’s Muslim scholars played in shaping the larger Islamic world included their outward migration, spreading various Sufi and early Shi’a traditions to the larger Indian Ocean. Already during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph al-Muʿawiyya, for instance, Yemen would be divided into two regions with the north centered around Sanaʿa. Within this administrative frame, the city’s political and economic elite, the primary patrons of Ismaili, Zaydi and Shafi’ scholarly traditions, thrived. This continued during the transition to the Abbasid caliphate and by the mid-9th century, a local dynasty of the Yufirids (847-997) took control of the neighboring highlands, helping incubate Sana’a even further from the larger doctrinal tensions experienced in the rest of the Arab Muslim world.
At the beginning of the 10th century, the leader Yahya ibn al-Husayn established a Zaydi imamate in the northern highlands of Yemen that resulted in centuries of co-habitation between Zaydi scholars-cum-political leaders and outside powers. With the incorporation of Sana’a by the Fatimids (1047-1099), the sultans of Hamdan (1099-1173), the Ayyubids (1173-1230) and then the Rasulids (1230-1381) all accommodated the thriving Muslim diversity that remained in the city. Indeed, during the occupation of Fatimid Egypt large numbers of Ismailis settled in Yemen contributing to a sharp codification of distinctive Shi’a traditions that lasted until the middle of the 15th century, an era when Sana’a was directly administered by Zaydi imams. By the time of the first Ottoman occupation in the mid-16th century, Sana’a established itself as the primary vehicle for the Shiʿa Zaydi legalism (entirely detached from the emerging Twelver Imamiyyah Shiism that was the Safavid Empire’s official religion), one that cohabitated with Shafiʿi Sunnis to produce a dynamic society impervious to the sectarianism afflicting Yemen today.
Still a thriving metropolis by the 16th century, larger Yemen’s importance to the global economy made securing political accommodation from Sana’a’s cultural and political elites essential for representatives of the Dutch, Portuguese, Mamluk and then Ottoman states. This helped once the Ottomans withdrew in 1630 due the rebellion of the Zaydi Al-Mansur al-Qasim for Sana'a to become the seat of an independent Imamate that ushered in a long period of prosperity for the city’s inhabitants. This is best reflected in the quality and quantity of buildings from that time. Indeed, most of the architecture still standing in the city dates from this period, suggesting a deeply rooted society with family networks assuring Sana’a’s diverse Islamic heritage continued well into the twentieth century. Among the most famous scholars to emerge from this period was al-Shawkani (1759–1834).
Unfortunately, much of the city’s historic core has been overwhelmed by modernization beginning in the 1970s, a period after the decade-long war that began with the overthrow of the last Zaydi Imam from this era. Following a pattern of urban and demographic sprawl seen elsewhere in the world, the city’s population grew from about 55,000 in 1970 (more or less the same number of inhabitants during the second period of Ottoman administration that lasted from 1872 to 1918) to 1.7 million by 2004. Accounting for this sprawl was the influx of uprooted peasants from the countryside impacted by frequent violence in South Arabia. The resulting demographic expansion of the city well beyond its historic limits has change the religious function of the city.
The city’s limited natural resources—especially water and space for movement—shapes the sectarianism recognized since the 1980s. Despite the earlier noted tradition of ecumenical co-existence, the first wave of Yemenis moving to Saudi Arabia in search for work converted to their Saudi host’s Hanbali values. Their acquired intolerance thanks to the issuance of fatwas by Saudi-backed communal leaders like Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi'i led to open conflict in Yemen after Riyadh deported over a million Yemenis in 1991 because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. With Yemen’s explosion of Saudi-backed “jihadism” mediated by the expansion of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated scholars like Abdul Majid al-Zindani, Sana’a became a city internally divided by competing networks of mutually hostile Muslim communities.
Crucially, the expansion of influence of some so-called Salafist groups by the late 1990s would serve the Yemeni government in a series of attempts to subdue political rivals both within and beyond the city. Known as the civil wars between the government of Ali Abdallah Saleh and former leaders of South Yemen in 1994 and the Sa’adah Wars that lasted throughout the 2000s, the state increasingly pitted inhabitants of the city against each other along sectarian lines. This impacted who lived in the city.
Because of growing sectarianism backed by the Yemeni state, old Sana’a families abandoned their houses in the historic center, leading to a shift of most of the shopping, educational, entertainment, banking, and government services beyond the old city walls. Lower income Yemenis moved into the old city, making conditions deteriorate further. Over the course of these devastating internal conflicts, the Saleh government experimented with dividing the administrative power of the city to so-called Local Councils in 2002. According to the Saleh government, these councils would offer a stabilizing mechanism that could supplant the authority of the government over now massive neighborhoods emerging since the waves of migration to the city. Negotiated at a time of duress, Saleh’s experimentation with allowing political parties formally displaying Islamic social and cultural agendas to thrive helped the national government contain the growing presence of refugees from the Zaydi regions north of Sana’a. The government’s offer to transfer some administrative and financial functions over to friendly Salafist political parties thus proved a tactic aimed protect the regime from opposition. Unfortunately, the allocation of resources and tax revenue to political parties allied with the state denied many inhabitants basic services.
While in theory the changes ...
October parliamentary elections accurately reflected
the collective frustrations of voters. The foremost
opposition party, Lëvizja Vetëvendosja! (VV,
or Self-Determination), and its charismatic leader
Albin Kurti seem to have won a mandate to directly
challenge Kosovo’s EU/US masters. Yet their
efforts to form a new government ran up against
the stalling tactics of the second-largest opposition
party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). By
all accounts, the LDK, loyal to Washington since
the 1990s, has embraced the US embassy’s hostility
to the prospect of working with a government led
by Kurti. A new coalition government was finally
formed on February 5, allowing Kurti to take office
as prime minister. But a difficult partnership is
expected, with the LDK seeking to block VV from
enacting its most radical corrective policies. This
spells trouble for 2020.
In Kosovo, the results of the snap October parliamentary elections accurately reflected
the collective frustrations of voters. The foremost opposition party, Lëvizja Vetëvendosja! (VV, or Self-Determination), and its charismatic leader
Albin Kurti seem to have won a mandate to directly challenge Kosovo’s EU/US masters. Yet their efforts to form a new government ran up against the stalling tactics of the second-largest opposition party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). By
all accounts, the LDK, loyal to Washington since the 1990s, has embraced the US embassy’s hostility to the prospect of working with a government led by Kurti. A new coalition government was finally formed on February 5, allowing Kurti to take office
as prime minister. But as this article predicted, it was a difficult partnership with the LDK seeking to block VV from enacting its most radical corrective policies. As suggested this would spell trouble for 2020, and indeed, in late May, the Americans, LDK and PDK successfully brought down the popular VV from power, imposing a new, many would say entirely illegitimate puppet state that will allow for negotiations with Serbia to begin again.
Full copy of:
Blumi I. (2020) Yemen, Imperialism in. In: Ness I., Cope Z. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
The objective of the workshop is for participants to acquire advanced insight into the study of migration, refugees, and settlement regimes in and from the Global South in a historical-comparative and social-theoretical manner.
This two-day seminar will take an inter-disciplinary approach to discussing, theorizing and historicizing the impact of large-scale, modern human migrations as a result of war and economic development. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship in anthropology, sociology and history, this seminar will apply new methods of analyzing these movements of immigrants and refugees. The same methods will also be used to examine the actions of those governments seeking to settle such people who directly affected the global transformations of the past two centuries (1800-2015). These two days will be broken up into at least four separate sections, with a survey of the larger issues addressed within the different disciplines. In each of the sections, different sources will be used to initiate discussion among the participants.
The doctoral workshop is funded by MUBIT Inter-University Doctoral Coordination in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Basel/Zurich and is a part of the curriculum of the Graduate School of Social Sciences (G3S), University of Basel.
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