Dr Blumi undervisar i kurser på institutionen för asiatiska och Mellanösternstudier. Kurser inkluderar Mellanöstern:

Religioner och tidig historia Mellanösterns

tidigmoderna historia, 1500-1920

Mellanösterns samtida historia, 1820-2020

Mellanösternstudier: Källor Mellanösterns politik och utveckling

Perspektiv på Mellanösternstudier

En introduktion till Mellanöstern Mänskliga rättigheter i Mellanöstern

Isa Blumi forskar om samhällen i social, ekonomisk och politisk transformation. Tidigare jämförde han hur österrikisk-ungerska, ryska, italienska, brittiska, holländska, spanska och franska imperialistiska projekt i den islamiska världen korsades med, och därmed informerades av, händelser inom det osmanska riket. Hans senaste arbete täcker den sena osmanska perioden och efterföljande regimer, och hävdar att händelserna på Balkan och Mellanöstern är motorerna för förändring i den större världen. I detta avseende undersöker han på ett jämförande, integrerat sätt hur (post-)ottomanska samhällen som finns i till exempel Albanien/Jugoslavien, Turkiet, Gulfen och Jemen passar in i vad som är en global övergångshistoria. Detta informerar i sin tur historien om den atlantiska världen, särskilt framväxten av den moderna europeiska imperialismen och Amerika.

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• Imperial Equivocations: Britain's Temperamental Mobilization of the Caliphate, 1912-1924

  2021. Isa Blumi. Rivista italiana di storia internazionale 4 (1), 149-173

  Artikel

  The British Empire adopted an array of contradictory policies towards Muslim subjects scattered throughout the world. As it managed its post-World War I goal of dominating the former Ottoman territories, London-based policies considered varying policies. Since the British Empire managed its affairs with different Muslim subjects through different administrations based in Cairo, Bombay, and occupied Istanbul after 1918, such policies clashed, reflecting the distinctive issues facing administrators of these unique regions. This article makes the observation that there proved to be a range of policies adopted by competing entities of «His Majesty’s Government» (HMG) toward the Caliphate, requiring a rethinking of British imperialism vis-à-vis the Muslim world. Seeking to use the Caliphate from 1912 to 1924 for different objectives, the following reads these policies within the larger context of an empire facing disparate and contradictory challenges from different Muslims demands. In the process, this chapter asks why local events regularly upset such schemes that sought to mobilize the Caliphate, questions answered by returning focus to a multiplicity of factors contributing to the modern world’s (dis)order

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• Ottoman Albanians in an era of Transition: An Engagement with a Fluid Modern World

  2021. Isa Blumi. Narrated empires, 191-212

  Kapitel

  During a critical period of transformation prior to World War I, a generation of Ottoman-Albanian activists whose engagements with ‘modernization’ not so much marked an end of the Ottoman Empire but a phase of its more complicated adaptation. Known in subsequent generations as heroes of Albanian nationalism, the Ottoman-Southern Albanian (Tosk) activists studied here demonstrate how a self-selective constituency challenged the Ottoman government to adapt to a changing world. In the end, the Frashëri family (Sami, Abdyl, and Naim Frashëri) mobilized the ecumenical possibilities embedded in the era’s iteration of ‘nationalism’ and expected the Ottoman state to do the same. In this respect, Ottoman subjects like the Frashëris instrumentalized the empire’s diverse cultural, political, and socio-economic heritage to support their political and economic aims to save the empire from the ethno-nationalism awaiting it from 1900 onwards.

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• Speaking above Yemenis: a reading beyond the tyranny of experts

  2021. Isa Blumi. Global Intellectual History 6 (6), 990-1014

  Artikel

  Although rarely making the headlines, concerned employees of international organizations privately admit that since March 2015, Yemen has been the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.1 Year by year the situation gets worse as a coalition of financially-strapped regional powers and their US and UK facilitators continue a siege of the entirety of the North of the country while fighting it out among themselves over control of the resource-rich South. The result of this multipolar war of attrition is that upwards of 18 million Yemenis face starvation and disease.

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• Yemen, Imperialism in

  2021. Isa Blumi. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2905-2915

  Kapitel

  To better appreciate modern imperialism inYemen, the following charts how relations withEurasian powers like the Ottomans and Britainshifted from humble alliance making to outright(almost always failed) attempts at military conquest. As argued, it is crucial to reflect moreclosely on the manner Eurasian agents securedtheir initial foothold in the Western Indian Oceanworld by way of such alliances. By the time Ottoman surrogates like Muhammad Ali and crewslinked to venture capitalists in London establisheda presence in the Red Sea, the political orientations of a growing set of new political-spiritualmovements were on the rise. The subsequentadaptations by Ottoman and British officerswould directly impact how their respectiveempires evolved over the following nineteenthand twentieth centuries.

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• An Ottoman Story Until the End: Reading Fan Noli’s Post-Mediterranean Struggle in America, 1906-1922

  2020. Isa Blumi. Journal of Balkans and Black Sea Studies 3 (5), 121-144

  Artikel

  As the lives of so many men and women in the late nineteenth century Ottoman Balkans collapsed, many began to invest in ways to circumvent the accompanying powers of the modern state. An equal number attempted to manage the changes by availing themselves to the evolving Ottoman state with the hope of fusing efforts of reform with the emerging political-cultural structures of the larger world that was explicitly geared to tear the multi-ethnic Ottoman Balkans apart. By exploring the manner in which some members of the Balkans’ cultural elite adapted as their worlds transformed, this article introduces new methods of interpreting and narrating transitional periods such as those impacting men like Fan S. Noli. His itinerary itself reveals just how complex life in the Balkans and Black Sea would be during the 1878-1922 period, but not one entirely subordinate to the ethno-nationalist agenda so often associated with him.

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• The Albanian Question Looms Over the Balkans Again

  2020. Isa Blumi. Current history (1941) 119 (815), 95-100

  Artikel

  Brussels and Washington had imposed a regime that subordinated the long-term goals of Albanians to the economic and political agendas of the Western powers.

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• Albanian Slide: The Roots to NATO's Pending Lost Balkan Enterprise

  2019. Isa Blumi. Insight Turkey 21 (2), 149-170

  Artikel

  Since the end of the 1990s, Albanians in North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia have submitted to a regime of political and economic austerity in return for access to the European Union. The heavy costs, from economic decline, deadly pollution, and political corruption have translated into years of frustrations. These frustrations have exposed a political failure that extends from the region to the United States and Brussels. The resulting political turmoil will soon turn violent as the global economic downturn puts strains on Albanians sliding further away from their untrustworthy EU/U.S. allies. These afflicted relations may also highlight enduring tensions within the larger NATO alliance as American unilateralism continues to strain the divergent interests of key European partners.

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• Navigating the Challenge of Liberalism: The Resurrection of the Orthodox Church in Post-Communist Albania

  2019. Isa Blumi. Orthodox Churches and Politics in Southeastern Europe Nationalism, 197-222

  Kapitel

  Surviving the Balkans’ twentieth century was no simple task for Albanian Christians. Facing a regime of capitalism that absorbed the socialist Balkans in the 1990s, the efforts of Albanian Orthodox Christians to adapt seem inadequate. This chapter explores how one may read the struggles of the post-communist Albanian Autocephalous Orthodox Church that confronted the “universal” liberal enterprise in the context of the concurrent tensions within Albanian circles seeking the reaffirmation of ethno-nationalist concerns. In questioning how the rebuilding of the Church reflected an aggressive missionary approach led by Greek-born Archbishop Anastasios Yannoulatos, it will become clear how necessary it is to read this ongoing process of rebuilding on several institutional and ideological/spiritual planes.

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• Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us About the World

  2018. Isa Blumi.

  Bok

  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.

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• Battles of Nostalgic Proportion: The Transformations of Islam-as-Historical-Force in Western Balkan Reconstitutions of the Past

  2018. Isa Blumi. Nostalgia, Loss and Creativity in South-East Europe, 37-71

  Kapitel

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• Islamophobia in Europe: Special Issue

  2018. .

  Bok (red)

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• Battles of Nostalgic Proportion: The Transformations of Islam-as-Historical-Force in the Ideological Matrix of a Self-Affirming ‘West’

  2016. Isa Blumi. Althusser and Theology, 182-197

  Kapitel

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• Reorientating European Imperialism: How Ottomanism Went Global

  2016. Isa Blumi. Die Welt des Islams 56 (3-4), 290-316

  Artikel

  Scholars have long studied Western imperialism through the prism of pre-World War I literature and journalism. Characterizing this literature as Orientalist has become programmatic and predictable. The sometimes rigid analysis of this literature often misses, however, the contested dynamics within. This is especially the case with analyses of Ottoman contributions to the rise of a Western colonialist ethos – orientalism, imperialism, and racism – reflecting the political, structural, and economic changes that directly impacted the world. Essentially, colonial pretensions – servicing the ambitions of European imperialism at the expense of peoples in the ‘Orient’ – were articulated at a time when patriotic Ottomans, among others, were pushing back against colonialism. This article explores the possibility that such a response, usefully framed as Ottomanism, contributed regularly to the way peoples interacted in the larger context of a contentious exchange between rival imperialist projects. What is different here is that some articulations of Ottomanism were proactive rather than reactive. In turn, some of the Orientalism that has become synonymous with studies about the relationship between Europe, the Americas, and the peoples “East of the Urals” may have been a response to these Ottomanist gestures.

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• Introduction to the Special Issue: Islamophobia in Europe

  2015. Isa Blumi, Mehmet Hacısalihoğlu. IRCICA Journal 3 (6), 13-28

  Artikel

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• Nothing New: Islamophobia by Default in Postwar Europe

  2015. Isa Blumi. IRCICA Journal 3 (6), 29-64

  Artikel

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• Special Issue: Islamophobia in Europe

  2015. .

  Bok (red)

  In an age of extreme atrocities and breaches of fundamental human rights and liberties across the globe, one of the most adversely affected social groups is constituted by the Muslims. From Myanmar to Palestine, from East and Southeast Asia to Central and Western Europe Muslims face various forms of violence, bigotry, hatred, stereotyping and discrimination today informed by anti-Muslim extremism. In this context, it is pertinent that ircica presents the Special Issue of ircica Journal on issues of Anti-Muslim Extremism and Islamophobia in Europe to the attention of scholarly community.

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• The Transformation of Islam in Kosovo and its Impact on Albanian Politics

  2015. Isa Blumi. Religion in the Post-Yugoslav Context , 173-196

  Kapitel

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• Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World

  2013. Isa Blumi.

  Bok

  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.READ AN EXTRACT 

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• War & Nationalism: The Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and Socio-Political Implications

  2013. .

  Bok (red)

  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.

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• Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State

  2012. Isa Blumi.

  Bok

  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: 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 Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as the only source of change and highlights the progression of modern imperial states.

  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. This book offers a methodological and historiographic intervention meant to challenge conventional studies of the modern era.

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• Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800-1912

  2011. Isa Blumi.

  Bok

  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.

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• Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism

  2010. Isa Blumi.

  Bok

  Chaos in Yemen challenges recent interpretations of Yemen’s complex social, political and economic transformations since unification in 1990. By offering a new perspective to the violence afflicting the larger region, it explains why the ‘Abdullah ‘Ali Salih regime 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 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 timely contribution will be of great relevance to students and scholars of the Middle East and the larger Islamic world, Conflict Resolution, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.

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• Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen, 1878-1918

  2010. Isa Blumi.

  Bok

  In this collection of essays, Isa Blumi seeks to reassess some common misconceptions about the history of the Ottoman Empire. Blumi, an expert on the Empire’s Albanians, takes up the question of communities on the periphery of Ottoman society, be they Albanian or Yemeni. However, Blumi still sees such people as being part of the greater Ottoman society and shows that studies of the provinces can provide valuable insights for historians. The essays of the book are tied together by Blumi’s reflections on being a history writer, but each individual essay touches on some unique and almost forgotten aspect of Ottoman history.

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• Exceptionally normal (post-)Ottomans: How failure shaped the futures of Balkan heroes

  2022. Isa Blumi. Global Biographies, 124-142

  Kapitel

  Isa Blumi provides us with a sort of anti-biography of Fan S. Noli, a praised national hero in Albanian historiography. Blumi demonstrates that Noli was in fact the result of Tosk-Albanian elite networks, supportive of the Ottoman Empire. This is an insight that Blumi obtains by tracing Noli’s trajectory beyond Albania to Cairo, Alexandria and Boston in the United States. By dislocating Noli, and paying close attention to those around him, Blumi demonstrates that Noli was – as Blumi also puts it – exceptionally normal. He is better understood, so to speak, as a fairly normal member of networks whose representatives were by no means as sure of their support of and membership in future nations as historians would like them to have been.

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• Çamërian Chimera?

  2022. Isa Blumi.

  Övrigt

  It seemed as if Çamëria was yet another post-Ottoman community doomed to be “unmixed” via population exchanges. As Isa Blumi shows, however, Çamërians resisted, defending a community experts dismissed as chimerical.

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• Amerika'da Balkanlar'ın Kültürel Elitinin Paradoksal Dağılımı: Sona Kadar Bir Osmanlı Arnavut Hikayesi

  2020. Isa Blumi. Kebikeç 50, 261-284

  Artikel

  As the lives of so many men and women in the late nineteenth century Ottoman Balkans collapsed, many began to invest in ways to circumvent the accompanying powers of the modern state. An equal number attempted to manage the changes by availing themselves to the evolving Ottoman state with the hope of fusing efforts of reform with the emerging political-cultural structures of the larger world that was explicitly geared to tear the multiethnic Ottoman Balkans apart. By exploring the manner in which some members of the Balkans' cultural elite adapted as their worlds transformed, this article introduces new methods of interpreting and narrating transitional periods such as those impacting men like Fan S. Noli. His itinerary itself reveals just how complex life in the Balkans and Black Sea would be during the 1878-1922 period, but not one entirely subordinate to the ethno-nationalist agenda so often associated with him.

  Läs mer om Amerika'da Balkanlar'ın Kültürel Elitinin Paradoksal Dağılımı

• Iraqi ties to Yemen’s demise: Complicating the ‘Arab Cold War’ in South Arabia

  2022. Isa Blumi. Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World 16 (3), 235-254

  Artikel

  The Cold War justifiably receives attention from scholars exploring interstate relations in the Middle East. While competition between the major nuclear powersinvariably contributed to how regional politics transpired in the twentieth century,there may be much that is missing from the narrative adapting such a focus onexternal factors. This article provides a detailed analysis of intraregional relationsthat are informed by domestic, intra-Arab concerns. With special focus on theevolving relations between Iraq and Yemen over the course of the 1920–90 period,it is possible to argue for a new approach to the study of the Middle East and itsrelationship to the larger world during the Cold War. Domestic concerns prove asmuch an animating force in global affairs as those based in British, American and/or Soviet Bloc circles usually foregrounded.

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• Obituary: Rifa‘at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj: A Life on the Path of Knowledge: Rifa‘at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj

  2022. Isa Blumi. Kadim 2 (3), 267-268

  Artikel

  Rifa‘at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj (1933-2022), a scholar of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, completed a Ph.D. in Princeton University’s Departments of Oriental Studies and History in 1963. A key member of a generation of scholars who challenged a Euro-American dominated academy and its study of the Middle East, Dr. Abou-El-Haj spent the majority of his teaching career at California State University, Long Beach. For over 50 year, Abou-El-Haj critically engaged scholars working on the early modern Ottoman state and society via publications such as The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman Politics (Leiden: Brill, 1984; translated into Turkish in 2011) and Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: SUNY University Press, (1991; in translated into Turkish in 2018).

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• Brandt, Marieke (ed.): Tribes in Modern Yemen. An Anthology. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2021

  2022. Isa Blumi. Anthropos 117 (2), 544-545

  Artikel

  Drawing from the collective wisdom of scholars of rural Yemen, Vienna-based anthropologist Marieke Brandt’s newly released volume offers a robust argument for the continued relevance of framing Yemeni inter-communal relations in terms of the “tribe.” Explained as a “historically rooted, emic concept of social representation” (12), Brandt assures the reader that the tribe in Yemen is rooted in remotest antiquity and survives by taking on modified, modern forms today. In this orientation of scholarly expertise seeking to capture in Yemen what anthropologists elsewhere have excised from their framework of analysis, Brandt’s selected representative voices constitute a who’s who in Yemeni studies. Reading this volume thus may offer non-specialists a rich sampling of previous and ongoing ethnographic work. Here the advocacy for a buoyant representation of rural Yemeni societies in terms of their tribal associations deserves praise; it also, however, induces some frustration with the underlying tenor of some contributions as authors misplace the role of others’ scholarly engagement with the tribal theme. 

  Läs mer om Brandt, Marieke (ed.): Tribes in Modern Yemen. An Anthology. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2021

• The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

  2023. Isa Blumi. Government and Politics of the Contemporary Middle East, 545-652

  Kapitel

  Ever since its creation in 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has been studied as a cohesive political, economic, and military unit whose member states operated in unison. As demonstrated in this chapter, such a narrative of cohesion and cooperation proves misleading. Despite considerable strategic importance given to the region’s oil and gas wealth, the GCC’s unstable political and economic conditions remain a paradox rarely registered in the scholarship. Indeed, this chapter argues that the origins of instability in the larger Middle East region directly informs the very precarious nature of the GCC, with domestic rivalries between key elements of each member states’ political and merchant classes regularly upsetting relations between members. As such, this chapter explains how the contentious politics and struggle for economic advantages makes for the entirety of the Gulf a complex setting in which foreign influences, initially European and then the United States of America, significantly impact the evolution of each member state. As elsewhere, key local, regional, and global factors contribute to a necessarily modified, more realistic understanding of the Politics and Government among GCC countries.

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• Preface: Aspects of Islamic Radicalization in the Balkans After the Fall of Communism

  2023. Isa Blumi. Aspects of Islamic Radicalization in the Balkans After the Fall of Communism, vii-xiii

  Kapitel

  Islam in Europe has become a micro industry for scholars and pundits alike. Confronted by the idealized “enemy within” an audience is guaranteed for the well-positioned expertise on offer in scholarly and journalistic forums. Alas, as recognized in the current volume generously supported by the Balkan History Association, navigating the inaccuracies catering to these audiences often pits meaningful insights and attempts at corrective clarity against institutional support in Europe. This tension between scholarly ethics and a specific demand is only intensified when applied to the Balkans, where a considerably large indigenous Muslim population still lives.Fixated on identifying a growing schism between what ostensibly constitutes, in their understanding of it at least, “tradition” and new iterations of religious faith, scholars of Islam in the Balkans have been especially keen on registering transitions in the larger world to account for what shapes Muslims’ unique place in the larger story of Southeast Europe. In a gesture toward the contemporary handwringing over Islam being a faith of reactionary radicals, many have referenced politically motivated versions of the political action regularly unleashed in regions European Muslims call home. Alas, the primary source of this rising of a so-called political Muslim is not as reactionary as has been often assumed. What manifests proves to be often a complex interplay of the ontological and contingent, with individual and distinctive group responses to varied local conditions upsetting any attempt at writing a sweeping general account of Muslim experiences in Europe.

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• Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe by Emily Greble

  2023. Isa Blumi. Journal of Church and State 65 (3)

  Artikel

  The Balkans’ diverse cultural heritage remains ensnared in formulaic representations that keep it outside normative “European” experiences. Emily Greble’s new book seeks to move beyond clumsy binaries by inspecting the 1878–1948 period that led to the contested forms of the stateknown as Yugoslavia. In suggesting that some Muslims contributed to the major political movements that shaped this modern state-building process, Greble adds to a rethinking of secularism and citizenship while inviting new questions about how we write such post-imperial histories.

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• La misión liberal de Najeeb Saleeby: un sirio-estadounidense en la construcción del Imperio en el sur de Filipinas, 1900-1923

  2023. Isa Blumi. Misioneros del Capitalismo, 183-204

  Kapitel

  One of the more enduring tropes of Euro-American expansionism is the racial uniformity of its promoters, its beneficiaries, and its victims. Aside from the self-indulgent claims of racial superiority and the corresponding missionary spirit of many European-origin imperial conquerors, recent scholarship reveals a much more diverse cadre of imperialist benefactors. Now cutting across the “white man’s” self-imposed divide that circulated by way of popular culture and scholarship, a new complexity to the power dynamics at play includes reassessing the profile of the frontiersmen, cowboys, settlers, pioneers, miners, and then state employees who brought modern capitalism’s empire to the far corners of the world.

  Properly telling the story of capitalist imperialism’s ascendancy still requires the register of deviance, deceit, greed, and criminal duplicity, but one that emanates from multiple layers of the society 19th century global capitalism created. Regularly acknowledged in the recent scholarship on colonialism, the conquests of other people’s lands did not come without the human components whose skills extended beyond simple murder, financial mendacity, and European origins. Thanks to a recent surge in rethinking the sociology of this nasty enterprise, the panoply of human agents contributing to the expansion of empire included men and women of very different origins, be it geographic, class, race, or religion. Indeed, the very fact such a diversity of humanity came to serve the brutal role of dislodging other people from their homelands demands new ways of writing modern history.

  In the following we explore possible ways of discovering and then making sense of those whose non-European, and thus non-White, backgrounds did not stop them from becoming an agent who used empire to secure greater social mobility. One particularly conspicuous beneficiary of European imperialism was the migrant sent to the colonial theatre to service capitalism’s comprehensive subjugation of others’ natural resources. From humble origins in the Middle East, East Asia, or throughout the Mediterranean were migrants so often celebrated in the media at the time for their overwhelming impact on the process of “expanding civilization” (Blumi 2013). The regular stories in newspapers and the expanding library of novels depicting this settlement of migrants regularly sold the myth of capitalism and “progress.” This discourse infiltrated the world, selling the promise of rewards of a “new life” for those willing to “work.” In this context, otherwise marginal people, often themselves victims of the same expansive capitalist system, became heroes of liberal-era capitalism by the often-coerced use of their “free” labor.

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• Bir Kadim Arap Metropolü San’â’

  2023. Isa Blumi. Derin Tarih 24, 128-133

  Artikel

  Today the largest and most populous city in Southern Arabia, Sana’a has been continuously inhabited for at least 2,500 years. Situated in a fertile basin over two thousand meters above sea level, the city remained economically and politically important over millennia because it sits on a major communication axis linking the mountains and rich fertile valleys of larger Yemen with the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean. Considered the ancestral heartland of the Arabs, the recognized Islamic heritage of the city allowed it in 1984 to become a recognized UNESCO World Heritage Site. With its 14-meter-tall walls surrounding the inner core of the city, a maze of over 6000 still largely intact multi-story tower houses makes Sana’a unique in the world. Its famous skyline consists of family homes that are at least five, if not eight or nine stories high. Along with these homes, the diverse Muslim population was serviced by more than 100 mosques (and associated evkaf properties) and 14 communal baths (hammams), all built before the 11th century.

  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 Saleh’s government would enable the local population to elect their own representatives, it became clear these representatives would also need to secure the approval their foreign government patrons. As such, the decentralization heralded as a model for Yemen’s future strengthened the rivalries between Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati supported religious parties and left Zaydi and secular parties out. The lack of a clear definition of hierarchical administrative prerogatives along with irregular attempts by Yemeni religious leaders to contribute a sectarian tenor to Yemen’s political debates led to a clash of interests and a sharpening of the doctrinal differences Saleh’s government sought. Despite the explicit attempts at pitting “Sunni” parties against Saleh’s Zaydi rivals, some prominent judges like Mohammed bin Ismail al-Amrani, himself followed by millions, issued a fatwa commanding his Sunni audience “not to consider the Shiites astray of Islam.”

  To no avail. By 2010, the regime pitting rival Muslim traditions led to months of street protests that mirrored the larger “Arab Spring.” In time, once allied parties, including ones led by the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Abdullah ibn al-Ahmar, turned on Saleh’s government. The resulting violence led the United States in 2012 to impose an “interim” government led by a weak Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, a member of Saleh’s political General People’s Congress party. Undergirding this interim government was the role of the Qatari-backed Yemeni Congregation for Reform, or Islah, party and its charismatic representative, Tawakkal Karman. She would share the Nobel Prize in 2011 in recognition of her efforts against the Saleh regime and role in supporting the Hadi government. Despite this support, the Islamist alliance around the Islah leadership faced opposition from various Saudi-backed “Jihadists” while the large number of Zaydis who settled in Sana’a organized a broader coalition known as Ansarallah (Partisans of God). The subsequent inability of the Hadi/Islah interim government to accommodate elements of the population who also opposed the Saleh regime ultimately resulted in first low-scale violence targeting leading Zaydi personalities and then the removal of the interim government from its offices in Sana’a in late 2014 by Ansarallah and its most prominent Zaydi leaders, known as the “Houthis.” Hadi’s offence was introducing IMF and US supported economic and political “reforms” that legally required Yemen’s parliament to approve. In essence, Ansarallah and their broad coalition of supporters decreed that no further modifications of Yemen’s economic relations to the larger world could happen before a new parliament was elected. The resulting war initiated by a coalition organized by the Obama administration to expel Ansarallah from Sana’a had the initial support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Failing a quick victory, however, the result of the war has been hundreds of thousands of casualties and the isolation of Sana’a’s Ansarallah administration and its inhabitants from the rest of the world.

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• Settling aftermath regimes: Iitinerate cham albanians in the post-ottoman world, 1822–1932

  2024. Isa Blumi. Archiv Orientálni. Supplementa 9 (3), 467-495

  Artikel

  During the “Age of Revolution,” disruptions that initiated transitional processes in many European states had their origins in peripheral zones, often themselves in a perpetual state of destabilization due to colonial administrative policies. From the Haitian Revolution to the destabilization caused by the American revolutions, European states collapsed and reconfigured to become the modern states associated with the era. This symbiotic relationship between the historical center and the periphery increasingly acknowledged, needs its equivlent. The same dynamics are at play in the following article, one that monitors the collective action of a particular group of Albanian Orthodox Christians who establish themselves in diasporas in Egypt and North America. Their ultimate contribution to the transformations impacting the larger Ottoman Empire and its Balkan/Eastern Mediterranean territories, recorded as the era of ethno-nationalism and liberation proves to invite a set of collective state building enterprises and Great Power adjustments witnessed elsewhere in Europe. And as events in Haiti and the larger Americas induced significant change in the empire’s metropole, so too did the charted actions of heretofore ignored Albanian Ottomans inform the evolution of diplomacy and international law as applied in Post-Ottoman contexts after the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913.

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• al-Badr, Muḥammad

  2023. Isa Blumi. Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, 5-6

  Kapitel

  Muḥammad al-Badr b. Aḥmad Ḥamīd al-Dīn (15 February 1926–6 August 1996) was the last Zaydī Imām of the Mutawakkilī dynasty, a family that decended from the prophet Muḥammad and ruled North Yemen from 1918. Today either revered or despised for his part as amīr al-muʾminīn (commander of the faithful) in a counter-revolutionary campaign in the 1960s, he played a critical role in Yemen’s post-World War II era. 

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