Annual MESP Conference: The Global Middle East

The Paradox of Islamic Finance: How Shariah Scholars Reconcile Religion and Capitalism
Ryan Calder

In just fifty years, Islamic finance has grown from a tiny experiment operated from a Volkswagen van to a thriving global industry worth more than the entire financial sector of India, South America, or Eastern Europe. This talk examines the Islamic finance boom, arguing that shariah scholars—experts in Islamic law who certify financial products as truly Islamic—have made the industry a profitable, if controversial, hybrid of religion and markets. I argue that shariah scholars’ conception of Islamic finance is perfectly suited to the age of financialization and the global efflorescence of shariah-minded Islam.

Ryan Calder is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of the Program in Islamic Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on new and fast-changing transnational markets and industries.

His first book, The Paradox of Islamic Finance: How Shariah Scholars Reconcile Religion and Capitalism (2024), shows how experts in religious law have spurred Islamic finance’s growth into a multi-trillion-dollar global industry, bringing capitalist finance into alignment with shariah-minded Islam. Calder uncovers how capitalism shapes us into beings moral and immoral, pious and impious, “religious” and “secular,” “rational” and “irrational,” rich and poor, calculating and emotional, nationalist and cosmopolitan, sub-human and supra-human.

The Uyghur-Chinese Muslim Struggle for Arab Public Opinion in Cairo, 1931-1945
John Chen

In late 1933, after establishing the First East Turkistan Republic (ETR) in Kashgar, Uyghur leaders sought support from al-Manar, a major Arabic-language magazine. They accused Chinese-speaking Muslims in the Republic of China’s northwest of not supporting them. A few months later, Chinese Muslim troops helped the Chinese Nationalist (KMT) government crush the ETR. Afterward, Chinese Muslim KMT officials and scholars tried to co-opt Uyghur leaders and weaken their push for independence. They promoted a narrative that highlighted historical ties between China and the Arab world, portraying Chinese Muslims as key figures in this relationship. Some Chinese Muslim scholars in Cairo, who studied at al-Azhar from 1931 to 1946, shared this view with Arabic audiences through their connections. This research examines how the Middle East influenced Uyghur and Chinese Muslim identity and became a focus in China’s nation-building politics.

John Chen is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University Bakersfield. His articles and book-in-progress examine the political and intellectual history of Muslims in modern China, with a focus on their travels in the Middle East and Indian Ocean, roles in Chinese domestic and foreign policy-making, and processes of identity formation. He has also written about the globalization of Eurocentric assumptions about religion and how this shaped the modern racialization and minoritization of religious communities worldwide.

Unrequited and Undecided: Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans in 2024 and Beyond
Youssef Chouhoud

Middle Eastern and Muslim American voters constitute a small, but strategically located portion of the electorate. Typically, their status as racial and religious minorities in the US would suggest that their natural positioning on the political spectrum is squarely left-of-center. The reality, however, is far more complex and can lead to electoral quandaries for these communities. Drawing on empirics, theory, and history, this talk traces the considerations these voters faced going into November and the possible ramifications of their (in)actions beyond this election cycle.

Youssef Chouhoud is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Christopher Newport University, where he is affiliated with the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution. Additionally, he is a Public Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute, producing accessible scholarship on religious, racial, and ethnic pluralism in the US. Dr. Chouhoud’s research models support for core democratic norms, with a particular focus on tolerance and a more general interest in how religiosity mediates social and political attitudes. He also has an extensive record of public scholarship on Muslim and Arab American opinions and behaviors.

Picketing the Syrian shop: Confronting Mahjari Capitalism and Its Archival Afterlives
Stacy D. Fahrenthold

Between 1913 and 1934, New York City’s garment industry saw a wave of strikes led by women and girls previously deemed unorganizable. These strikes, often involving thousands, forced employers to close shops and secure better wages, contracts, and conditions. While much has been written about the garment industry’s role in the women’s labor movement, the “Syrian shops” where 3,500 to 6,000 Arab American women worked are often overlooked. Initially considered “unreachable” due to ethnic ties, these women surprised labor activists by joining strikes and securing concessions from their employers. This talk examines the role of Syrian women in these labor actions and their interactions with unions.

Stacy D. Fahrenthold (Associate Professor at University of California Davis) is a historian of the modern Middle East specializing in labor migration; displacement/refugees; border studies; and diasporas within and from the region.

Her first book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, received the Arab American National Museum’s 2020 Evelyn Shakir Award, the 2019 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies, the 2019 Syrian Studies Association’s Book Award, and received Honorable Mention by the Lebanese Studies Association in 2020. Her new book, Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class, examines how Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian immigrant workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation in the textile industries of the Atlantic world.

Passage to Blackness: Mobility and Difference across Desert and Sea
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen

Every year, thousands of West and Central Africans set out from their hometowns on ‘adventure’ across increasingly violent borderscapes. In contrast to humanitarian discourses decrying the violence that migrants experience on their journeys as human trafficking or ‘modern-day slavery’ perpetrated mainly by other Africans, this talk considers migrants’ adventures through the border in relation to the various passages that have shaped the region: from local practices of migration as a rite of passage to captivity and forced passage across desert and sea. Taking account of the deep spacetimes of racialization, devaluation, and social survival illuminates migrants’ encounters with the EurAfrican border not through the lens of trafficking but transformation.

Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen is a Lecturer in African Studies and Middle East Studies and faculty affiliate in Anthropology and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Her work focuses on the geopolitics and economics of race, especially as they relate to mobility and migration.

Her first book, under contract with Duke University Press, is entitled Bordering Blackness: Migration and Dispossession between Africa and Europe. It comprises an ethnography of the ‘EurAfrican border’ through the experiences of West and Central African migrants encountering it as they travel from their home countries, through Morocco and other northern African states, and across the Mediterranean Sea.

‘Asia for Asians’: Early 20th Century Afghanistan and the Making of a Transregional Identity
Marya Hannun

This presentation explores how the concept of ‘Asia’ came to matter in Afghan political thought in the early 20th Century, in relation to the wider inter-Asian circulation of people and ideas. Through Afghan reformers and the transregional press, Asia became a galvanizing political framework that shaped material solidarities on the ground in Afghanistan. At the same time, the tensions and contradictions in visions of Asia, and the political realities facing Afghanistan, led to disillusionment and competing claims about what Asia represented. Beyond shedding light on important intellectual developments, this work puts forward conceptual history as a method for writing regional histories. It illustrates the potentials of situating and tracking the development of the geographic terms we use across time and languages.

Marya Hannun is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, where she serves as the Managing Editor of MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project). Her current research project examines women’s movements and legal reform in early-twentieth century Afghanistan, focusing on the years leading up to and following World War I and the end of the Ottoman Empire (1880-1929).

Conflict and Compromise: Elite Men’s Poetry, Politics, and the Social-Political Role of Lebanese and Syrian Women in Brazil and the Levant, 1920s-1940s
José D. Najar

After World War I, democratic struggles led to changes in Brazil and the Levant. The Ottoman Empire’s defeat briefly allowed Syrian independence, but by 1923, the League of Nations placed Lebanon and Syria under French Mandate. In Brazil, young military officers, called tenentes, revolted in 1922, seeking reforms against a corrupt system dominated by São Paulo and Minas Gerais, leading to internal conflicts. For women in both regions, these struggles represented opportunities to advance political agency. By 1934, Brazil granted women the right to vote, while women in Syria and Lebanon gained this right only after independence. Despite this, women in both regions shared similar political strategies in the 1930s, using patriotic themes in poetry and press to support their involvement. This talk explores why Syrian and Lebanese women in São Paulo embraced Patriotic Womanhood during conflicts and how local press coverage influenced their citizenship aspirations.

José D. Najar is an Assistant Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil and Latin America. His work focuses on whiteness and non-European diasporas in the Americas, gender inequality, imperialism, anti-colonial resistance, and transnationalism and transimperialism as historical methods. 

In his recent book, Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850–1940 (Nebraska University Press, 2023), Dr. Najar re-examines the myth of exceptional social mobility and other national and imperial narratives through the analysis of overlapping trans-imperial discourses of white privilege and gender inequality encapsulated in islamophobia and antisemitism. 

At the Frontlines of Deportation: Indonesian Domestic Workers and Saudi Arabia’s Migration Control Regime
Rachel Silvey

Rachel Silvey is Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on migration, gender, social networks, and economic development in Indonesia; immigration and employment among Southeast Asian-Americans; migration and marginalization in Bangladesh and Indonesia; and religion, rights and Indonesian migrant women workers in Saudi Arabia.