In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen offers an interpretation of the biblical Good Samaritan according to which the Samaritan stops not because he recognizes the need of his neighbor, but because through the act of stopping he enters into a neighborly relation. Practice similarly helped to constitute neighborly relations for Yemeni activists who forged new solidarities through their experiences during the eleven-month uprising of 2011 and its aftermath. Yemeni activists across the political spectrum—from Marxists to Islamists to liberal constitutionalists—have remarked that late nights spent in the squares writing slogans, making posters, and preparing and serving meals fundamentally altered their sense of self in relation to differently situated others. Rather than articulating a single national(ist) project, however, many activists speak of solidarities made in difference, or what political philosopher Iris Marion Young described as “a relationship among separate and dissimilar actors who decide to stand together, for one another.” These solidarities resulted in new and concrete forms of activism, which the formal transitional process has severely undermined. The experiences of Yemeni activists stand as an important reminder to scholars to attend to the intersection of formal and informal in our analysis of the politics of the Arab uprisings.

The existing literature on the denial of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 tends to concentrate on either the Turkish state's political practices or civil society's increasing openness to alternative readings of the event. I argue that both approaches reduce denialism to the political practices and defense mechanisms of Turkey by prioritizing the state as the sole agent of genocide denial. Although the state is indeed a dominant actor of denialism, to juxtapose state and society is to overlook the power that rests in the discourse itself and its pervasiveness across different—at times even competing—social and political settings.

My starting point is the present—certainly a critical and loaded moment for scholars of the modern Middle East. It is incumbent upon us to take a step back and to rethink how to create new concepts, new narratives, new explanatory schemes, new historicities, and new visions of the future. An engagement with science studies, understood broadly, is one possible way to begin such critical rethinking. It is an exercise that could also be mutually illuminating, as scholars of science studies have been debating the global nature of science and technology for the last decade, undoubtedly in reaction to the once European-dominated narrative of the history of science. The field of science studies has moved well beyond “diffusion” and “core-periphery” models toward more eclectic examinations of various processes of epistemic encounters, translations, mediations, and conflicts that shaped societies. These processes also shaped science and technology. Here, I would like to provide a brief outline of one mutual engagement inspired by the injunction to follow scientists, doctors, and engineers and to probe what was at stake in the knowledge they produced and how they “made society.”

An amusing and indicative sign of changing times, in December 2014 Saudi cleric Ahmad ʿAziz al-Ghamdi, a religious scholar and former head of the religious police in Mecca (officially known as the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice), ignited a fierce national debate regarding the niqab when he replied positively to a tweet by a Saudi woman asking if it was permissible in Islam for her to post a picture of her face on social media. His affirmative answer went viral and his Twitter feed received more than 10,000 comments, ranging from congratulations to death threats. He subsequently appeared on Badriya, the popular weekly TV talk show broadcast from Dubai, together with his wife, Jawahir bint Shaykh ʿAli, who appeared without a face veil and wearing make-up.

Political scientists have struggled to understand the unexpected 2011 mass mobilizations in the Middle East and North Africa as well as ensuing sociopolitical transformations. Functionalist and regime-centered approaches in particular have been unable to grasp dynamics of mobilization and change on the ground. I argue in this short essay that “state analysis from below” helps us to better understand the underlying causes of the 2011 uprisings, the dynamics of ensuing power struggles, and sociopolitical microstructures of political mobilization and demobilization.

In 2003, while a graduate student working on my dissertation, I wrote an article on the Internet in postrevolutionary Iran that looked at the politics of the emerging technology in a country undergoing major political changes. In the context of political rivalries between reformists and conservatives, the Internet, I argued, “as an advancing means of communication,” played a key role in the struggle for democracy by opening up a virtual space of dissident activism. Euphoric in spirit and utopian in outlook, the article ended with the following quotation from an Iranian dissident: “At night, every light that is on in Tehran shows that somebody is sitting behind a computer, driving through information roads; and that is in fact a storehouse of gunpowder that, if ignited, will start a great firework in the capital of the revolutionary Islam.” These “information roads,” I concluded, could play a significant role in the emergence of a new form of political society in Iran and beyond.

At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

A century after the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial by the Turkish state, there has emerged a notable and unprecedented interest in the Armenian past and present both in civil society discourse and scholarship in Turkey, accompanied by various reconciliation iniatives at the state and society levels. Observers have suggested that this increased engagement with Turkey's suppressed past is an outcome of its EU candidacy, the democratization reforms of the early 2000s, and the shockwave among liberal segments of Turkish society caused by the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. I argue that this shortsighted analysis, which completely ignores the Kurdish movement's transformative challenge to Turkish denialism since the 1980s, echoes the key fallacy of present discussions of Turkey's engagement with its past: compartmentalization and disjunction of interlinked state crimes.

My roundtable contribution inevitably starts with a critique of the field the scholarly utility of which we as contributors wish to defend. The study of the antique sciences (including the history of archaeology and heritage) still has marginal standing in science studies. So does the Middle East as a geographical region, which until recently enjoyed little scholarly interest in the field. The persistent Eurocentric research agenda of science studies has been questioned, however, with the recent call for a “global history of science.” This ambiguous term has triggered new methodological challenges, but it has also created new trenches.

The world is not flat, nor has it ever been, but empire's apologists have been claiming otherwise for a very long time. A full decade has passed since Thomas Friedman published his manifesto on behalf of neoliberal globalization. But if Friedman's reductionism and mangled metaphors still make him an easy target for critical scorn, his “brief history of the twenty-first century” offers a remarkably compact distillation of several key ideas that organize mainstream globalization discourse well beyond his fortified outpost on the op-ed page of The New York Times. The first is a presentist assertion that globalization is new, that a recent intensification of worldwide flows of capital, goods, information, and people represents a sharp rupture with the past. This historically dubious account of global connections in turn undergirds two further claims about the character of the transformations taking place in the current moment. Globalization, in Friedman's telling as in so many others, appears as a process of convergence, synchronization, and unification. And new technologies such as smart phones, laptops, and the Internet, themselves described as the unambiguous products of Western ingenuity, hold out the promise that this “flattening” of space will advance the spread not only of economic opportunity but also of liberal, secular values. Neither the forms of global connection and movement that Friedman purports to reveal nor his ways of writing about them, however, are as novel as his breathless exclamations would have us believe. It is these paired critical insights that provide the common thread between the five new histories of globalization and technology under consideration in this essay.

In the midst of World War I, a group of Ottoman scientists published a debate entitled “National Education” in the 1916 issue of the periodical Muallim (The Teacher). The exchange between the sociologist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) and the psychologist Satiʾ al-Husari (1882–1968) started out with different agendas for imperial education and culminated with an outburst regarding the definition of modern science. In his conclusive remarks, al-Husari declared: “I consider [his] way of thinking to be a form of metaphysics and mystics that resembles pantheism.” Al-Husari was a positivist who professed the exclusive authority of empirical data over all immaterial evidence acquired through metaphysics and mystical experience. Yet, his opponent was nothing less, and the accusation was all the more provocative because Gökalp believed that his positivist sociology could become the organizing principle of educational reform.

This short essay focuses on three issues: how science studies may facilitate the rapprochement between the philological study of scientific texts and Middle East history; how it may help us reconsider ambiguous if not “black-boxed” terms such as the “state,” “Islam,” and the “West”; and finally, how it may build thematic and theoretical bridges with other histories and geographies of science currently emerging from a more global, and not merely local, perspective.