Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

Chapter 1 narrates a history of Muslim presence in Asante. Drawing on oral histories, interviews, archival records, and secondary literature, I trace this history since the early eighteenth century. Originating from across the West African subregion, Muslim migrants have been present as a minority in Asante at least since the foundation of the Asante dominion in around 1700. Throughout the Asante dominion, theirs was a small community of Dioula living at the royal court. Under colonial rule, numerous Muslim traders and labourers from the northern regions moved into Asante and founded zongos across the region. In the process, Hausa displaced Dioula as the hegemonic group, and the Qadiriyya order became the predominant Islamic group in the zongos. During the early twentieth century, the Qadiriyya were supplanted by the Tijaniyya, who held Islamic hegemony until the 1970s, when they came under open attack by the reformist Sunna. Up to the present, both groups have struggled for Islamic hegemony in the zongos. As I argue, the current diversity of lived Islam in the zongos is at once informed by this changing history and informs its divergent and contested narrations, which are part of and co-shape the discursive tradition of this religion.

Shifting the analytical lens beyond Iran, Chapter 7 “Africa (1985–2013)” traces the history and evolution of the IRI’s foreign policy and RJ’s developmental activities in sub-Saharan Africa between the 1980s and the 2000s. Contrary to common assumptions, the de-radicalization of the IRI’s foreign policy in Africa began not under the pragmatists in the early 1990s, but under the rightists or conservatives in the mid-1980s. This period marked the first time that the IRI instrumentalized development to advance its strategic interests in Africa – a policy that has continued despite the factionalization of the IRI’s political elite. The chapter is the first to investigate the history and activities of RJ in Africa. It posits that development has enabled the IRI to make significant inroads into the continent due to its sizeable agrarian economies, widespread rural poverty, and formidable developmental challenges.