THE CENTER FOR MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES NEWS HARVARD UNIVERSITY 2019–20 3 LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR A message from CMES Acting Director Cemal Kafadar 5 NEWS AND NOTES New faculty; fall reception; Q&A with Rosie Bsheer; updates from faculty, students, alumni, and visiting researchers; faculty books; student dispatches from Turkey, Tunisia, and Florence; virtual commencement 39 EVENT HIGHLIGHTS Lectures, workshops, and conferences ON THE COVER: Sunrise in Sidi Bou Said, by Hacı Osman “Ozzy” Gündüz LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR 2019–20 HIGHLIGHTS A message from 2019-20 CMES Acting Director Cemal Kafadar The original script made it look easy. I was Academy. Her cohort includes another going to be Acting Director for a year, while dear CMES friend and former faculty who Bill Granara would enjoy his hard-earned is now in the other Cambridge, namely sabbatical leave. The first eight months Khaled Fahmy. Kudos to them both! were indeed smooth, thanks above all to Bill Granara’s new book, Narrating our administrative staff, working with great Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval professionalism and efficiency under (to Mediterranean World, was the true delicacy me) Lady Lauren Montague. Speaking of of fall 2019. Why should I be embarrassed to our staff colleagues, the fall opened with promote it? Gülru and I took it along on our the felicitous news that Carol Ann Young journey to Sicily in December, and it turned had given birth to Olive, whose visits to the out to be a fabulous travel companion. I experimented with something new in Center were the most cheerful moments of It was a great joy to have my first full terms of my own seminars, and that was the semester—no contest. year of colleagueship with Rosie Bsheer the highlight of the year for me as a history In September, the book I co-edited with at the Center and to see her take charge of teacher. No, make that the highlight of Gülru Necipoğlu and Cornell Fleischer, of the her teaching and advising responsibilities several years. Beshara Doumani, a colleague University of Chicago, arrived from Leiden with such poise and generosity. We sorely at Brown University, and I structured a in a handsome set of two volumes. Treasures needed a modern Middle East historian, seminar around a set of recent books in of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman and we lucked out by having Rosie in that early modern and modern Middle East Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4) is the product role. The public lecture series that she history, alternating the venue for each of a group project launched in 2014 with a organized, inviting authors of some exciting week’s session between Cambridge and workshop at Harvard, to offer a detailed anal- new books in Middle East studies, was an Providence. We provided the syllabus and ysis of the library collection of the Topkapı intellectual feast, well attended by engaged led the discussion, but it was the brilliant Palace through its inventory from 1502 to audiences. (Spoiler alert: the field will be Middle East history students (from both 1504, listing more than seven thousand titles blessed with an accomplished and stun- Brown and Harvard) who provided the in different disciplines. The twenty-two ningly original new book this fall, namely intellectual vibrancy that became our essays on the intellectual life of the empire Rosie’s own volume on Saudi Arabia.) weekly fix. CMES’s logistical support was include those of Harvard colleagues Khaled Working with Jesse Howell, CMES’s essential in pulling this traveling circus off. El-Rouayheb, Mohsen Goudarzi, and Himmet Academic Programs Manager, was another Our J-Term programs in Tunisia and Taşkömür and CMES alumni Aleksandar first-full-year colleagueship pleasure. Not Turkey went as usual, namely superbly, Shopov and Hüseyin Yilmaz, with contribu- only did he and I and Lauren collaborate thanks to Sihem Lamine and Jesse Howell, tions by Hesna Ergun Taşkömür and CMES and conspire regularly, but he and I also respectively. students Didar Akbulut and Eda Özel. co-ordinated the proseminar for our superb February opened the second semester In recognition of her “outstanding con- cohort of first-semester AM students, who nicely with two big events. Derek Penslar, tributions to subjects within the humanities gave an engaging and entertaining hard who published his eagerly awaited book on and social sciences,” Gülru Necipoğlu was time to different CMES faculty members Theodor Herzl that month, hosted Noam named Corresponding Fellow of the British and guests each week. Shuster-Eliassi, a wizard comedian who 2019–20 | CMESNEWS 3 LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR knows how to turns matters of gravity into he felt, and he told me that he was “robbed the least, and by the time it was announced, the stuff of hilarity with biting humor and of his senior year experience that he had the writ was on the wall. daring. The room was packed, of course, been looking forward to for four years.” As if the pandemic was not enough, there and bursting with laughter. But the other Neither he nor I doubted the wisdom of was another—dare I say, bigger—cataclysmic big event had an audience flowing into the the University’s decision, but we could not event to unfold. On May 23, first day of the corridors, because colleagues and students clear the heavy air of the feeling of loss that Eid, I gave an interview to Medyascope, a from many different parts of the university the circumstances dished up. Turkish web news channel, where we spoke came together to celebrate and discuss We were all robbed of the spring 2020 about pandemics in the past and our current Bill’s book on Sicily. Engaged does not experience. Online teaching was odd but circumstance, simply thinking of coronavirus begin to describe the audience, carried by not too bad, and in fact enjoyable in its and the strange “normal” of the lockdown. Bill’s passion about his subject. own right at times. Given the absence of At some point, I happened to mention that I We had a fabulous lineup for the rest of bodily travel, it also inspired us to invite had read about the fact that a far larger num- the spring: concerts (Ara and Onno Dinkjian, a “commencement speaker” for our own ber of Black than White Americans were Ezgi Stump); film opening (Zeynep Dadak’s graduating students for the first time. hit by the virus, and added that “the virus is Invisible to the Eye, based on Eremya The award-winning author–intellectual working on the major fault-line of American Kömürjian’s seventeenth-century account Leila Slimani kindly agreed and dazzlingly society, the racial divide.” That much was of Istanbul); a visit by a celebrated author delivered. But nothing, absolutely nothing, and is obvious to anyone following the news. (Kapka Kassabova); book launches (CMES can replace the person-to-person face-to- But how could any of us have known what alum Ayfer Karakaya-Stump; the Harvard face corporeal experience of a university, we May 25 would bring and lead to? team of our Treasures of Knowledge); all realized anew. The rest of the spring and I need not go over the events since the distinguished lectures; and more. summer, faculty and staff colleagues in the tragic murder of George Floyd on that And then came March 2020. I’d better administration and on various committees fateful day. We have posted a letter to our be brief about it. My memory of those days worked tirelessly to articulate and keep CMES community that is on our website. is foggy on many details but vivid when refining new regulations regarding access to And even that does not do it for a full it comes to the feeling of uncanniness and mobility on campus. account of the spring and summer. Having that was growing by the hour, as news Our developing fluency with Zoom already acquired unmatched notoriety circulated about an unparalleled challenge allowed us to bring together our globally by the summer, the year 2020 also gave that we were facing and unprecedented dispersed PhD students for a three-part us the devastation in Beirut, where some decisions that had to be made. It was the workshop titled Research and Disruption. dear members of our community, and an saddest moment in my thirty-five years as Students were able to share the challenges extended family of sorts, friends, friends of a teacher when I saw the faces of students of conducting research abroad at a time friends, former visitors, colleagues, students, during those few days when they were still when the pandemic (in tandem with his- happened to be witnesses to the tragedy and around but had been told that the campus toric floods in one case) caused closures of suffered the trauma. Words do not do much would need to be vacated. I remember essential libraries and archives, disrupting in these instances, but I know that each one running into a senior I know in the lobby all well-laid plans and research expecta- of us, wherever we are, would like to ex- of Widener Library. Were we still shaking tions. Seeing their committment and re- press that we share their loss and their deep hands? We certainly were not wearing sourcefulness in the face of such obstacles mourning and look forward to the revival of masks yet. One could still take for granted was a jolt of energy for all of us. that glorious city of invincible citizens. an encounter with a warm human touch in The wait for the University’s decision How I wish we had Roger with us for that sumptuous setting.