Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class

Preface and Acknowledgments ix Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii Abbreviations and Acronymns xv CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: Modernity, Class, and the Architectures of Community 1 CHAPTER TWO: An Eastern Mediterranean City on the Eve of Revolution 31 SECTION I: Being Modern in a Time of Revolution: The Revolution of 1908 and the Beginnings of Middle-Class Politics (1908-1918) 55 CHAPTER THREE: Ottoman Precedents (I): Journalism, Voluntary Association, and the True Civilization of the Middle Class 68 CHAPTER FOUR: Ottoman Precedents (II): The Technologies of the Public Sphere and the Multiple Deaths of the Ottoman Citizen 95 SECTION II: Being Modern in a Moment of Anxiety: The Middle Class Makes Sense of a Postwar World (1918-1924)--Historicism, Nationalism, and Violence 121 CHAPTER FIVE: Rescuing the Arab from History: Halab, Orientalist Imaginings, Wilsonianism, and Early Arabism 134 CHAPTER SIX: The Persistence of Empire at the Moment of Its Collapse: Ottoman-Islamic Identity and New Men Rebels 160 CHAPTER SEVEN: Remembering the Great War: Allegory, Civic Virtue, and Conservative Reaction 185 SECTION III: Being Modern in an Era of Colonialism: Middle-Class Modernity and the Culture of the French Mandate for Syria (1925-1946) 210 CHAPTER EIGHT: Deferring to the A yan :The Middle Class and the Politics of Notables 222 CHAPTER NINE: Middle-Class Fascism and the Transformation of Civil Violence: Steel Shirts, White Badges, and the Last Qabaday 255 CHAPTER TEN: Not Quite Syrians: Aleppo's Communities of Collaboration 279 CHAPTER ELEVEN: Coda: The Incomplete Project of Middle-Class Modernity and the Paradox of Metropolitan Desire 299 Select Bibliography 309 Index 317