Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Islamic and West Asian Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies in 2015 and has since taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Freiburg, and Frankfurt. Simon works on transnational connections between South Asia and the Middle East as well as on global Islam in the modern period. His last monograph In a Pure Muslim Land. Shi‘ism between Pakistan and the Middle East was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2019. He is currently working on a global history of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Thomas Pierret is a Senior Researcher at Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence, France. He holds a PhD in Political science from Sciences Po Paris and the University of Louvain. He was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (2011-2017) and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He focuses on politics and religion in modern Syria. He is the author of Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Islam in Post-Ottoman Syria (Oxford University Press, 2016), as well as the editor of Ethnographies of Islam. Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Middle Easterners and North Africans have habitually projected their fears and hopes onto the future, and tried to realise utopias. How they did so, and why: that is the remit of this path-breaking volume, whose fascinating journey ranges from Tunisia to Iran and from atoms via prisons to desert cities.

• List of Figures and TablesAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: The Three Ages of Utopianism in the Modern Middle East and North AfricaThomas Pierret and Simon Wolfgang FuchsI. Aspirations of the Liberal Age 1. The Persian Dreams: The Constitutional Revolution and Fantasising over Lost and Envisaged UtopiasBehzad Zerehdaran2. Egypt 3105 CE: Salama Musa’s Views on UtopiaRuben SchenzleII. Visions of High Modernity 3. The Idea of Secularism in Transcendent Turkish UtopiasRahime Çokay Nebioğlu4. The City is an Educator: Utopianism, Urbanism and the Creation of Republican AnkaraIsaac Hand5. Atomic Utopias in Egypt: Decolonisation, Techno-nationalism and Popular Science, 1945-50Hebatalla Taha and Pelle Valetin OlsenIII. The City of God: Islamic Perspectives 6. Paradise on Earth: How the Muslim Brotherhood Built a ‘Virtuous City’ (Madina Fadila) in ‘Abd al-Nasir’s PrisonsMathias Ghyoot7. The Utopian Caliphate: What Does the Caliphate Mean for the People?Mujtaba Ali IsaniIV. Revolutionary Horizons and Authoritarian Dreams after the Radical Age8. Practicing Utopia – Governing Effects of Democratic Confederalist Discourse in North and East SyriaJulia Wartmann 9. Democracy Imagined from Below: An Analysis of the Revolutionary Imaginaries of the Tunisian Uprisings after 2011Nabila Abbas10. Borrowing Faces, Re-enacting Modernity: On a Photonovel by Fehras Publishing PracticesYazan Alloujami11. Saudi’s NEOM: A New ‘Utopian City’ Gluing the Jewel to the CrownHend Aly Conclusion: From Utopian Dreams to Pragmatic Alter-citizenship and Low-key Utopias?Stéphanie Latte Abdallah and Simone SperaSelected BibliographyIndex