Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa

by Simon Wolfgang Fuchs (Editor), Thomas Pierret (Editor)

Overview

This is the first systematic exploration of the diversity of utopian thought and practice in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Beyond intellectual debates, utopianism has infused the many ideologies that have shaped contentious politics and governance in the region, from state formation to revolutionary transformations, conflicts, and the recent authoritarian resurgence. Drawing on case studies from Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, contributors address a broad array of utopian visions pertaining to political ideologies such as liberalism, secularism, Islamic revivalism, and socialism, but also to fields of expertise and technologies such as urbanism, the atom, and artificial intelligence. Likewise, they acknowledge the diversity of players that partake in the production of utopias, including writers, ideologues, activists, statesmen, experts, artists, and social media users. Moreover, authors consider both imaginaries promoted by challengers to the incumbents, and visions that serve the consolidation of authoritarianism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399537735
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2025
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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 Universityies 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 Universityé, 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 UniversityPress, 2013) and Islam in Post-Ottoman Syria (Oxford UniversityPress, 2016), as well as the editor of Ethnographies of Islam. Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2012).

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: The Three Ages of Utopianism in the Modern Middle East and North Africa
Thomas Pierret and Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

I. Aspirations of the Liberal Age
1. The Persian Dreams: The Constitutional Revolution and Fantasising over Lost and Envisaged Utopias
Behzad Zerehdaran
2. Egypt 3105 CE: Salama Musa’s Views on Utopia
Ruben Schenzle

II. Visions of High Modernity
3. The Idea of Secularism in Transcendent Turkish Utopias
Rahime Çokay Nebioğlu
4. The City is an Educator: Utopianism, Urbanism and the Creation of Republican Ankara
Isaac Hand
5. Atomic Utopias in Egypt: Decolonisation, Techno-nationalism and Popular Science, 1945-50
Hebatalla Taha and Pelle Valetin Olsen

III. 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 Prisons
Mathias Ghyoot
7. The Utopian Caliphate: What Does the Caliphate Mean for the People?
Mujtaba Ali Isani

IV. Revolutionary Horizons and Authoritarian Dreams after the Radical Age
8. Practicing Utopia – Governing Effects of Democratic Confederalist Discourse in North and East Syria
Julia Wartmann
9. Democracy Imagined from Below: An Analysis of the Revolutionary Imaginaries of the Tunisian Uprisings after 2011
Nabila Abbas
10. Borrowing Faces, Re-enacting Modernity: On a Photonovel by Fehras Publishing Practices
Yazan Alloujami
11. Saudi’s NEOM: A New ‘Utopian City’ Gluing the Jewel to the Crown
Hend Aly

Conclusion: From Utopian Dreams to Pragmatic Alter-citizenship and Low-key Utopias?
Stéphanie Latte Abdallah and Simone Spera

Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

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.

Cyrus Schayegh