Domesticating the Turks, Staging Otherness. The Tradition of Embodying the Turks, the Parata dei Turchi of Potenza and Its Narration in 20th-Century Folkloric Descriptions

The aim of the essay is to analyse the presence of Oriental characters in the patron saint’s Feast of San Gerardo, taking place in the city of Potenza on 29 May. After offering an insight into the integration of Oriental characters into Italian early modern culture, the paper will first focus on the ‘historicity’ of the Parata dei Turchi and its carnivalesque function. It will then move to the way in which the Turks were represented between the 19th and 20th centuries — that is, the period from which sources present it as an already long-established tradition — seeking to offer a contribution to the interpretation of the tradition of the parading of Turkish masks on the annual procession of San Gerardo.

An Emblematic Case in the Kingdom of Iraq: the Jewish Commander in Charge of the Baghdad Arsenal, Yamen Yousef, from Integration in Nation-Building to Exclusion

This article illustrates aspects of modern Iraqi history, being concerned with the life and career of Yamen Yousef (Yāmēn Yūsif, Hebrew name: Yāmīn Ṣiyyōn [ben] Yōsēf [ben] Nissīm), an officer in the army of the Kingdom of Iraq, who was the commander in charge of the Baghdad Royal Arsenal in the 1930s, and earlier on had been one of the three young officers made to proclaim Iraq’s first king during the coronation ceremony. That up to the late 1930s he was commander in charge of the Baghdad Royal Arsenal is in retrospect surprising (and that late in that decade a false charge was made against him by the far right is unsurprising), in consideration of rising animosity towards his ethno-religious identity. This came to a breaking point when he resigned, thus reverting from the acquired status of a career in the service of the state, to private bourgeoisie: this was happening in the first decade of full independence, when Jewish civil servants were being dismissed in their droves, after having been co-opted into the process of nation-building, owing to their educational qualifications giving them for a while an advantage. This study contributes novel data and facets that enable a fairly novel, and certainly more nuanced view of intercommunal relations in Iraq from late Ottoman times throughout the Hashemite monarchy (and beyond).

A Nineteenth-Century Blueprint for Recasting the Muslim Mindset in British India

The reformist endeavour famously known as the Aligarh Movement, initiated by the prominent Muslim intellectual Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḫān in the wake of the fateful happenings of 1857, indisputably represents a significant modernist movement among Indian Muslims in nineteenth-century British India. Despite having a limited base among the community, given its elitist character, the role that this movement played in shaping the Muslims’ destiny during the twentieth century cannot be overstated. As a reformist project, this movement set as its main objective the remodelling of the Muslim mindset as well as the resuscitation of the hitherto moribund community to bring it back to the mainstream. In line with this intention, the reform-minded Sayyid Aḥmad put forward an elaborate three-pronged scheme. This article, therefore, seeks to shed light on the Aligarh’s ambitious programme which targeted every aspect of Muslim life, political, religious and socio-cultural.