New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

When European powers carved political borders across the Middle East following World War I, a curious event in the international drug trade occurred: Palestine became the most important hashish waystation in the region and a thriving market for consumption. British and French colonial authorities utterly failed to control the illicit trade, raising questions about the legitimacy of their mandatory regimes. The creation of the Israeli state, too, had little effect to curb illicit trade. By the 1960s, drug trade had become a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and drug use widespread. Intoxicating Zion: A Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel (Stanford UP, 2020) is the first book to tell the story of hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Trafficking, use, and regulation; race, gender, and class; colonialism and nation-building all weave together in Haggai Ram's social history of the drug from the 1920s to the aftermath of the 1967 War. The hashish trade encompassed

How has the Syrian regime been able to bear the brunt of the challenges raised against it? And, what can we learn about the seductions of authoritarian politics more generally from the study of Syria? These questions animate Lisa Wedeen’s Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her answers to them journey far beyond narrow causal inferences about the war in Syria, into an empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated account of the part that ideology as form plays in the making of subjects. Drawing on a decade of multi-sited ethnography, Wedeen traverses the day-to-day violence of war to attend to how Syrians are interpolated into arrangements for political domination through logics of disavowal. Weaving her interlocutors’ cultural products and interpretations of conditions in Syria together with work by Althusser, Arendt and Wittgenstein, she offers a complex and unsettling account of how people are brought into deeply ambivalent relationshi

The African Red Sea Littoral, currently divided between Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, is one of the poorest regions in the world. But the pastoralist communities indigenous to this region were not always poor—historically, they had access to a variety of resources that allowed them to prosper in the harsh, arid environment. This access was mediated by a robust moral economy of pastoralism that acted as a social safety net.  In The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640–1945 (Palgrave, 2018), Steven Serels charts the erosion of this moral economy, a slow-moving process that began during the Little Ice Age mega-drought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and continued through the devastating famines of the twentieth century. By examining mass sedentarization after the Second World War as merely the latest manifestation of an inter-generational environmental and economic crisis, this book offers an innovative lens for understanding poverty in northeastern Africa within the Indian

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer & Poetry in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Niloofar Haeri is a stunning and absorbing ethnography of the lived ritual experiences of contemporary Iranian women. The place of Persian poetry, especially in the tradition of erfan or mysticism, is central to many features of Iranian life, be it in school curriculum for children, who learn to recite these poems when they are young, or at family gatherings over meal. Poetry, particularly, informs other aspects of ritual life, namely prayer or namaz, and do’a (supplication). By capturing conversations that unfold during Qur’an and poetry classes, Haeri showcases how a group of educated, middle-class women encounter, engage, and embody the lived legacies of classical poetry of Rumi, Hafez, Saadi and many more in their day to day lives. In highlighting these intimate moments of conversation with God (do’a) or through the use of prayers composed by the Imams, Haeri highlights how prayer and ritual acts ebb a

Since the early twentieth-century, Kurds have challenged the borders and national identities of the states they inhabit. Nowhere is this more evident than in their promotion of the 'Map of Greater Kurdistan', an ideal of a unified Kurdish homeland in an ethnically and geographically complex region. This powerful image is embedded in the consciousness of the Kurdish people, both within the region and, perhaps even more strongly, in the diaspora.  Addressing the lack of rigorous research and analysis of Kurdish politics from an international perspective, Zeynep Kaya focuses on self-determination, territorial identity and international norms to suggest how these imaginations of homelands have been socially, politically and historically constructed (much like the state territories the Kurds inhabit), as opposed to their perception of being natural, perennial or intrinsic. Adopting a non-political approach to notions of nationhood and territoriality, Mapping Kurdistan: Territory, Self-Determination and Nationalism

Jeremy Pressman is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut. Jeremy is the author of The Sword is Not Enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the Limits of Military Force (Manchester UP, 2020), an exploration of the dominance of military force as the go-to option for political and social leaders on both sides of the Arab Israeli conflict. In our discussion, Jeremy and I discuss why violence is the default preference among some actors not just in the Arab Israeli conflict but in the realm of international relations. We talk about what can and cannot be achieved by violence, and also discuss why violence will never provide a resolution to the conflict. We also discuss the ideologically air-tight explanations upon which each side can draw that can convince people that the other side can never be trusted, and some of the steps that leaders can take to counteract this dangerous fear. The Sword is Not Enough is published by Manchester University Press in

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo? This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews. But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Pr

A remarkable view of one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City (FSG, 2017) is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem. The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler's Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine's chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, this "most private of public servants" finds himself working under the often stifling and violent conditions of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today's Jerusalem searching for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once a fixture on the local scene, Houris i

This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929-1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida's book Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, 2020) links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence. Based on the survivors' testimonies, wh

Contemporary historians have searched for the historical Muhammad along many paths. In Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (University of California Press, 2020), Sean Anthony, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, recommends employing non-Muslim and Muslim sources in tandem in order to view a fuller landscape of Late Antiquity. Anthony revisits the earliest Arabic materials, including the Qur’an, epigraphic and archeological evidence, as well as contemporaneous non-Muslim sources, and accounts preserved in the sira-maghazi literature. These make up the four cardinal sources for his historical and philological method. Anthony’s book both introduces a comprehensive portrait of the sources available for understanding Muhammad in his time period, as well as demonstrates how we can arrive at new insights through a “lateral” reading across the Late Antique period. In our conversation we discuss the earliest evidence mentioning Muhammad, non-Mus

The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender (Routledge, 2020), edited by Justine Howe, includes an excellent introduction to Islam and gender as well as to the volume and 31 content chapters, written by national and international, and established and emerging scholars. It encompasses a wide range of scholarship on many themes in the study of gender and Islam, including sex, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, women’s lived experiences, female authority, fertility, and queerness. It is organized in seven parts, which are: foundational texts in historical and contemporary contexts; sex, sexuality, and gender difference; political and religious displacements; negotiating law, ethics, and normativity; vulnerability, care, and violence in Muslim families; and representation, commodification, and popular culture. Each section utilizes various approaches, theories, and methods in understanding Islam, and examines key questions and debates in the specific area the chapters fall in.  The book makes for an excellent int

Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey (University of California Press, 2020) is an exploration of “the ways in which . . .veterans’ gendered and classed experiences of warfare and disability are hardened into politics . . .how self, community, and the world-making practices of disabled veterans get tangled up with ultranationalist politics in contemporary Turkey.” Drawing on extensive interviews and participant observations, anthropologist Salih Can Açıksöz traces the experiences of veterans of Turkey’s ongoing counter-guerilla warfare in the country’s predominantly Kurdish eastern region. In Turkey, military service is mandatory, part of a “heteropatriarchal contract” between men and the state. Injury in wartime confers on veterans the status of gazi, meaning both “wounded soldier” and “holy warrior.” Yet military “operations” in southeast Turkey are not officially recognized as war, and disabling injuries in Turkey’s “deeply ableist society” deny veterans the implicit

Land and Maritime Empires in the Indian Ocean (Educatt, 2017) reconceptualizes the history of the Indian Ocean through the themes of mobility, encounters, empires, and slavery. The book aims to reshape the historical understanding of Africa and Asia. It approaches Afro-Asiatic connections from different methodological perspectives. Nicolini and de Silva Jayasuriya have reread the Indian Ocean history's role away from traditional politics and international relations. They stated in the introduction: “We are both aware that the study of the history of the Indian Ocean can no longer be considered merely as hagiographic reconstructions, but must take into consideration a number of historical-political-institutional aspects. These include the presence of different cultural, social, and religious groups, together with the affirmation of the Omani Ibadites dominance between the mid-seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. the fundamental influence of the Indian mercantile and other Asian communitie

In Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Roland Betancourt reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, the book offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race. Weaving together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts, Betancourt investigates depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of

What is the status of Muslim Americans in American democracy? Dr. Nazita Lajevardi’s superb new study concludes they are ‘outsiders at home.’ In Outsiders at Homes: The Politics of American Islamophobia published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, Dr. Lajevardi uses a combination of quantitative methods – including survey experiments, field experiments, and textual analysis of media transcripts – to find that the citizenship and inclusion of American Muslims is inhibited because Muslim Americans are viewed negatively by the public, portrayed negatively by the media, and treated negatively by political elites. The book portrays Muslim American citizenship as grudgingly bestowed and remarkably insecure – and highlights the extent to which American Muslims are aware of their exclusion and precarity and how that awareness affects their political behavior. Dr. Nazita Lajevardi is an attorney and assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University. Her research has been featured in The Atlanti

In the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices, and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwards to Mozambique, Madagascar, and Cape Town. Through an investigation of the texts, ritual practices, and scholarly networks that went alongside Sufi expansion, Anne K. Bang's Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform (Brill, 2014) places religious change in the western Indian Ocean within the wider framework of Islamic reform. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at al

Visitors around the world have travelled to Europe to see the tall spires and stained glass windows of the continent’s Gothic cathedrals: in Cologne, Chartres, Milan, Florence, York and Paris. The trappings of Gothic architecture have become shorthand for “medieval Europe”. Yet in Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (Hurst: 2020), Diana Darke investigates the Islamic origins of Gothic architecture, tracing its history through pre-Islamic Syria through the Islamic empires to the tall European cathedrals between the 12th and 17th centuries. The book sold out on its first day of sale, in part due to its review in The Guardian, which called the book "an exhilarating, meticulously researched book that sheds light on centuries of borrowing." In this interivew, Diana Darke and I talk about the origins of what we consider to be “Gothic architecture”, how those styles came to Europe, how this history of cultural and intellectual exchange may have gotten lost, and what we miss when we cod

David Rundell brings to his book, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads (I. B. Tauris, 2020), a granular analysis and insider’s understanding of the inner workings of the kingdom garnered as a US foreign service officer who served a total of 15 years in the country. Rundell skilfully weaves history into a multi-layered portrait of the transformation for good and bad that Saudi Arabia is experiencing under King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The former diplomat illustrates Salman’s long-standing focus on combatting corruption with the picture he paints of his governing of the Saudi capital Riyadh for nearly five decades before ascending to the throne. Anti-corruption has played a dramatic role since Salman became king in solidifying and concentrating power in the kingdom and breaking with a past of slow and gradual change, introducing instead rapid reforms with little consultation. To do so, Salman picked his son, Mohammed, as crown prince because he saw in him a bulldozer with the nee

The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History (Bloomsbury, 2016) offers an overview of the history of Saudi Arabia and the five Persian/Arabian Gulf states that emerged from British rule between 1961 and 1971--including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The book synthesized the works of many academics, all experts in their field to bring forward a book that is as comprehensive as possible about the history of the region. It has 11 chapter and all but one chapter are organized into two sections. The first section provides a narrative of the the topic and the second a bibliographic overview. The scope of the book is vast but predominantly focus on the the history of the gulf from the 1800s to roughly the 1970s and in some cases the 80s. A general theme that the book centers around is that historically speaking, the gulf was interconnected within itself, as Arabs and Persians and other respective ethnic groups, intermixed, traded, fought and married within themselves. Henc

How was the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim communities theologically and spatially imagined in the premodern world? How did religious hierarchies map onto notions of place and spatial distinction and hierarchies? In her dazzling new book Minding their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma (Brill, 2020), Antonia Bosanquet addresses these questions through a detailed and theoretically charged reading of the famous and crucially important legal text/compendium Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma by Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawzīyah (d.1350). Bosanquet forcefully argues that one must approach this text not just as a legal compendium, but as a critical repository of premodern Muslim social imaginaries on the question of interreligious difference. In our conversation, we discuss a range of issues including literary precedents for Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma, spatial mappings and religious hierarchies, “relational” space and everyday Muslim-non-Muslim encounters, and the eschatological status of no