New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

In July 1958, U.S. Marines stormed the beach in Beirut, Lebanon, ready for combat. Farcically. they were greeted by vendors and sunbathers. Fortunately, the rest of their mission—helping to end Lebanon’s first civil war—went nearly as smoothly and successfully, thanks in large part to the skillful work of American diplomats on site, who helped arrange a compromise solution. Future American interventions in the region would not work out quite as well. Bruce Rydel’s new book Beirut 1958: How America's Wars in the Middle East Began (Brookings, 2019), tells the now-forgotten story (forgotten, that is, in the United States) of the first U.S. combat operation in the Middle East. President Eisenhower sent the Marines in the wake of a bloody coup in Iraq, a seismic event that altered politics not only of that country but eventually of the entire region. Eisenhower feared that the coup, along with other conspiracies and events that seemed mysterious back in Washington, threatened American interests in the Middle East.

Much has been written about the Crusades, the religiously-inspired wars that pockmarked the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet for all of the many books on the subject there has been surprisingly little focus on the men and the women who were entangled in these conflicts. In his book Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands (Viking, 2019), Dan Jones addresses this by detailing the role of key individuals played in these events. By drawing from a variety of perspectives, he shows how the Crusades was a different event depending upon one’s perspective, be that of a Norman ruler, a Byzantine princess, or a Muslim chronicler. Moreover, by expensing the scope of coverage beyond such traditional figures to include people such as the Norwegian king Sigurd I, Jones demonstrates the wide impact of the wars and the ways in which they drew in people from throughout Europe. From their stories, Jones shows how the purpose of the Crusades changed over time, as they reflected more the motivations of t

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions. The three had a common motive: their need to survive in a democratic age with their countries' prospects for economic growth uncertain. Mandelbaum further argues that the key to the return of peace lies in the advent of genuine democracy, inclu

Joanna Lillis’ Dark Shadows, Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan (I. B. Tauris, 2018) takes the reader on a penetrating, colourfully written journey into the recesses of a little known Central Asian nations on the frontier of tectonic shifts across Eurasia. Kazakhstan, a sparsely populated oil-rich former Soviet republic that shares borders with Russia and China that stretch thousands of kilometres, in which demographics amount to geopolitics, walks a tight rope in a world increasingly dominated by leaders who to varying degrees define their states in civilizational rather than national terms. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and stirring of unrest in two regions of Ukraine coupled with veiled threats uttered by Russian President Vladimir Putin raise the spectre of Kazakhstan’s worst nightmares. China’s brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims, including ethnic Kazakhs, in its troubled north-western province of Xinjiang fuels long-standing public suspicion of Chinese ambitions and put the government between a rock a

“Moderation in times of extremism is a revolutionary idea. It is a positive, courageous value, as opposed to a defeatist attitude. It is swimming against the tide, rather than following the crowd on a path obviously leading to the abyss. We need to create our own vision rather than just copy the vision of others.” -Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi In a time when Islam is increasingly identified by violent extremism and hostility towards Christians and Jews, Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi and his colleagues advocate for an Islam that is true to its Koranic foundations, which call for coexistence and cooperation with other religions. Daoudi took a group of Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz – a courageous assertion against the Holocaust denial rampant in Palestinian society, and an effort toward cultivating empathy. Daoudi paid a harsh price for the peaceful journey: he lost his job at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem as head of the libraries and director of the American Studies Institute, his car wa

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt's colonial economy and forms of subjectivity. Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperi

Building on nearly two decades of scholarship about sectarianism and communal relations in the Modern Middle East, Ussama Makdisi’s latest book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World(University of California Press, 2019) dispels the myth that the Middle East is inherently or inescapably sectarian and complicates the often overstated binary of “secular” and religious. Makdisi proposes a new paradigm for understanding the myriad visions of anti-sectarianism and pluralism in the region, which he calls “the ecumenical frame.” This capacious “ecumenical frame” includes political leaders and activists, intellectual elites, and ordinary people who worked – and still work – toward peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. Forged in the crucible of 19th century violence and political reform, this desire to reconcile the promises of unity and equal citizenship with the remarkable diversity of the Arab world has withstood war, colonialism, and authoritarian rule. Age of Coexis

In this new book, Revolution and its Discontents, Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s (of Goldsmiths University of London) studies the rise and evolution of reformist political thought in Iran and analyses the complex network of publications, study circles, and think tanks that encompassed a range of prominent politicians and intellectuals in the 1990s. The book maps maps and analyses a wide filed of political and ideological issues that are keys to understanding Iran’s revolutionary state. Among others, they include the ruling political theology of the ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’, the political elite’s engagement with questions of Islamic statehood, democracy, and constitutionalism, and their critiques of revolutionary agency and social transformation. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read

In today’s podcast, host Robert Elliott speaks with Dr. Perin Gürel about her new book The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey(Columbia University Press, 2017), which examines how Turkish perceptions of the United States intersected with debates around "westernization" in the twentieth century. In a 2001 poll, Turks ranked the United States highest when asked: "Which country is Turkey's best friend in international relations?" When the pollsters reversed the question―"Which country is Turkey's number one enemy in international relations?"―the United States came in second. How did Turkey's citizens come to hold such opposing views simultaneously? In The Limits of Westernization, Gürel explains this unique split and its echoes in contemporary U.S.-Turkey relations. Using Turkish and English sources, Gürel maps the reaction of Turks to the rise of the United States as a world-ordering power in the twentieth century. As Turkey transitioned from an empire to a nation-state, the countr

Guides have been written to the city of Cairo for generations. Whether they’re for foreigners who’ve come to the city or its residents. However, it might be safe to say thatA Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo (American University in Cairo Press, 2018) is a beast unto itself. It takes the names of streets in Central Cairo and uses them as a basis for its telling of Cairo’s urban history. Structured like a dictionary of sorts, it is the kind of book that can be read cover-to-cover or in snatches here and there. In this interview, we cover the origins of the project, how it was written, and ultimately what shapes the city of Cairo itself. Humphrey Davies is the translator of a number of Arabic novels, including The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (AUC Press, 2004) and Leg Over Leg by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (NYU Press 2014), in addition to novels by Naguib Mahfouz and Gamal al-Ghitani. He has twice been awarded the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Lesley Lababidi is

Differently than existing accounts that concentrate on Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, Kfir Cohen Lustig's Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary (Verso, 2019) suggests a new theoretical and historical approach to Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as to the contemporary system of world literature by accounting for the consequences of neoliberal globalization to literary form and its political import. The book proposes that until the neoliberal moment the difference in the socio-poetic form between Western Europe and Israel and Palestine lay in the concepts of autonomy and temporality: if in Western European societies autonomy is defined as an a-priori, ready-made property of the self-legislating subject, in Israel and Palestine, between the 1940s and the 1990s, autonomy was a collective product to be made in time. Autonomy here was the result of a social struggle with nature and with the “enemy” that subordinated the private to the publi

In his splendid military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Matthew Hughes of Brunel University shows how the British Army was so devastatingly effective against colonial rebellion in the mid to late 1930s by the Palestinian Arabs. The Army had a long tradition of pacification to draw upon to support operations, underpinned by the creation of an emergency Mandate / colonial state in Palestine. After conquering Palestine in 1917, the British established a civil Government that ruled by proclamation and, without any local legislature, the colonial authorities codified in law norms of collective punishment that the Army used in 1936. The Army used 'lawfare', emergency legislation enabled by the colonial state, to grind out the rebellion. Soldiers with support from the RAF launched kinetic operations to search and destroy rebel band

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpackin

The enterprise of journalism is in crisis. Today’s journalists face accusations of “fake news” on the one hand, and harassment, arrest, and even the murder of reporters on the other. At the same time, we who rely on journalists for information, are constantly bombarded by breaking news. Confronted by video and print updates in real time, it is increasingly challenging to keep up with, let alone understand, world events. Barrels of information continually roll towards us; how can we find the time and space to stop and consider – to digest the content of news and to reflect on what it all means? Seen through the whirlwind of information, the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, can appear more confusing and chaotic than ever. Enter Seth Frantzman. His new book After Isis: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East (Gefen House Publishing, 2019) is just what is needed to help deal with the news confusion. The brutal Syrian civil war and the war against Isis left hundreds of thousands dead

In Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019), Charlie Laderman exposes the way that imperial ambitions suffused the ideas and practices of turn-of-century humanitarian intervention. Beginning his story in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire, Dr. Laderman demonstrates how the successive waves of violence perpetrated against Armenian Christians provoked new ways of thinking about imperial governance, the practice of intervening on humanitarian grounds, and notions of “civilization” itself. Laderman’s book opens in the mid-19th century Ottoman Empire, when both Eastern and Western European states stood poised to further destabilize the Ottoman government with repeated interventions and invasions into its territory, ostensibly on behalf of the Ottoman Empire’s non-Muslim subjects. The Ottoman administration’s precarity, coupled with intensifying religious and ethnic tensions along the Empire’s far-flung borders

The "Arab Spring" shook the world in 2011, revealing profound dissatisfaction throughout the Middle East and North Africa, as people throughout the region took to the streets demanding dramatic political change. The uprisings have been analyzed by scholars, journalists, and other observers of the region from many angles, but the ideas of the revolution have received comparatively less attention. In her pathbreaking book, Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (Columbia University Press, 2019), Elizabeth S. Kassab shows her readers that the demands for human dignity, freedom, and political participation had been robustly discussed by intellectuals in Syria and Egypt during the 1990s and 2000s. She examines how debates about tanwir, or “enlightenment” in English, unfolded under the thumb of powerful, omnipresent states. By exploring the rich intellectual and cultural contexts of these tanwir debates, Kassab firmly and persuasively rebuts the notion that calls for democratic refo

Did the early Christians believe their myths? Like most ancient—and modern—people, early Christians made efforts to present their myths in the most believable ways. In How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (Yale University Press, 2019), M. David Litwa explores how and why what later became the four canonical gospels take on a historical cast that remains vitally important for many Christians today. Offering an in-depth comparison with other Greco-Roman stories that have been shaped to seem like history, Litwa shows how the evangelists responded to the pressures of Greco-Roman literary culture by using well-known historiographical tropes such as the mention of famous rulers and kings, geographical notices, the introduction of eyewitnesses, vivid presentation, alternative reports, and so on. In this way, the evangelists deliberately shaped myths about Jesus into historical discourse to maximize their believability for ancient audiences. Dr. M. David Litwa is a scholar of ancient Mediterr

Sometimes it seems that there’s nothing left to say about mass violence in the 20th century.  But the new edited volume Let Them Not Return: Sayfo – The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire (Berghahn Books, 2017), draws our attention to a conflict that even most scholars know little about—the persecution and killing of Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians during and after the First World War. In the book, editors David Gaunt, Naures Atto, Soner O. Barthoma, provide a broad range of perspectives.  With so little known about the violence, they provide historical perspectives on the long-term origins, analyses of individual and corporate responses, and reflections on the long term memory and impact of the conflict. The book functions in some ways like an invitation—an invitation to learn something about peoples and suffering about which we know little, an invitation to consider how this violence should reshape how we think about the region during the first quar

Why was a Crusade that was initially meant for Syria end up in Tunis? How did the aspirations of the King of France and the Mamluk Sultan, the King of Sicily and the Hafsid Emir of Tunis, get entangled in the years following the Mongol invasion of the Middle East? More broadly, how should we approach the Crusades, a series of events that have traditionally focused on either the European or the Near Eastern perspectives, and can these perspectives become integrated into a more wholistic, Mediterranean approach? In The Tunis Crusade of 1270: a Mediterranean History (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dr. Michael Lower, professor of History at the University of Minnesota, offers a broad and deep dive into the Tunis Crusade, an unlikely but impactful moment of Mediterranean History. In our conversation, Michael and I touch upon traditional and new methodological approaches to the Crusades, the important roles played by Mediterranean rulers and the political, religious, and economic pressures that shaped their decisi