New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

In Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Ian Black, the former Middle East Editor of the Guardian, offers a comprehensive view of the past and present of what would ultimately become known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on a range of sources, the book aims to offer a balanced and clear narrative of a history that has become infamously contested. 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 more of Yadgar’s work here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), looks specifically at the larger context of Palestinian citizens of Israel, those Palestinians who stayed behind after the 1948 war simultaneously created the state of Israel and created refugees out of thousands of Palestinians. Brothers Apart looks at their position within Israeli society, their intellectual production, and their relationship to the greater Arab world. Nassar also examines the relationship between different ideologies amongst these Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as the issue of Palestinian resistance. She thus tells the story of a people who are caught between different intellectual and political commitments, yet who are also dedicated to fighting for their rights within Israeli society and

Who are the American Jews behind many of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank? This is the question that Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, seeks to answer in her new book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Harvard University Press, 2017). By analyzing archival documents along with periodicals, internet sources, and a wealth of self-conducted interviews, Hirschhorn concludes that many American-Israeli settlers are not the messianic, ultra-right-wing fanatics that stereotypes suggest. Instead, the majority come from liberal American backgrounds, are highly-educated, and have conservative—but rarely Orthodox—Jewish backgrounds. What is more, she argues, their actions, motives, and self-conceptualizations are reflective of the evolution of American and Israeli Jewish identities over time. Sara Hirschhorn is University Research Lecturer in Israel Studies at the University of Oxford and Sidney Brichto Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and J

In the Arab world, photography is often tied to the modernizing efforts of imperial and colonial powers. However, indigenous photography was itself a major aspect of the cultural and social lives of Middle Eastern societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016) tells that story, focusing primarily on portraiture and those that took portraits. Sheehi examines the formalism of portraits in relation to changing notions of class, questioning whether or not portrait photography were creating new forms of sociability or vice versa. But photography is also another way Arab modernity was in relation to Ottomanism: The Arab Imago looks at how portrait studios developed in Istanbul and beyond, often operated by Armenian and Greek Orthodox photographers. The Arab Imago integrates photography, modernity, and the banal to give us one of the first histories of photography in the Middle Ea

Sufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2017), has produced a primer that will both challenge and reinforce many of the assumptions we’ve made in the study of Islamic mysticism. Knysh walks us through how to define Sufism, the origins of Sufism (including the influence of the Hellenic world), how texts fit into our consideration of Sufism, contemporary developments in Sufism, and more. He places this within the framework of outsiders and insiders (to Sufism), challenging us to understand better how the study of Sufism itself came into being. The entire book itself is in conversation, not simply with theoretical debates in Islamic studies and the study of religion, but also the greater field of history. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language

The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vigor to the violence and pain of that conflict. Indeed, the French state only officially recognized the war as a war in 1999. Claire Eldridge‘s From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2016) interrogates the war’s legacies by focusing on the French settlers and the native military and civilian auxiliaries who fled Algeria in the thousands as French colonialism there came to an end. Examining pied-noir and harki grassroots collective mobilization and memory activism in France after 1962, From Exile to Empire shows that, while the war may have been repressed and silenced in a variety of ways in French society, the conflict was far from “forgotten” for these communities. Addressing material concerns including housing, poverty, and forms

Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press, 2016), Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Assistant Professor of French at the University of Rhode Island, examines one population who has often been left out of these cultural formations. Kemp focuses on the representation of first-generation Maghrebi women in France in documentaries, short films, feature films, and telefilms. Her analysis revolves around filmic textual analysis and the production, audience reception, and distribution of these art forms in contemporary French society. Kemp is attuned to filmic genre conventions, narrative structures, and formal techniques that media producers and artists use to both appeal to large mainstream audiences while challenging dominant stereotypes about Muslims. In our conversation we discussed vie

Spanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material. Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author’s intellectual journey. 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 more of Yadgar’s work here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi

Studies of Arab nationalism populate the field of Middle Eastern studies, perhaps even overpopulate it. However, what Adam Mestyan does in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017) is very different: he looks specifically at patriotic sentiment, not nationalism per se, and its specifically Ottoman roots. Using archival sources in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, Mestyan ties together the public sphere, the press, leadership, and even opera to show us how the homeland is portrayed and thought of in late Ottoman and then later, colonial Egypt. This in turn allows us to understand how patriotism would later influence the development of nationalism in the twentieth century. Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Middle East and is assistant professor at Duke University. He was a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard and taught at Oxford after getting his doctorate in history from Central European University. He is involved in many

The Syrian Revolution, which began in March 2011, has since resulted in what can be described as a civil war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the forced migrations of millions of Syrians. This story has been told countless times in news media. However, less known is the story of the Syrian artists who have portrayed the revolution with all of its nuances. miriam cooke’s Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (Routledge, 2017) tells that story, beginning before the revolution and continuing until the present. Through cooke’s work, we see how oppression can beget creativity and how art in the Syrian context can create public memory. cooke brings together different mediums to show how different conversations cut through the Syrian artistic community and how Syrians relate to one another. Dancing in Damascus is comprehensive, provocative, and hopeful. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on t

We’ve featured a few books on fashion and the Muslim world recently, all part of an effort to re-orient the study of women in the Muslim and Arabic-speaking worlds. Elizabeth Bucar’s Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017) uses three different Muslim populations, Iran, Indonesia and Turkey, to look at what Muslim women wear and how it reflects individual agency. What’s so original about Bucar’s contribution is that it emphasizes how women dress, versus simply what they wear. Bucar looks at bad style, new media, global fashion, and religious authority in an account that gives agency to the subjects. But the book isn’t simply about Muslim women, but all women and is at its best when reminding the reader how dress functions in their own society. Elizabeth Bucar is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University. She was previously Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is a religious ethicist who stud

Over the past century, virtually every Iranian—whether living in Iran or in the diaspora—has been exposed, to one degree or another, to certain commonly held nationalistic beliefs about what it means to be Iranian. These beliefs include the idea that Iranians are an “Aryan” race; that pre-Islamic Iran was a sort of golden age, marked by a glorious Persian Empire; and that this pure Iranian “soul” was subsequently “polluted” by the arrival of Arab culture, language and even religion in the seventh century. As Reza Zia-Ebrahimi shows in his deftly argued new book, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation (Columbia University Press, 2016), these nationalistic myths are largely a modern invention—a phenomenon he describes as “dislocative nationalism.” Following a “traumatic encounter with Europe” in the nineteenth century, Zia-Ebrahimi argues, Iranians were left searching for explanations for their perceived backwardness vis-a-vis western civilization. And the answer increasingl

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much scholarship has focused on understanding the Iranian revolution of 1979, especially in relation to other nations in the Middle East and those further away in the West. The Islamic Republic of Iran is an interesting foreign policy study, but of less interest for studies of the political development of the state. Absent from this conventional interest is the ways that the Iranian government has adopted and implemented social policy, before and after the revolution. Based on extensive fieldwork, Harris shows how the government since 1979 took welfare state institutions of the pre-revolutionary regime and expanded programs for health, education, and aid. His descriptions of the provision and administration of healthcare services in rural regions of Iran is especially interesting. These finding

Marie Grace Brown’s Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017) is in many ways a history of fashion in Sudan, but in so many ways, its much more than that. It is the story of women in Sudan, as well as the story of their bodies and movement. Brown weaves together women’s education, women’s health, activism and more through the tobe, a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman’s head and body. She reads textiles like texts and challenges us to both read existing primary sources differently and seek out new primary sources. Khartoum at Night shows us how the centrality of the tobe shaped everyday life, but how the tobe itself was shaped by continuity and rupture in Sudanese society. What we have as a result is a story that gives agency to its actors and ultimately, the story of imperial Sudan. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the

In her new book Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices (Oneworld Publications, 2017), Sophia Rose Arjana explores the diverse array of pilgrimage practices in the Muslim world. Pilgrimage in Islam is often synonymous with the hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, but Arjana’s study deconstructs this normatively held assumption by taking her readers on a journey across various sacred spaces throughout the contemporary global context. Her itineraries in this book beautifully illuminate the ways in which mobility around the sacred varies, challenging any easy categorizations scholars and students may apply in the study of Islamic pilgrimages and sacred spaces. Her book moves us beyond sectarian binaries, notions of mystical or Sufi rituals, and gendered norms, to help us deconstruct labels that have been conventionally used by Religious Studies scholars. Arjana’s text is a valuable resource for undergraduate students, but also for graduate students, as it provides provocative case studies and theoriz

How does a group become defined as white? And does that group define themselves that way as well? Neda Maghbouleh‘s new book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017), uses interview and ethnographic data to better understand how Iranian Americans perceive themselves and are perceived. “Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility,” Iranian Americans often straddle a space in which they are sometimes defined as white but other times not. Through the voices and experiences of 80 young people, Maghbouleh exposes the reader to the inner workings of their lives at school, at home, and abroad. By comparing and contrasting experiences in different social systems and situations, the reader becomes immersed in the lives of these youth and is connected to their racialized experiences. At home, these youth are often told that they are white and that they should be proud of their heritage; however, the yout

In her new book, Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Karen Ross conducts an in-depth analysis of Jewish-Palestinian youth encounter peace-building programs in Israel. She adopts a narrative approach and carefully considers how these youth programs impacted their young participants in long-term, positive and profound ways. Of particular interest is her insights about how to research and evaluate the “impact” of education programs in a non-linear, non-causal and broadly conceived approach. Her work has rich and multi-layered practical implications for the continuous peace-building efforts both within and out of the Israeli/Palestinian context. Karen Ross is an assistant professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are youth

Fashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 300+ eye-opening pages to it. Defining it as, not a history, but “a history of several lived presents.” Largely focusing on Turkey, Western Europe, and North America, Lewis walks us through the landscape of Muslim fashion, incorporating marketing, global trends, social media, and the perspectives of those who wear the clothes themselves, Muslim women. We see how religion and identity shape what people wear, how they don’t necessarily have to even fit within the set of decisions that one makes when picking ones clothes, and how functionality is also key. Ultimately, Muslim Fashion is about the role of personal choice in how Muslim women express themselves through dress and will go far in challenging assumptions about Muslims and specifically, young Muslim women. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton Univers

Normally, we feature books, but this time we’re highlighting an independent press making waves in academic works on the ancient Near East, Syriac, Islam, Jewish studies, and more: Gorgias Press. Based in New Jersey, the press has grown since its inception in 2001 to include the publication of journals, open-source projects, and countless monograph and handbook series. We talk to the founder, George Kiraz, also director of the Beth Mardutho (The Syriac Institute) about how the press came about, what goes into running such a press, the press’ philosophies, and future plans. George Kiraz himself is a tremendous scholar of Syriac and a pioneer in digital humanities, among whose many publications include The Syriac Dot and many linguistic texts.     NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Rein

In The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives of Southeast Asian migrant workers and African asylum seekers in Israel. She depicts an image of a reality of poverty, harassment, and abuse that often goes largely unseen. Based on a decade’s worth of experience in the field, The Unchosen sheds light on Israel’s often brutal treatment of these marginalized and frequently silenced peoples, providing them with a space where their voices can be heard. Mya Guarnieri Jaradat is a journalist and writer who spent nearly a decade covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Her work has been published in a number of literary and media outlets, including the Nation, Al Jazeera English, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Narrative, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most