New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

American culture is ubiquitous across the globe. It travels to different social contexts and is consumed by international populations. But the relationship between American culture and the meanings attached to the United States change over time. During the 20th century, the American Century, American culture generally aided in the positive global perception of U.S. policies and governance. In After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016), Brian T. Edwards, Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and Professor of English at Northwestern University, demonstrates how this relationship altered in recent decades. Technological innovation and the emergence of the digital age have drastically changed the nature of cultural circulation and production. Edwards explores the innovative play between global culture and local subjects in Egypt, Iran, and Morocco. He explores the exchange and interpretations between multiple publics that engage culture situated wit

Medieval Egypt had a rapid influx of Sufis, which has previously been explained through reactionary models of analysis. It was argued that the widespread popularity of Sufism was marked by a public adoption of practices that satisfied the masses in ways the religious elite were not fully addressing. In The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Nathan Hofer, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, critiques the social binary that these assumptions create, as well as, rethinks the mechanisms within the social production of Sufi culture. He explores these concerns in the context of the Ayyubid and Mamluk states and their relationships with Sufi masters and communities. First, a state-sponsored Sufi lodge serves as the site for professionalization of Sufis and the public consumption of Sufi culture that aligns with state objectives. The emergence of the Shādhilīya sufi order serves as a case of the textualization of an idealized sufi identit

Last week featured a year-end-round up of books in American politics. This week I looked back to the past year on the podcast in other subfields. I start with an interview I enjoyed with Prerna Singh. Her book examines sub-nationalism in India. Prerna’s book is How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India and was published by Cambridge University Press. Next up is Marc Lynch who came on the podcast to talk about international relations in the Middle East. Here is an excerpt from our interview. Marc’s book is titled The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East and was published by Public Affairs in 2016. In a year with Republicans on the rise in Washington, I enjoyed Bob Lacey’s book of political theory. Bob’s book is Pragmatic Conservatism. Palgrave MacMillan published the book this year. And finally, Deepa Iyer came on the podcast to talk about social movements and South Asian American politics. Deepa’s book, with my favorite cover of the year, is We Too

For over 40 years, Jack M. Sasson has been studying and commenting on the cuneiform archives from Mari on the Euphrates River, especially those from the age of Hammurabi of Babylon. Among Mari’s wealth of documents, some of the most interesting are letters from and to kings, their advisers and functionaries, their wives and daughters, their scribes and messengers, and a variety of military personnel. The letters are revealing and often poignant. Sasson selects more than 700 letters as well as several excerpts from administrative documents, translating them and providing them with illuminating comments. In distilling a lifetime of study and interpretation, Sasson hopes to welcome readers into the life of a world entombed for four millennia, making the realities of ancient life tangible, giving it a human perspective that is at once instructive and entertaining. All that and more on today’s show as we speak with Jack Sasson about his recent publication, From the Mari Archives: An Anthology of Old Babylonian Let

In White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (MIT Press, 2015), Sharon Rotbard, Senior Lecturer in the Architecture Department at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, examines the dual histories of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. He offers a nuanced and compelling deconstruction of the myth of the White City and the erasure of what he deems the Black City. This book is a compelling contribution, bringing critical urban studies into conversation with critical histories of Zionism in innovative and provocative ways. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Much of the existing literature on Mandatory Palestine adheres to a dual society model which assumes that the Palestinian Arab community and the Jewish Yishuv had separate economic, social, and cultural systems, and that interaction between them was quite limited. In their new book, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (Brandeis UP, 2016), Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor focus on Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews in order to challenge this model. As power shifted away from the traditional politics of notables, Sephardic and Oriental Jews attempted to position themselves as the ideal mediators between Jewish and Arab societies. Oriental Neighbors examines these attempts in the political and cultural spheres, in mixed neighborhoods, and in the security arena, to highlight Middle Eastern Jewish-Palestine interaction as a site of both cooperation and conflict. In doing so, this book calls the dual society model into question, integrates the history of Palestine into that of th

In Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 2016) Devin Naar delves deep into the archives to produce this intimate and exciting portrait of Salonica’s Jewish community between the late 19th century until World War II, when the overwhelming majority of the population was deported to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Naar’s study takes readers into institutional hallways and homes of Jewish elites and ordinary citizens, revealing a community rapidly adjusting to changes in its relationship to political regimes claiming Salonika and its diverse residents as their own. Jewish Salonica offers readers an opportunity to consider Jewish communal agency and vibrancy in a period and place too often missing from modern Jewish historical narratives.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victor Taki’s Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire (I.B. Taurus, 2016) invites the reader to explore the captivating story of the relationship of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the 19th century, and highlights the role the Oriental world played in the shaping of Russian national idea and Russia’s relationship with Europe. Dedicated to the study of previously less well known sources such as diplomatic correspondence, military memoirs, or former captives narratives, this book argues that, for Russia, the relationship with the Ottoman Empire served as a way to establish the image of self as a superior, more progressive westernized state. The book also talks about the transformation of the image of the Ottoman Empire in Russian cultural imagination over the course of the 19th century as well as Russian attitudes towards Christian co-religionists living outside Christian lands. Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empireis particularly interesting as a multidisciplinary a

What is the relationship between state power and self-destructive violence as a mode of political resistance? In her book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2016), Banu Bargu (Politics, The New School) analyzes the Turkish death fast movement and explores self-inflicted death as a political practice. Amid a global intensification of the “weaponization of life,” Bargu argues for conceptualizing this self-destructive use of the body as a complex political and existential act. In doing so, she theorizes a reconfiguration of sovereignty into biosovereignty and of resistance into necroresistance. To accomplish this, the book innovatively weaves together political and critical theory with ethnography in a way that enables the self-understanding and self-narration of those in and around the death fast movement to speak to canonical thinkers and concepts. John McMahon is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Beloit College. He is a former

In The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966 (Syracuse University Press, 2015), Bryan K. Roby, fellow at the Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, traces the early history of Mizrahi struggle for equality and civil rights in Israel. Roby reexamines and destabilises our understandings of this period of Israeli history. This book is a highly original and compelling contribution that tells an unknown story of Mizrahi politicisation and rebellion that has ongoing consequences for contemporary political struggles in Israel/Palestine. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how did the Iranian revolution impact and shape Foucault’s thought? These are among the questions addressed by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in his exciting new book Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). This book presents an intimate portrait of the events and conditions that led to the revolution, coupled with a fascinating account of Foucault’s engagement with that moment. Historically rich and theoretically nuanced, Foucault in Iran advances a scathing critique of previous works on this subject that charged Foucault with having endorsed Islamist violence by supporting the revolution. This book offers a more complicated reading of Foucault’s views on the revolution that disrupts binaries like secular/Islamist while also providing a riveting analysis on question

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Green, Professor of South Asian and Islamic history at UCLA, examines how these terrains of exchange transformed Islam during the modern period from roughly 1800-1940 in his book, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015). Green sees religion as a tool for social power and explores various religious economies to determine how interpretations of Islam are negotiated and deployed. What he shows is that modern iterations of the tradition are often shaped not only by Muslims, but also Christians and Hindus. In these sites of exchange religious actors and institutions can be analyzed as entrepreneurs and firms, which effectively compete for their clientele. Religious entrepreneurial competition and innovation fostered by Muslim/Christian interactions in imperial contexts cont

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than just institutions where the sick were treated; hospitals also served as important sites of communal services and congregation, as urban architectural monuments, and as symbols and expressions of a rulers political authority. By exploring an astonishing variety and number of sources, Ragab provides an unparalleled window into the aspirations and operations that defined the medieval Islamic hospital. This splendid new book will be of great interest to students of medieval Islamic history, religion and science, medical history, and the study of Islam and religion more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaph

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Sephardi Jews with roots in the Ottoman Empire who sought citizenship within European nations for a variety of reasons, including socio-economic mobility and political refuge. While analyzing complex legal systems and the ways in which different nations viewed their extraterritorial subjects, Abrevaya Stein never loses site of the individual experiences of Jewish men and women. Indeed, by offering a series of case studies that range from Salonica during the Balkans War to 1930s Shanghai and Baghdad, she demonstrates how questions over citizenship and status were often determined by local politics and personalities and could lead to vastly different fates for these Jewish “proteges.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, an internationally recognized award given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to a photographer who has demonstrated great originality working in the documentary vein. Through images created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observers gaze under conditions of occupation. These photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state– and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of bein

You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points out in his excellent new book Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015) they often got it right, despite their “Orientalist” prejudices. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and most readable account of the Crusades relying on Islamic sources. Cobb expands the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Crusades by placing traditional conflicts within Muslim accounts of Frankish aggression. In general, medieval Muslims were not overly concerned with Europe and ongoing relationships between Christians and Muslims only really existed in the Mediterranean context. European expansion into Muslim lands throughout the Middle Ages marked a different phase of encounter,but these incursions were not a

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism, Beirut’s plurality of time was less an exception than it was a quandary to later advocates who aimed to organize time along geographical lines. In The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), Vanessa Ogle excavates 19th century movements to reform and standardize time: summer time, calendar time, time zones, religious time, and national time among others. Ogle questions the inevitability of 21st century time, demonstrating that it was the object of active creation for nearly two centuries prior. The rise of nationalism, the consolidation of colonial practice, along with autonomous

From his modest beginnings in southern Iran, the Persian king Cyrus II went on to conquer three of the dominant kingdoms of the ancient Near East those of the Medians, the Lydians, and the Babylonians and establish the first world empire. In Discovering Cyrus: The Persian Conqueror Astride the Ancient World (Mage Pub, 2013), Reza Zarghamee draws upon the available written sources and archaeological record to provide the first comprehensive biography of Cyrus written since the middle of the 19th century. In it he describes Cyrus’s background, the context for his rise to power, and the empire he built. By detailing the forces he used, the organization of his empire, and his relationship with various groups, Zarghamee provides us with a portrait of a bold conqueror and shrewd ruler who understood the effectiveness of cooperating with the local elites in conquered lands and who established a multicultural realm that would endure for the next two centuries and serve as a model for future empires. Learn more about

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), Elizabeth Hurd, Associate Professor of Religion and Political Science at Northwestern University, explores the powerful global networks that seek to regulate and moderate religion in the name of promoting religious freedom. Through a careful examination of the discourses and activities of a range of state and non-state actors, in the US and elsewhere, Hurd demonstrates that international regimes of religious freedom advocacy actively participate in the labor of defining and generating particular notions of good and normative religion that privilege particular actors and institutions over others. However, as Hurd brilliantly shows and argues, such attempts to canonize good religion,