New Books in Middle Eastern Studies
1,060 episodes - English - Latest episode: 26 days ago - ★★★★ - 28 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of the Middle East about their New Books
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Episodes
Arjen F. Bakker, "The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls" (Brill, 2023)
May 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourArjen F. Bakker's book The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 2023) contributes to the rethinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an essential and integral part of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. The Qumran manuscripts attest to the reconfiguration of Jewish wisdom concepts in this period. Strikingly, reflection on time as the organizing principle behind all of reality is formative for these emerging concepts, which are expressed by the enigmatic phrase rāz nih...
Assaf Tamari, "God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah" (Magnes Press, 2023)
May 20, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesIn a broken world, in which even God Himself is in a state of deep crisis, what is required in order to mend the rupture? How can one heal God and His world? Moreover, what might allow our actions to be effective? These questions stand at the heart of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the apex of the Safedian intellectual and religious renaissance of the sixteenth century, and one of the constituting phenomena of Modern Jewish thought. God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah (Magnes ...
Sari Nusseibeh, "Avicenna's Al-Shifā': Oriental Philosophy" (Routledge, 2018)
May 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSari Nusseibeh's book Avicenna's Al-Shifā': Oriental Philosophy (Routledge, 2018) deals with the philosophy of Ibn Sina - Avicenna as he was known in the Latin West- a Persian Muslim who lived in the eleventh century, considered one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy. Although much has been written about Avicenna, and especially about his major philosophical work, Al-Shifa, this book presents the rationalist Avicenna in an entirely new light, showing him to have presen...
José Ciro Martínez, "States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan" (Stanford UP, 2022)
May 15, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acqui...
Lisa Bhungalia, "Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2023)
May 15, 2024 08:00 - 47 minutesThe United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023) traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian li...
What does Biden’s temporary suspension of offensive arms transfers mean for US-Israeli relations?
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesCharles Blaha, a former State Department expert on the vetting of U.S. weapons transfers to other countries, helps us understand this important moment in the Israel-Hamas conflict. After an extended period of tension between U.S President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has decided to freeze some transfers of weapons to Israel, at least temporarily. In his conversation with RBI director John Torpey, Blaha explains United States law and policy governing weapons t...
Yasmine Ramadan, "Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesIn 1960s Egypt, a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Yasmine Ramadan’s Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) explores how this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment with the project of the postcolonial nation-state in Egypt. Combining a sociological approach to literature with detailed close readings, Yasmine Ramadan exp...
Görkem Akgöz, "In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey" (Brill, 2023)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, 2023) offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialization through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secr...
Hala Auji et al., "The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesWhat was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (r...
David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesLaying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected ...
Sami Hermez with Sireen Sawalha, "My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine" (Redwood Press, 2024)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesMy Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Redwood Press, 2024) is a riveting and unapologetic account of Palestinian resistance, the story of one family's care for their land, and a reflection on love and heartache while living under military occupation. In 1967, Sireen Sawalha's mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen's family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village o...
Salar Mameni, "Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2023)
May 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2023), Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopoliti...
Nadine A. Sinno, "A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut" (U Texas Press, 2024)
May 02, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesOver the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut (University of Texas Press, 2024), Dr. Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art have been used in postwar Beirut to comment on the rapidly changing social dynamics of the country and region. Analysing how graffiti makers can reclaim and transform cityscapes t...
Harry Pettit, "The Labor of Hope:: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2023)
May 02, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesCapitalism is not only an economic system but also a system of production and allocation of hope. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this. In The Labor of Hope:: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt (Stanford UP, 2023), Harry Pettit follows these educated but underemployed men as they struggle to establish careers and build satisfying lives. In so doing, this book reveals the lived co...
The Rhetoric of Crisis in Israel-Palestine: A Discussion with Amos Goldberg
May 01, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesThis week, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Among other rhetorical aspects of the conflict, Goldberg reflects on the meaning of such slogans as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They also discuss the question whether Israel is committing genocide and what that means. Finally, the c...
Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, "The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 01, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesThe Indian state of Kerala is one of the largest blocs of migrants in the oil economies of the Arab Gulf. Looking closely at the cultural archives produced by and on the Gulf migrants in Malayalam -- the predominant language of Kerala -- The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford UP, 2024) takes stock of circular migration beyond its economics. It combines formal and thematic analyses of photographs, films, and literature with anthropological and historical de...
Maha AbdelMegeed, "Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
April 28, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesIn Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda (Syracuse UP, 2024), Maha AbdelMegeed offers a compelling and far-reaching alternative to the traditional mode of analyzing Arabic literature through an encounter between Arabic narrative forms and European ones. Drawing upon close engagements with the works of canonical authors from the period, including Hassan Husni al-Tuwayrani, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Ali Mubarak, Francis Marrash, and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, AbdelMegeed addresses not wher...
Tarek El-Ariss, "Water on Fire: A Memoir of War" (Other Press, 2024)
April 24, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesIn this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire. Water on Fire: A Memoir of War (Other Press, 2024) tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic ...
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, "Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State" (Stanford UP, 2024)
April 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBetween the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified compe...
M. A. R. Habib and Bruce B. Lawrence, "The Qur'an: A Verse Translation" (Liveright, 2024)
April 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn their landmark new translation of the Qur’an, The Qur’an: A Verse Translation (LIveright, 2024), M. A. R. Habib and Bruce B. Lawrence translate the entirety of the Qur’an in a fashion that beautifully and majestically captures the poetic sensibility of the Qur’an for contemporary English speakers and readers. The distinctive feature of this Qur’an translation is its close attentiveness to the literary possibilities opened by the versification of the text and to the oral and aural capacitie...
Nora E. H. Parr, "Novel Palestine: Nation Through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah" (U California Press, 2023)
April 23, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesPalestinian writing imagines the nation, not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into a distinct set of formations. Novel Palestine examines these imaginative structures so that we might move beyond the idea of an incomplete or fragmented reality and speak frankly about the nation that exists and the freedom it seeks. In Novel Palestine: Nation Through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah (U California Press, 2023), Nora E. H. Parr traces a ...
On the History and Evolution of Zionism
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourOn today's episode of the New Books Network, we are privileged to have Professor Arie Dubnov joining us for an in-depth discussion on the multifaceted history and evolution of Zionism. Professor Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University and a preeminent scholar on Zionist thought and nationalist movements. His acclaimed works include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and the edited volum...
Huda J. Fakhreddine, "The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
April 20, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesThe Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2021), by Huda Fakhreddine, examines one of the most controversial poetic forms in Arabic: the Arabic prose poem. When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring, often described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle and...
Ahmed M. Abozaid, "Undesired Revolution: The Arab Uprising in Egypt--A Three Level Analysis" (Brill, 2023)
April 20, 2024 04:00 - 1 hourAhmed M. Abozaid’s Undesired Revolution: The Arab Uprising in Egypt--A Three Level Analysis (Brill, 2023) introduces new non-Western perspectives on the Arab Uprisings, decentering and decolonizing International Relations, and Middle Eastern Studies. Drawing on over ten years of fieldwork, ethnography, over 250 interviews, and empirical research, it is one of the first books to evaluate the position of International Relations theorists towards studying the Arab Uprisings. It relies on local I...
Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, "A Nose and Three Eyes" (Hoopoe, 2024)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesWritten by iconic Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, this classic of love, desire, and family breakdown smashed through taboos when first published in Arabic and continues to captivate audiences today It is 1950s Cairo and 16-year-old Amina is engaged to a much older man. Despite all the excitement of the wedding preparations, Amina is not looking forward to her nuptials. And it is not because of the age gap or because of the fact that she does not love, or even really know, her fiancé. ...
Jae Hee Han, "Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jae Han investigates how various Late Antique Near Eastern communities—Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and philosophers—discussed prophets and revelation, among themselves and against each other. Bringing an interdisciplinary, historical approach to the topic, he interrogates how these communities used discourses of prophethood and revelation to negotiate their place in the world. Han tracks the shifting contours of p...
Cristiana Strava, "Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhat does living “precariously” mean in Casablanca? In 2014 it meant being labeled tcharmil (seeming to endanger public order) and swept up by the police, if you were an unemployed young man sporting a banda haircut and gathering with your mates on a street corner. Cristiana Strava witnessed this and other neglected aspects of urban vulnerability while conducting extensive fieldwork in Hay Mohammedi, a renowned working-class neighborhood on the margins of modern Morocco’s economic mecca, Casa...
Robert D. Kaplan, "The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China" (Random House, 2023)
April 11, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesThe Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades. Robert Kaplan—author, foreign policy thinker, longtime writer on international affairs—has written about what he terms the “Greater Middle East”, a region that spans from the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia and eastward...
Catholic in Palestine (with Fr Firas Abedrabbo)
April 11, 2024 04:00 - 44 minutesThere have been Christians in the Holy Land for two thousand years; “we are the first church,” says Father Firas Abedrabbo who is from Bethlehem and works in Ramallah. He studied law in France and speaks excellent English and spoke with me about his experience as a priest in Palestine (the West Bank) during the Gaza War. We talk politics and history, but we also talk about how people in the middle of a war can see God’s love and His participation in our daily lives, even (or perhaps especiall...
Emily Drumsta, "Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation" (U California Press, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesIn Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation (U California Press, 2024), Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islami...
Eric Calderwood, "On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus" (Harvard UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesDuring the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus (Harvard UP, 2023) shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination,...
Sumita Pahwa, "Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesDespite expectations that the deeply held political and religious organizing principles at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood would prove incompatible and contentious should the organization ever come to power, the Brotherhood succeeded in maintaining a united identity following the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak and the election of a Brotherhood-majority government. To understand how the movement threaded these disparate missions, Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Mus...
Annika Schmeding, "Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesAnnika Schmeding’s new book Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan (Stanford UP, 2023) is a deeply sensitive and rich study of a variety of facets of Sufism in contemporary Afghanistan. Focused on the intersection and interaction of Sufism and Afghan civil society, this book simultaneously offers a layered and often moving account of Sufism in Afghanistan, while also presenting an excellent critique of Western NGO driven understandings of civility and civil s...
Esra Mirze Santesso, "Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesRecent decades have seen an unprecedented number of comics by and about Muslim people enter the global market. Now, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023) offers the first major study of these works. Esra Mirze Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East--from blockbuste...
Loren D. Lybarger, "Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile" (U California Press, 2020)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourChicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Loren D. Lybarger's book Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (U California Press, 2020) charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects...
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, "Merits of the Plague" (Penguin, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSix hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been wil...
Alessandro Columbu, "Zakariyya Tamir and the Politics of the Syrian Short Story: Modernity, Authoritarianism and Gender" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
March 29, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesZakariyya Tamir is Syria’s foremost writer of short stories, and his works are widely read across the Arab world. In Zakariyya Tamir and the Politics of the Syrian Short Story: Modernity, Authoritarianism, and Gender (I. B. Tauris, 2023), the first English-language monograph on Tamir’s entire oeuvre, Alessandro Columbu examines Tamir’s literary development in the context of changing political contexts, from his beginnings as a short story writer for local magazines in the late 1950s until the...
Rana AlMutawa, "Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai" (U California Press, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesEveryday Life in the Spectacular City is a groundbreaking urban ethnography that reveals how middle-class citizens and longtime residents of Dubai interact with the city's so-called superficial spaces to create meaningful social lives. Rana AlMutawa shows that inhabitants adapt themselves to top-down development projects, from big malls to megaprojects. These structures serve residents' evolving social needs, transforming Dubai's spectacular spaces into personally important cultural sites. Th...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesAcross the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultu...
Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 34 minutesGlobal adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies?...
Laura Menin, "Quest for Love in Central Morocco: Young Women and the Dynamics of Intimate Lives" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesFollowing the 2011 wave of revolutions and protests in North Africa and the Middle East, new discussions of individual freedoms emerged in the Moroccan public sphere and human rights discourse. A segment of the public rallied around the removal of an article in the penal code that punished sexual relationships outside of marriage. As debates about personal and sexual freedom gain momentum, love and intimacy remain complex issues. Moving between public, clandestine, and online interactions, Q...
Eileen Kane et al., "Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 20, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThe roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford UP, 2023) presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and/or Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer’s diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. Thes...
Jörg Matthias Determann and Shoaib Ahmed Malik, "Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion" (I. B. Tauris, 2024)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourOver the last thirty years, humanity has discovered thousands of planets outside of our solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life could be imminent. This book explains how such a discovery might impact Islamic theology. It is the foundational reference on the subject, comprising a variety of different insights from both Sunni and Shi'i positions, from different Muslim contexts, and with chapters that compare and contrast Islamic perspectives with Christianity. Together, they addres...
Yaacov Nir, "Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949)" (Cambridge Scholars, 2024)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourYaacov Nir's Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949) (Cambridge Scholars, 2024) explores the nature of the severe conflict over immigration to Palestine during the post-Second World War period, and the British policy of deportation to Detention Camps in Cyprus (1946-1949). It considers the perspective of actors such as the British Foreign Office, dominated by stubborn Ernest Bevin, and the Colonial Office, the Palestinian Jewish community and it...
Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists f...
Julie Kalman, "The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesOn July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony. The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and...
Sofia Rehman, "Gendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesGendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers (Oxford UP, 2024) presents for the first time a partial translation and study of Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi's work, al-Ijaba li-Iradi ma Istadraktahu Aisha Ala al-Sahabah-"The Corrective: Aisha's Rectification of the Companions. "It critically analyses from the perspective of hadith criticism a number of sections presenting Aisha's refutations and corrections of key Companions including, Umar b. al-K...
Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013:: An Anthropological Approach
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesIn Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013:: An Anthropological Approach (Routledge, 2023), Emilie Le Febvre takes us to the Naqab Desert where Bedouin use photographs to make, and respond to, their own histories. She argues Bedouin presentations of the past are selective, but increasingly reliant on archival documents such as photographs, which spokespersons treat as evidence of their local histories amid escalating tensions in Israel-Palestine. These practices shape...
On America’s Blind Spot Towards the Palestinians
March 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn their handling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process over the decades, U.S. officials have displayed a “systemic blind spot” by alleviating pressure on the stronger party, Israel, and increasing pressure on the weaker party, the Palestinians, Khaled Elgindy argues in Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump (Brookings Institution Press, 2019). In my conversation with Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, we explore the particular forms that this b...
Alexander Christie-Miller, "To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesWalking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Alexander Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country’s history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future in his book To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul (Pegasus Books, 2024). Caught between two seas and two continents, Istanbul lies at the centre of the most pressing challenges of our time. With environmental decay, rapacious development and tightening autho...