New Books in Middle Eastern Studies
1,075 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago - ★★★★ - 28 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of the Middle East about their New Books
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Episodes
Salman Sayyid, "Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order" (Hurst, 2014)
March 06, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesIn his paradigm shifting book, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order (Hurst, 2014), which was recently translated into Arabic as Isti‘adat al-Khilafa Tafkik al-Isti‘mar wa al-Nizam al-‘Alimi, Salman Sayyid offers a breathtakingly brilliant meditation on the problem of decolonization through Muslim thought and politics. What are the foundational modern Western political and conceptual categories that inhibit and frustrate the project of decolonial thought? And through what re...
Jeffrey James Byrne, "Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order" (Oxford UP, 2016)
March 04, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn his brilliant, category-smashing book, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jeffrey James Byrne places Algeria at the center of many of the twentieth-century’s international dynamics: decolonization, the Cold War, détente, Third Worldism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and postcolonial state-making. The book is a challenge to the very geography of international history. Byrne, an associate professor at UBC and one of my MA advi...
Darryl Li, "The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity" (Stanford UP, 2020)
March 04, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourNo contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. But in a radical departure from conventional efforts to explain and solve the “problem” of jihad, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020) begins with the assertion that transnational jihadi...
Intractable Syria: What Does and Does Not Lead to an Unmanageable Crisis
February 26, 2020 09:00 - 24 minutesThe most intractable conflict in recent times is the Syrian Civil War: it has caused prolonged tensions, severe destruction, and devastating consequences and, despite several peacemaking efforts, has only escalated over time. How this conflict—which started out with the arrest of a few students—reached a state of intractability is much more nuanced than previously believed. Siniša Vuković and Diane Bernabei from The Johns Hopkins University, USA, in their study titled “Refining Intractability...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
February 25, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesHow does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identitie...
Sohaira Siddiqui, "Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
February 21, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutesIn her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analysis of how conditions of political change and fragmentation generate intellectual debates and fermentation on the often-conflictual interaction of certainty, continuity, and community in Muslim thought and practice. Focused on the thought and career of the prominent 11th-century Muslim scholar al-Juw...
Murad Idris, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford UP, 2019)
February 21, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMurad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political th...
Nicholas Blincoe, "More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine" (Bold Type Books, 2019)
February 19, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourNicholas Blincoe’s More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (Bold Type Books, 2019) is a beautifully narrated and written history of a century of conflict between pre-state Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians after the establishment of the state. It is a story that goes far beyond the history of the conflict, the mirror images of developments in Jewish and Palestinian society, and the internecine ideological infighting and power struggles within th...
Yaakov Katz, "Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power" (St. Martin's Press, 2019)
February 19, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutesWith the world’s attention riveted to the nuclear threat from Iran, Yaakov Katz’s new book could not be more timely. In Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin's Press, 2019), Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Katz tells the inside story of how Israel stopped Syria from becoming a global nuclear nightmare. On September 6, 2007, shortly after midnight, Israeli fighters advanced on Deir ez-Zour in Syria. Although Israel often flew into Syria as a...
Todd Shepard, "Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
February 18, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourDeparting from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a complex analysis of the lasting impact of the Algerian Revolution through the cultural politics of sex, gender, and power in France. Shepard tracks the figure of the “Arab” man from Algerian independence to the Iranian Revolution. Ju...
Julian Bolleter, "Desert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai’s Urban Model" (Routledge, 2019)
February 17, 2020 09:00 - 50 minutesDesert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai’s Urban Model (Routledge, 2019) explores how designed landscapes can play a vital role in constructing a city’s global image and legitimizing its socio-political hierarchy. Using the case study of Dubai, Julian Bolleter explores how Dubai’s rulers employ a paradisiacal image of greening the desert, in part, as a tool for political legitimization. Bolleter also evaluates the designed landscapes of Dubai against the principles of the United Na...
Ayelet Hoffman Libson, "Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
February 12, 2020 09:00 - 50 minutesLaw and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud (Cambridge UP, 2018) examines the emergence of self-knowledge as a determining legal consideration among the rabbis of Late Antiquity, from the third to the seventh centuries CE. Based on close readings of rabbinic texts from Palestine and Babylonia, Ayelet Hoffman Libson highlights a unique and surprising development in Talmudic jurisprudence, whereby legal decision-making incorporated personal and subjective information, a process that included the rabbi...
Using Discretion in Response to Political Crises: A Lesson for Diplomats
February 12, 2020 09:00 - 12 minutesThe 2011 uprisings in Arab countries put their diplomats under scrutiny: they faced unprecedented political situations that could not be resolved through regular policies. This caused a dramatic shift in how diplomats perceived and responded to political crises, majorly affecting their decision-making abilities. Judit Kuschnitzki, a PhD student at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK, talks about how, when in crises, diplomats should make use of discretion, the power of fr...
Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Slavery and Islam" (Oneworld Academic, 2019)
February 07, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn his majestic and encyclopedic new book Slavery and Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2019), Jonathan A. C. Brown presents a sweeping analysis of Muslim intellectual, political, and social entanglements with slavery, and some of the thorniest conceptual and ethical problems involved in defining and writing about slavery. Self-reflective and bold, Slavery and Islam also offers a remarkable combination of intellectual and social history, anchored in layers of complex yet eminently accessible textual ...
Misguided Bias: How Revisionism May Have Distorted the History of Arabic Literature
February 05, 2020 09:00 - 10 minutesRevisionism, a form of literary criticism, is an integral part of scholarly research, and revisionists often find themselves challenging the orthodox views held by scholars before their time. In Arabo-Islamic writing, modern scholars often tend to neglect traditional scholarly commentary, such as from the Mamlūk and Ottoman periods—two critical periods in the history of Arabic literature. Dr Adam Talib, from Durham University, UK, explores these issues in his study titled “Al-Ṣafadī, His Crit...
Alex Dika Seggerman, "Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary" (UNC Press, 2019)
February 04, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesWith scholarship in the discipline of history witnessing a shift toward global approaches to local historical processes, new questions are being raised about how to identify commensurate theoretical methods and conceptual frameworks for analysis – with art history being no less part of this scholarly shift. How do we strike a balance between acknowledging distinctly local historical transformations with related global ones? In what ways can we conceptualize intertwined global networks that ga...
Penny Sinanoglou, "Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
February 03, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesPartitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of the Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition—that is, a division of territory and sovereignty—in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Inverting the spate of narratives that focus on how the idea contributed to, or hindered, the development of future Israeli and Palestinian states, Penny Sinanoglou asks inst...
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
January 30, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesIf you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the sam...
Benjamin Balint, "Jerusalem: City of the Book" (Yale UP, 2019)
January 15, 2020 09:00 - 45 minutes“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.” ― Susan Orlean, The Library Book. Benjamin Balint and Merav Mack's Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale University Press, 2019) is a fascinating journey through Jerusalem’s libraries which tells the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although ren...
Arbella Bet-Shlimon, "City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk" (Stanford UP, 2019)
January 14, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesIn her debut book, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019), Arbella Bet-Shlimon explores the vibrant and often troubled history of one of Iraq’s most diverse and oil-rich cities. Bet-Shlimon begins at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, illustrating the fluidity of identities in the multilingual and multiethnic city of Kirkuk. She then explains how ethnic identity as such was constituted and sharpened through the processes of colon...
Leor Halevi, "Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935" (Columbia UP, 2019)
January 07, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutesHow did Muslims respond to foreign goods in an age characterized by global exchange and European imperial expansion? What sort of legal reasoning did scholars apply in order to appropriate – or reject – items like the synthetic toothbrush, toilet paper, gramophones, photographs, railway lines, banknotes, hats, and other commodities? What role did laypeople play in shaping the contours of the scholarly debates around these items and projects? How did the entanglements of imperial power plays a...
Barbara Spackman, "Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands" (Liverpool UP, 2017)
January 06, 2020 09:00 - 48 minutesBarbara Spackman’s riveting study identifies a strand of what it calls “Accidental Orientalism” in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Relocated, or “de-toured” by historical accident, these travelers wrote about their experiences in Italian, English, and French. Crossing class, gender, dress, and religious boundaries as they move about the Mediterranean basin, the travelers’ accounts variously reconfigure, recon...
Joyce Dalsheim, "Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self Determination as Self Elimination" (Oxford UP, 2019)
January 02, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutesIn Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self Determination as Self Elimination (Oxford University Press, 2019), Joyce Dalsheim considers some of the surprising outcomes of the great Israeli experiment of re-imagining and reconstructing Judaism, Jewishness and the Jewish people as an ethno-national project focused on the state. Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as "the nation" in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the m...
Stephanie Malia Hom, "Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention" (Cornell UP, 2019)
December 31, 2019 09:00 - 40 minutesItaly's current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom's new book Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell University Press, 2019) investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state's historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today's refugee crisis. What is a...
Seyed Ali Alavi, "Iran and Palestine: Past, Present, and Future" (Routledge, 2019)
December 24, 2019 09:00 - 24 minutesIn Iran and Palestine: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, 2019), Seyed Ali Alavi (SOAS University of London) surveys the history of the relationship between Iran – and especially the Islamic Republic of Iran - with Palestinian organisations and leadership. It also, quite obviously, deals with Iranian views of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinized. To pro...
K. B. Berzock, "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa" (Princeton UP, 2019)
December 23, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourThe companion publication to the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton University Press, 2019, published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University) tells the story of how trade routes across the Saharan Desert facilitated the movement of people, ideas, and objects between the 8th and the 16th century. Not your typical exhibition catalogue, Caravans of Go...
Martin Nguyen, "Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018)
December 18, 2019 09:00 - 36 minutesWhat precisely is “Muslim theology?” What would a “Muslim theology” in the present day look like? And what then is a “Muslim theology of engagement?” In Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Martin Nguyen draws from – and critically engages with – a constellation of resources available in the Islamic intellectual and spiritual tradition as well as those in the secular western academic tradition to take readers on a journey ...
Narges Bajoghli, "Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic" (Stanford UP, 2019)
December 17, 2019 09:00 - 54 minutesIn her book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford University Press, 2019), Narges Bajoghli takes an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to w...
Zahra Ali, "Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
December 16, 2019 09:00 - 1 hourIn her powerful new book Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation (Cambridge UP, 2018), Zahra Ali presents a detailed and fascinating account of Muslim feminist discourses and politics in modern Iraq. Women and Gender in Iraq represents historical anthropology at its best; it combines careful attention to the historical contexts and contingencies that have shaped feminist politics in Iraq with an intimate ethnography of the major actors and conditions that continue ...
Michael Krona and Rosemary Pennington, "The Media World of ISIS" (Indiana UP, 2019)
December 13, 2019 09:00 - 36 minutesFrom efficient instructions on how to kill civilians to horrifying videos of beheadings, no terrorist organization has more comprehensively weaponized social media than ISIS. Its strategic, multi-platformed campaign is so effective that it has ensured global news coverage and inspired hundreds of young people around the world to abandon their lives and their countries to join a foreign war. Michael Krona and Rosemary Pennington's new book The Media World of ISIS (Indiana University Press, 201...
Afshin Matin-Asgari, "Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
December 09, 2019 09:00 - 42 minutesFollowing the Iranian Revolution of 1978—79, public and scholarly interest in Iran have skyrocketed, with a plethora of attempts seeking to understand and explain the events which led up to that moment. However, navigating the terrain of Iran’s modern historical trajectory has proven to be a daunting task which has only intensified, given the muddled public discourse that tends to frame it within the paradigm of a perennial conflict between the “religious,” “traditional,” and “despotic” East ...
Lyn Julius, "Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018)
December 09, 2019 09:00 - 41 minutesWho are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? And what lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East? This neglected piece of history, as ancient as the Bible, and as modern as today’s news, is urgently relevant today, as minorities continue to face discrimination, persecution, ethnic cleansing and even genocide in parts of the Middle East. Jews live...
Maziyar Ghiabi, "Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
December 09, 2019 09:00 - 45 minutesIran has one of the planet's highest rates of addiction. Maziyar Ghiabi's Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a fascinating, new, and nuanced perspective on the control and consumption of substances in Iran. Based on ethnographic and historical research, this fully Open Access book reveals the complex and at times progressive nature of drug policy in Iran. The book showcases drug policy in Iran as well as the everyday live...
Lior Sternfeld, "Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran" (Stanford UP, 2019)
December 03, 2019 09:00 - 48 minutesBetween Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran (Stanford University Press, 2019) by Lior Sternfeld presents the first systematic study of the rich and variegated history of Jews in twentieth-century Iran. Lior begins his intervention by identifying a “lachrymose historical narrative” that has predominated modern Jewish history and framed it as a “homogenously tragic” history across the board, resulting in the privileging of Zionist historiography in Jewish historical writin...
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
December 03, 2019 09:00 - 57 minutesWe’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short...
Christine D. Baker, "Medieval Islamic Sectarianism" (Amsterdam UP, 2019)
November 29, 2019 09:00 - 54 minutesHow do contemporary events shape the ways in which we read, understand, and interpret historical processes of identity formation? How can we resist framing conflicts of the past through frameworks of the present? What role does historical memory play in the forming and framing of group identity? In her book Medieval Islamic Sectarianism (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Christine D. Baker, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, engages these...
Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, "In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East" (UNC Press, 2019)
November 26, 2019 09:00 - 49 minutesScholarly and public discourse on Islamic intellectual thought in the modern period tend to frame it narrowly through the concept of “influence” as it emanates from the Middle Eastern “center” to the non-Middle Eastern “peripheries” without paying sufficient attention to the ways in which these variegated “peripheries” retain the autonomy to form their own conceptions of religious identity in relation to themselves and to those “centers.” In his latest work, In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism bet...
Najam Haider, "The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
November 06, 2019 09:00 - 46 minutesIn the absence of any real certainty about the nature and intention of the early sources that tell us the story of the early Islamic period, how can we use them? What sort of methodological approaches may we deploy to elucidate the meanings of texts, often similar in their core elements, but with divergent perspectives and intentions that cut across a range of genres? In The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Najam Haider, Associate Professor in th...
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
November 03, 2019 09:00 - 40 minutesAs you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestseller...
Bruce Rydel, "Beirut 1958: How America's Wars in the Middle East Began" (Brookings, 2019)
November 01, 2019 08:00 - 36 minutesIn 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 Am...
Dan Jones, "Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands" (Viking, 2019)
October 29, 2019 08:00 - 40 minutesMuch 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,...
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
October 24, 2019 08:00 - 32 minutesThe 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 ho...
Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019)
October 24, 2019 08:00 - 55 minutesIn 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 t...
Joanna Lillis, "Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan" (I. B. Tauris, 2018)
October 23, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourJoanna 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 domi...
Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, "Teaching Empathy and Reconciliation In Midst Of Conflict" (Wasatia Press, 2016)
October 22, 2019 08:00 - 1 hour“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 an...
Jennifer L. Derr, "The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2019)
October 10, 2019 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 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 ninet...
Ussama Makdisi, "Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World" (U California Press, 2019)
October 09, 2019 08:00 - 51 minutesBuilding 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-sectari...
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, "Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
October 08, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 ...
Perin Gürel, "The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey" (Columbia UP, 2017)
October 06, 2019 04:00 - 37 minutesIn 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 ques...
Humphrey Davies and Lesley Lababidi, "A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo" (AU in Cairo Press, 2018)
September 25, 2019 08:00 - 58 minutesGuides 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-cove...