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
Max Weiss, "Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba'thist Syria" (Stanford UP, 2022)
May 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe November 1970 coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power fundamentally transformed cultural production in Syria. A comprehensive intellectual, ideological, and political project—a Ba'thist cultural revolution—sought to align artistic endeavors with the ideological interests of the regime. The ensuing agonistic struggle pitted official aesthetics of power against alternative modes of creative expression that could evade or ignore the effects of the state. In Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural...
Martyrs in Mosul: A Conversation on Christian Persecution with Father Benedict Kiely
May 28, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesWith Christmas approaching, in this episode we reflect on Christian persecution in the Middle East, the historic cradle of Christianity and the birthplace of Jesus, and the very different challenges Christians face in the East versus the West. Annika sits down with Father Benedict Kiely, a Catholic priest who has devoted his ministry to serving Christian communities in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Nasarean, his non-profit to help Christians in the Middle East is here.: The Chinese Communist Par...
Jessica M. Marglin, "The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean" (Princeton UP, 2022)
May 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing initiated a fierce lawsuit over his large estate. Before Shamama’s riches could be disbursed among his aspiring heirs, Italian courts had to decide which law to apply to his estate—a matter that depended on his nationality. Was he an Italian citizen? A subject of the Bey of Tunis? Had he become stateless? Or was his Jewishness also his nationality? Tracing a decade-lo...
Burkhard Schnepel and Julia Verne, "Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean" (Ohio UP, 2022)
May 27, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesCargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2022) is an innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little ...
Aomar Boum, "Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2023)
May 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler's genocidal campaign against Jews. But the horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to the concentration camps of Europe: antisemitic terror spread through Vichy French imperial channels to France's colonies in North Africa, where in the forced labor camps of Algeria and Morocco, Jews and other "undesirables" faced brutal conditions and struggled to survive in an unforgiving landscape qu...
Daniel Martin Varisco, "Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition in the Arab Gulf" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
May 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSeasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition in the Arab Gulf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is the first in English to survey indigenous knowledge of seasonal, astronomical, and agricultural information in Arab Gulf almanacs. It provides an extensive analysis of the traditional information available, based on local almanacs, Arabic texts and poetry by Gulf individuals, ethnographic interviews, and online forums. A major feature of the book is tracing the history of terms and concepts in the loca...
Philip Gooding, "Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesDroughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) explores histories of droughts and floods in the Indian Ocean World, and their connections to broader global climatic anomalies. It deploys an interdisciplinary approach rooted in the emerging field of climate history to investigate the multifaceted effects of global climatic anomalies on regions affected by the Indian Ocean Monsoon System – regularly conceived of as the macro-region’s ‘deep s...
Natalie Koch, "Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia" (Verso, 2023)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesThe iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example: In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called "Hi Jolly." This "camel corps," the US government hoped, could help the army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps - and sadly, the camels - died, the id...
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, "A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War" (Knopf, 2023)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe history of reportage has often depended on outsiders--Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present? A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War (Knopf, 2023) is award-winning writer G...
Mark LeVine, "We'll Play Till We Die: Journeys Across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslim World" (U California Press, 2022)
May 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn We'll Play till We Die: Journeys across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslim World (University of California Press, 2022), Mark LeVine, Professor at University of California, Irvine, dives into the revolutionary youth music cultures of Muslim societies before, during, and beyond the waves of resistance that shook the region from Morocco to Pakistan. This sequel to his celebrated 2008 musical travelogue Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, s...
Algeria and France: Grievances and the Effects of Decolonialism
May 18, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI's director, John Torpey interviewed Laetitia Bucaille about the factors that explain variation in resentment and grievances in former colonies drawing from the cases of Algeria and South Africa. Bucaille delves deeper into the case of Algeria and the affected populations whose identities were crossed cut by institutions and personal experiences as a former colony. Moreover, she explains how Algeria, considered not a colony but a French territory,...
Daniel Gordis, "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?" (Ecco Press, 2023)
May 17, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn 1948, Israel’s founders had much more in mind than the creation of a state. They sought not mere sovereignty but also a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. Did they succeed? The state they made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering. Now, as the country marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of ...
Claudia Liebelt, "Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
May 14, 2023 04:00 - 31 minutesIn the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly common practice, especially among younger and middle-aged women. Turkey now ranks among the top countries worldwide with the highest number of cosmetic procedures, and with its cultural and economic capital, Istanbul has become a regional center for the beauty and fashion industries. Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Fem...
Oded Zinger, "Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
May 11, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesLiving with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in a Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at h...
Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha, "Arab and Muslim Science Fiction" (McFarland, 2022)
May 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow is science fiction from the Arab and Muslim world different than mainstream science fiction from the West? What distinctive and original contributions can it make? Why is it so often neglected in critical considerations of the genre? While other books have explored these questions, all have been from foreign academic voices. Instead, Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha,'s book Arab and Muslim Science Fiction (McFarland, 2022) examines the nature, genesis, and history of Arab...
Laetitia Nanquette, "Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution: Production and Circulation in Iran and the World" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
May 06, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesIn Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution: Production and Circulation in Iran and the World (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Dr. Laetitia Nanquette explores how Iranian literature has functioned and circulated from the 1979 revolution to the present. She looks at prose productions in particular, analyzing several genres and media. Taking Iran as a starting point, Nanquette explores the forms, structures and functions of Iranian literature within Iranian society. She then turns to the diaspora –...
Gönül Tol, "Erdoğan's War: A Strongman's Struggle at Home and in Syria" (Oxford UP, 2023)
May 05, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesRecep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's pugnacious president, is now the country's longest-serving leader. On his way to the top, he has fought many wars. This book tells the story of those battles against domestic enemies through the lens of the Syrian conflict, which has become part and parcel of Erdoğan's fight to remain in power. In Erdoğan's War: A Stongman's Struggle at Home and in Syria (Oxford University Press, 2022), Turkey expert Gönül Tol traces Erdoğan's ideological evolution from a conser...
Brahim El Guabli, "Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence" (Fordham UP, 2023)
April 30, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesMoroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence (Fordham UP, 2023) investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma pl...
Teena U. Purohit, "Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism" (Princeton UP, 2023)
April 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourTeena Purohit’s new book Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2023) maps how various Muslim modernists from the 19th to the 20th centuries used their Sunni normativity to construct social and political boundaries around conceptions of tawhid or Islamic unity. The book distinctively focuses on how Muslim modernists such as canonical figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida and many others, focused on communities such as Shi‘a...
Awad Halabi, "Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948" (U Texas Press, 2023)
April 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMembers of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystica...
Imprisoned in Iran: A Conversation with Wang Xiyue
April 22, 2023 22:56 - 1 hourFor 40 months, Wang Xiyue was imprisoned in Iran on false charges of espionage. A doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, Wang Xiyue joins the show to discuss his imprisonment and U.S.-Iranian relations. Xiyue's essay "What I learned in an Iranian prison" is here. His essay "Don’t let Iran’s human rights be sacrificed at the altar of a nuclear deal is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https:/...
Barak S. Cohen, "For Out of Babylonia Shall Come Torah and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Peqod" (Brill, 2017)
April 21, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesIn For Out of Babylonia Shall Come Torah and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Peqod (Brill, 2017), Barak S. Cohen reevaluates the evidence in Tannaitic and Amoraic literature of an independent "Babylonian Mishnah" which originated in the proto-Talmudic period. The book focuses on an analysis of the most notable Halakhic corpora that have been identified by scholars as originating in the Tannaitic period or at the outset of the Amoraic. If indeed such an early corpus did exist, what are its cha...
Barak S. Cohen, "The Legal Methodology of Late Nehardean Sages in Sasanian Babylonia" (Brill, 2011)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBarak S. Cohen's The Legal Methodology of Late Nehardean Sages in Sasanian Babylonia (Brill, 2011) consists of a systematic analysis of the halakhic/legal methodology of fourth and fifth century Nehardean amoraim in Babylonia (as well as their identity and dating). The book uncovers various distinct characteristics present in the halakhic decision making and source interpretation, and demonstrates how certain amoraim can be characterized as portraying consistent interpretive and legal approac...
Alexander Jabbari, "The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAlexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) narrates the cultural and literary history of one of the world's most significant yet understudied lingua francas. From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritag...
The Future of Antisemitism: A Discussion with Dave Rich
April 15, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesFew people would describe themselves as antisemites. And yet many Jews living in Europe and the US believe that they encounter anti-semitism quite frequently – so what accounts for these different perceptions? Owen Bennett Jones discusses antisemitism with Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into our World and How You Can Change It (Backbite, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a residen...
Chas Smith, "Reports from Hell" (Rare Bird Books, 2020)
April 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhile now a prominent and controversial surf journalist, Chas Smith started his career as a war correspondent in the Middle East. Obsessed with Joan Didion, but really working in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson, he embarked on a series of often ill-fated reporting trips to Yemen and Lebanon. Smith’s adventures ranged from discovering new surfing beaches on the Arabian Peninsula to being kidnapped by Hezbollah. His experiences are chronicled in Reports from Hell with his trademark wry, sel...
Jennifer Lynn Kelly, "Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine" (Duke UP, 2023)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Pale...
Amahl Bishara, "Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression" (Stanford UP, 2022)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesPalestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Ex...
Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Islam and Blackness" (Oneworld Academic, 2022)
April 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourJonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Blackness in Muslim intellectual traditions and social histories, premodern and modern, in a variety of contexts. At once deeply reflective, philologically majestic, and theoretically productive, Islam and Blackness engages and examines a range of texts from a wide expanse of scholarly genres to show that the question of whether Islam is antiblack is im...
Sara Koplik, "A Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan" (Brill, 2015)
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan (Brill, 2015) by Sara Koplik describes the situation of Jews in that country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly 1839-1952. It examines the political, economic and social conditions they faced as religious minorities. The work focuses upon harsh governmental economic policies of the 1930s and 1940s spearheaded by 'Abd al-Majid Khan Zabuli which caused the impoverishment and suffering of both the local communit...
Eric Alterman, "We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel" (Basic Book, 2022)
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. In We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, 2022), Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel’s 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the “nakba” or “catastrophe” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the chall...
Jill Jarvis, "Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony" (Duke UP, 2021)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021), Jill Jarvis examines the crucial role that writers and artists have played in cultivating historical memory and nurturing political resistance in Algeria, showing how literature offers the unique ability to reckon with colonial violence and to render the experiences of those marginalized by the state. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st ce...
Jacob Norris, "The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub: Or, How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerka" (Stanford UP, 2023)
March 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThis is the fantastical, yet real, story of the merchants of Bethlehem, the young men who traveled to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth century. These men set off on the backs of donkeys with suitcases full of crosses and rosaries, to return via steamship with suitcases stuffed with French francs, Philippine pesos, or Salvadoran colones. They returned with news of mysterious lands and strange inventions—clocks, trains, and other devices that both befuddled and bewitched the Bethlehe...
Aaron Rock-Singer, "In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East" (U California Press, 2022)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWho are the Salafis, and what are the roots of Salafism? What does it even mean to be Salafi? Why is Salafism concerned with ethics of visibility and bodily regulation? Why, when, and how did Salafism become significant? In his latest book, In the Shade of the Sunnah: Salafi Piety in the 20th Century Middle East (University of California Press, 2022), Aaron Rock-Singer explores these questions and many more about Salafism. Rock-Singer situates Salafism as a movement whose core logic is shape...
Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, "Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives" (Duke UP, 2023)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesIn Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke UP, 2023), Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and non-normative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire ...
Hilary Falb Kalisman, "Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2022)
March 15, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controlled by the Ottomans, and then by the British in the early and mid-twentieth century, teachers were key players in government and leading formulators of ideologies. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, Hilary Falb Kalisman's Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2022...
Mohamed Tonsy, "You Must Believe in Spring" (Hajar Press, 2022)
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourYou Must Believe in Spring (Hajar Press, 2022) is Mohamed Tonsy's "speculative fiction." It is about the future of Egypt when people's memory of the recent revolution is beginning to fade away as a distant past. How can we find hope when we find ourselves in a dystopia? Twenty years after she first chanted in Tahrir, Hanan’s son is living under military rule in Egypt. Though he is both a disciple of the national Sufi institute and a swimmer representing the Armed Forces, proximity to power ...
Joseph W. Peterson, "Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourUpon the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, the territory quickly became a placeholder for French dreams, debates, and experiments in social engineering, economic development and even religious culture. Missionaries and Jesuit priests sent to minister to the new French colonial population there commented favorably on Arab Muslims’ religiosity, seeing in it both the possibility of effective missionization and an example of how religion and civil society might work together. After decades of f...
Ali Mozaffari and Nigel Westbrook, "Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in Late Twentieth-Century Iran" (Manchester UP, 2020)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 30 minutesDevelopment, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in Late Twentieth-Century Iran (Manchester UP, 2020) analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural design in the developmental context of Iran, a country that has endured radical cultural and political shifts in the past five decades. Offering a trans-disciplinary approach toward complex relationship between architecture, development, and heritage, Mozaffari and Westbrook suggest that transformations ...
The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesThe term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and w...
Shivan Mahendrarajah, "A History of Herat: From Chingiz Khan to Tamerlane" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourShivan Mahendrarajah's A History of Herat: From Chingiz Khan to Tamerlane (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) follows the history of the city, from its desolation under Chingiz Khan in 1222, to its capitulation to Tamerlane in 1381. Unlike the other o quarters of Khurasan (Balkh, Marw, Nishapur), which were ravaged by the Mongols, Herat became an important political, cultural and economic centre of the eastern Islamic world. The post-Mongol age in which an autochthonous Tajik dynasty, the Kart...
William Carruthers, "Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology" (Cornell UP, 2022)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFlooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology (Cornell UP, 2022) examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to "recolonize" it. In this book, William Carruthers asks how postwar decolonization took shape and what role a colonial discipline like archaeology—f...
Seema Golestaneh, "Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran" (Duke UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn her new ethnographic study Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran (Duke University Press, 2023), Seema Golestaneh guides her readers through processes and praxes of mystical experience and knowledge acquisition amongst Sufi communities in contemporary Iran. The book focuses on the central conceptual paradigm of “ma‘rifat”, which Golestaneh has incisively translated as “unknowing.” From a Sufi perspective, this complicated concept renders any knowledge of the divine as ult...
Melvyn P. Leffler, "Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAmerica's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 is arguably the most important foreign policy choice of the entire post-Cold War era. Nearly two decades after the event, it remains central to understanding current international politics and US foreign relations. In Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford UP, 2023), the eminent historian of US foreign policy Melvyn P. Leffler analyzes why the US chose war and who was most responsible for the decision. Employ...
Sabri Ciftci et al., "Beyond Piety and Politics: Religion, Social Relations, and Public Preferences in the Middle East and North Africa" (Indiana UP, 2022)
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesHow do ordinary men and women in Muslim-majority societies create religion-informed views of political topics such as democracy and economics? Beyond Piety and Politics: Religion, Social Relations, and Public Preferences in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana UP, 2022) provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the depth and variety of political attitudes held by people who consider themselves to be pious Muslims. Using survey data on religious preferences and behavior, the aut...
Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt: A Conversation with Andrew Simon
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAndrew Simon, a historian of media, popular culture, and the Middle East at Dartmouth College, discusses his new book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2022) , with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Media of the Masses is an engaging book that examines the impact of cassettes, cassette players, and their users during a particular period in Egypt's recent past. It provides a brilliant example of how disparate and surprising sources can be used t...
Amanda Podany, "Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford University Press, 2022), a sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Dr. Amanda Podany takes readers on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and cris...
Sarah M. Zaides, "Tevye's Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire" (Libra Kitap, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn existing scholarship on Jewish subjects of the Russian Empire, there were three typical fates available to Russia's Jews on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution: they could remain in the shtetl, leave for a new life in America, or participate in the Russian Revolution. Tevye's Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire (Libra Kitap, 2022) traces a fourth path, following the saga of Ashkenazi Jews who instead crossed the Black Sea to join their Sephardic coreligionis...
Digging for Answers: The Archaeology of Jerusalem and the Politics of Archaeology
February 23, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourKatharina Galor, an archaeology professor at the at the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University who has done a lot of excavation in Israel, is the author of The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans (2013). She takes us through the history of Jerusalem from its Canaanite beginnings to the capital of Israel today. We discuss the foundations and geography of this fortified city in the hills, the importance of water, and the lives of ordinary citizens. We talk about th...
Oren Kessler, "Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion that targeted both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities that for two decades had midwifed the Zionist project. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives—Jewish, British, and Arab—and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict ever since. Yet incredibly, no history of this seminal, formative first “Intifada” has ever been published for a general audience. The 1936–1939 revolt was th...