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
Joseph A. Boone, "The Homoerotics of Orientalism" (Columbia UP, 2014)
June 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourOne of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism. To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Midd...
Lori A. Allen, "A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2020)
June 20, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesLori Allen’s A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2020) is a deep engagement with Palestinian political history through an examination of international commissions. Over twenty commissions established over the last century have investigated political violence and human rights violations in the context of Palestine and Palestinians’ rights, yet there has also been very little material change resulting from these commissions. These commissions, Allen arg...
Sarah Irving et al., "'The House of the Priest': A Palestinian Life (1885-1954)" (Brill, 2022)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutes'The House of the Priest': A Palestinian Life (1885-1954) (Brill, 2022) presents and discusses the hitherto unpublished and untranslated memoirs of Niqula Khoury, a senior member of the Orthodox Church and Arab nationalist in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. It discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion, diplomacy and identity in the Middle East in the interwar period. This original annotated translation and accompanying articles provide a thorough explicati...
Andrew Simon, "Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2022)
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourMedia of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford UP, 2022) investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Over the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes became a ubiquitous presence in Egyptian homes and stores. Audiocassette technology gave an opening to ordinary individuals, from singers to smugglers, to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. Enabling an unprecedented number of people to participate in the cr...
Matt King, "Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily" (Cornell UP, 2022)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of economic, political, cultural, and military connections that linked the two dynasties to each other and to other polities across the medieval Mediterranean. Furthermore, despite the contemporary interfaith holy wars happening aro...
Lily Pearl Balloffet, "Argentina in the Global Middle East" (Stanford UP, 2020)
June 09, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourArgentina lies at the heart of the American hemisphere's history of global migration booms of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century: by 1910, one of every three Argentine residents was an immigrant—twice the demographic impact that the United States experienced in the boom period. In this context, some one hundred and forty thousand Ottoman Syrians came to Argentina prior to World War I, and over the following decades Middle Eastern communities, institutions, and businesses dotted the...
Guy MacLean Rogers, "For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66-74 CE" (Yale UP, 2022)
June 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFor the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66–74 CE (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Guy Maclean Rogers is a deeply researched and insightful book examines the causes, course, and historical significance of the Jews’ failed revolt against Rome from 66 to 74 CE, including the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Based on a comprehensive study of all the evidence and new statistical data, Dr. Rogers argues that the Jewish rebels fought for their religious and politica...
Chris Gratien, "The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier" (Stanford UP, 2022)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I talk to Chris Gratien, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, about his new book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2022). The Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined wit...
Matthew Mark Silver, "Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics" (U Alabama Press, 2020)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourZionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics (U Alabama Press, 2020) moves away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching...
Jeffrey Herf, "Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 02, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesIsrael's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949 (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international acc...
Mohammed Ayoob and Danielle N. Lussier, "The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in Muslim Societies," Second Edition (U Michigan Press, 2020)
June 02, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesAnalysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Fully revised and updated, Mohammed Ayoob and Danielle N. Lussier's The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in Muslim Societies (U Michigan Press, 2020) thoroughly analyzes the many facets of this political ideology and sho...
Andrew Leon Hanna, "25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 01, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesAndrew Leon Hanna's book 25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs (Cambridge UP, 2022) takes readers inside the Za'atari refugee camp to follow the stories of three courageous Syrian women entrepreneurs: Yasmina, a wedding shop and salon owner creating moments of celebration; Malak, a young artist infusing color and beauty throughout the camp; and Asma, a social entrepreneur leading a storytelling initiative to enrich children's lives. Anchored by these three inspiring sto...
Christopher Harker, "Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine" (Duke UP, 2020)
May 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine (Duke UP, 2020), Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and social one. Harker traces the emergence of debt in Ramallah after 2008 as part of the financialization of the Palestinian economy under Israeli settler colonialism. Debt contributes to processes through which Palestinians are kept economically unstable and subordinate. Harker draws extensively ...
Randa Khair Abbas and Deborah Court, "The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity" (Cambridge Scholars, 2021)
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesRanda Khair Abbas and Deborah Court's book The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) gives voice to the Israeli Druze through in-depth interviews with 120 people, 60 young adults and 60 of their parents’ generation. How is this traditional group, bound together through the centuries by their secret religion and strong value system, dealing with modernization? Can their religion, and their very identity, survive the meeting with the m...
Katherine Pangonis, "Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule" (Pegasus Books, 2022)
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFor nearly a century after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, that ancient city became the nucleus of a several kingdoms and principalities established by the crusaders. At the political, social, and cultural heart of their subsequent history were a series of remarkable women who exercised power and influence in a way nearly unknown in western Europe at that time. Katherine Pangonis is the author of the Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule, a remarkable chronicle of lives lived...
Ehud Olmert, "Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel" (Brookings Institution, 2022) Part 2 of 2
May 27, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesNB: This is part 2 of a two part interview with Ehud Olert. Part 1 is here. Written almost entirely from inside a prison cell, Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel (Brookings Institution, 2022) is the compelling memoir of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. The child of parents who were members of the Irgun, the paramilitary group that fought for the establishment of Israel, Olmert became the youngest member of the Israeli Knesset in 1973, serving in the right-wing Likud party. He r...
Amanda Phillips, "Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean" (U California Press, 2021)
May 27, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesTextiles were the second-most-traded commodity in world history, preceded only by grain. In the Ottoman Empire, in particular, the sale and exchange of silks, cottons, and woolens generated an immense amount of revenue. They touched every level of society, from rural women tending silkworms to pashas flaunting layers of watered camlet to merchants travelling to Mecca and beyond. Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (U California Press, 2021) offers the ...
Jonathan Fulton, "Routledge Handbook on China–Middle East Relations" (Routledge, 2021)
May 27, 2022 08:00 - 21 minutesHave you ever read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises? When asked how he went bankrupt, a character replies, “Gradually, then suddenly.” In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Helsinki, discusses with Jonathan Fulton about his newly edited Routledge Handbook on China–Middle East Relations. Jonathan Fulton is assistant professor of political science at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlan...
Peter Mandaville, "Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia's Global Influence on Islam" (Oxford UP, 2022)
May 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSaudi global export of an ultra-conservative strand of Islam and its impact on Muslim countries and communities across the globe has been a hotly debate topic for more than two decades. The rise of jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and their attacks in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa fuelled the debate, particularly since the September 11, 2001, strikes in New York and Washington. Critics of Saudi Arabia charge that Wahhabism and Salafism, the ultra-conservative ...
Heba Gowayed, "Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential" (Princeton UP, 2022)
May 18, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesAs the world confronts the largest refugee crisis since World War II, wealthy countries are being called upon to open their doors to the displaced, with the assumption that this will restore their prospects for a bright future. Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (Princeton UP, 2022) follows Syrians who fled a brutal war in their homeland as they attempt to rebuild in countries of resettlement and asylum. Their experiences reveal that these destination countries are not saviors; they...
Maria Chiara Rioli, "A Liminal Church: Refugees, Conversions and the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem, 1946–1956" (Brill, 2020)
May 13, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesThe history of the Palestine War does not only concern military history. It also involves social, humanitarian and religious history, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Jerusalem. A Liminal Church: Refugees, Conversions and the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem, 1946–1956 (Brill, 2020) offers a complex narrative of the Latin patriarchal diocese, commonly portrayed as monolithically aligned with anti-Zionist and anti-Muslim positions during the “long” year of 1948. Making use of largely ...
Mahmood Kooria, "Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
May 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAnalyzing the spread and survival of Islamic legal ideas and commentaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean littorals, Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022) focuses on Shāfiʿīsm, one of the four Sunnī schools of Islamic law. It explores how certain texts shaped, transformed and influenced the juridical thoughts and lives of a significant community over a millennium in and between Asia, Africa ...
Louis Fishman, "Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland" (Edinburgh UP. 2021)
May 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourUncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) the book by Louis Fishman looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This work presents an innovative analysis of the struggle in its first years, when Palestine was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. Fishman argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict: the new freedoms introduced b...
Ehud Olmert, "Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel" (Brookings Institution, 2022)
May 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWritten almost entirely from inside a prison cell, Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel (Brookings Institution, 2022) is the compelling memoir of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. The child of parents who were members of the Irgun, the paramilitary group that fought for the establishment of Israel, Olmert became the youngest member of the Israeli Knesset in 1973, serving in the right-wing Likud party. He rose quickly in the party, serving in national government before being electe...
Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, "The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine" (Oxford UP, 2020)
May 04, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesThe land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought to claim the national identity of the land through various martial, social, and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map. In The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine (Oxford Universit...
Moshe Shokeid, "Can Academics Change the World?: An Israeli Anthropologist's Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus" (Berghahn, 2020)
May 03, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesAD KAN (NO MORE) was founded in 1988 by a group of academics at Tel Aviv University. The initiative, a public pressure group, was prompted by public indifference (at best) about Israel’s 20-year occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and its forceful attempts to suppress the nascent First Intifada popular uprising in the West Bank. Whilst outward facing in their basic ambitions, the founder members of AD KAN also understood that academia’s failure to engage with the realities of the momen...
Ramadan Violence: A Conversation with Ambassador Dore Gold
April 27, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesA hilltop at the heart of Jerusalem, Israel, is known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. It has been the site of Muslim rioting during the month-long religious holiday of Ramadan. How did a holiday dedicated to fasting, prayer and charitable-giving become a time of violence – and not in Jerusalem alone? Recent years have seen Ramadan attacks in countries as different as France and Syria, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Somalia. Nevertheless, th...
Faisal H. Husain, "Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourRivers of the Sultan offers a history of the Ottoman Empire's management of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the early modern period. During the early sixteenth century, a radical political realignment in West Asia placed the reins of the Tigris and Euphrates in the hands of Istanbul. The political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia allowed the Ottoman state to rebalance the natural resource disparity along its eastern frontier. It regularly organized the shipment of grain, meta...
George Warner, "The Words of the Imams: Al-Shaykh Al-Saduq and the Development of Twelver Shi'i Hadith Literature" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
April 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIbn Babawayh – also known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq – was a prominent Twelver Shi'i scholar of hadith. Writing within the first century after the vanishing of the twelfth imam, al-Saduq represents a pivotal moment in Twelver hadith literature, as this Shi'i community adjusted to a world without a visible imam and guide, a world wherein the imams could only be accessed through the text of their remembered words and deeds. George Warner's book The Words of the Imams: Al-Shaykh Al-Saduq and the Deve...
Jeffrey Saks and Shalom Carmy, "Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)
April 14, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes"As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile,” S. Y. Agnon declared at the 1966 Nobel Prize ceremony. “But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” Agnon’s act of literary imagination fueled his creative endeavor and is explored in these pages. Jerusalem and the Holy Land (to say nothing of the later State of Israel) are often two-faced in Agnon’s Hebrew ...
Anthony Shaw and Giora Goodman, "Hollywood and Israel: A History" (Columbia UP, 2022)
April 08, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesFrom Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day peacemaking, Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry...
Pamela Kyle Crossley, "Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious ...
Paul Stephenson, "New Rome: The Empire in the East" (Harvard UP, 2022)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesAs modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin--will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In New Rome: The Empire in the East (Harvard UP, 2022), Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional te...
Scott Kugle, "Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean" (UNC Press, 2021)
April 01, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn his new book, Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and is available as an open-access enhanced edition, Scott Kugle follows the life and legacy of the influential Sufi scholar of Arabic, hadith, and scriptural hermeneutics shaykh ‘Ali Muttaqi. ‘Ali Muttaqi left South Asia for hajj (Mecca) where he eventually settled as an exile. Kugle provides a microscopic history of this figure by engaging a wealth of diverse Arabic and Persi...
On Israel, Palestine, and Christian Zionism
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesDr. Daniel Hummel is a scholar, writer, researcher, and teacher of religion, politics, and foreign policy in the United States and the modern Middle East. He is currently a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Hummel is also a specialist in the concept of Christian Zionism and has a forthcoming book from the University of Pennsylvania Press entitled, A Covenant of the Mind: Evangelicals, Israel, and the Constructi...
Jørgen Jensehaugen, "Arab-Israeli Diplomacy Under Carter: The US, Israel and the Palestinians" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe history of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East is marked by numerous stark failures and a few ephemeral successes. Jimmy Carter's short-lived Middle East diplomatic strategy constitutes an exception in vision and approach. In this extensive and long-overdue analysis of Carter's Middle East policy, Jorgen Jensehaugen sheds light on this important and unprecedented chapter in U.S. regional diplomacy. Against all odds, including the rise of Menachem Begin's right-wing government in Israel, Car...
Andrew Lawler, "Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City" (Doubleday, 2021)
March 28, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesUnder Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City (Doubleday, 2021) takes readers into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City. It brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape. With clarity and verve, acclaimed journalist Andrew Lawler reveals how their pursuit has not only defined the conflict over modern Jerusalem, but could provide a map for two peoples and three faiths to peacefully coexist. In 1863, a French sena...
K. S. Batmanghelichi, "Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
March 25, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesGender and sexuality in modern Iran are frequently examined through the prisms of nationalist symbols and religious discourse. In Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran (Bloomsbury, 2020), Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway, takes a different approach, by interrogating how normative ideas of women's bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed a...
Jeremy Friedman, "Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World" (Harvard UP, 2022)
March 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the pro...
The Samaritans: A Biblical People
March 23, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesThe Samaritans have been around since biblical times. They share history with the Jews, Christians, and Muslims; yet their identity is at odds with the people who trace their roots to ancient Israel. Who actually are Samaritans? And why did these biblical people turn into a micronation in this age? In this new episode, Steven Fine, Dean Pinkhos Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, and Director of the YU Center for Israel Studies and of the Israelite Samaritans Project, t...
David H. Warren, "Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis" (Routledge, 2021)
March 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourRivals in the Gulf: Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis (Routledge, 2021) goes to key questions of governance at the heart of developments in the Muslim world. Warren looks at the issue through the lens of two of the foremost Middle Eastern religious protagonists and their backers: Egyptian-born Qatari national Yusuf a Qaradawi, widely seen as advocating an Islamic concept of democracy, and UAE-backed Abdullah Bin Bayyah w...
Natasha Iskander, "Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2021)
March 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSkill—specifically the distinction between the “skilled” and “unskilled”—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar’s booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through her unprecedented look at the experiences of migrant workers, she reveals...
Natasha Iskander, "Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2021)
March 21, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesSkill—specifically the distinction between the “skilled” and “unskilled”—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton UP, 2021) shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar’s booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through he...
Sandy Gall, "Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud" (Haus Publishing, 2021)
March 17, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesOn September 9th, 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. Coming just two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Massoud’s assassination is thus one of those points in history that invites couterfactuals: was it a warning of things to come? And what might have happened in Afghanistan had the assassination failed? Afghan Napoleon: The Life o...
Asef Bayat, "Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring" (Harvard UP, 2021)
March 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourSeamlessly blending field research, on-the-ground interviews, and social theory, Asef Bayat shows how the practice of everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia was fundamentally altered by revolutionary activity. Women, young adults, the very poor, and members of the underground queer community can credit the Arab Spring with steps toward equality and freedom. In Bayat’s telling in Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021), the Arab Spring emerges as a para...
Peter Mandaville, "Islam and Politics" (Routledge, 2020)
March 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourPeter Mandaville's Islam and Politics (3rd Edition; Routledge, 2020) is a basic and comprehensive account of political Islam in the contemporary world. It provides a broad introduction to all major aspects of the interface of Islam and politics in an accessible style with sufficient depth for the academic classroom. Features include: Exploration of the origins and development of ISIS, Al-Qaeda and various regional affiliates of the global Salafi-Jihadi movement. Coverage of contemporary deb...
Sarah-Neel Smith, "Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey" (U California Press, 2022)
March 08, 2022 09:00 - 51 minutesMetrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (University of California Press, 2022) is a vivid portrait of the art world of 1950s Turkey in which Sarah-Neel Smith offers a new framework for analyzing global modernisms of the twentieth century: economic development. After World War II, a cohort of influential Turkish modernists built a new art scene in Istanbul and Ankara. The entrepreneurial female gallerist Adalet Cimcoz, the art critic (and future prime minister) Bülent Ecevi...
Gardner Thompson, "Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel" (Saqi, 2020)
March 02, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesIn Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books, 2020), Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain’s role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel. Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their rule in Palestine after the First World War. Despite evidence and warnings, over the next two dec...
Anneka Lenssen, "Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria" (U California Press, 2020)
February 28, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourBeautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (University of California Press, 2020), by Anneka Lenssen, focuses on modern art practice in Syria from 1900 to 1965 and the ways that artists sought to link their painting to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appea...
Nebil Husayn, "Opposing the Imam: The Legacy of the Nawasib in Islamic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
February 28, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutesIslam's fourth caliph, Ali, can be considered one of the most revered figures in Islamic history. His nearly universal portrayal in Muslim literature as a pious authority obscures centuries of contestation and the eventual rehabilitation of his character. In Opposing the Imam: The Legacy of the Nawasib in Islamic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Nebil Husayn, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami, examines the enduring legacy of the nawasib, early ...