New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

In 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 resources and strategies might one stage and imagine alternate horizons of the political? These are among the questions that anchor this truly multivalent study that offers critical insights and theoretical dividends into a range of questions, problems, and conceptual registers. Written with exceptional clarity, Recalling the Caliphate especially raises and addresses crucial questions about the role and possibilities offered by Islamist thought in imagining a decolonial world order. This monumental book should be read and t

In 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 advisors, packs a lot into this book. Tracing the history of the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 and the creation of an independent Algerian state in the 1960s and 1970s, Byrne shows how anticolonial revolutionaries and postcolonial statesmen harnessed the interstate system to advance their cause. The book should be read by anyone interested in the Cold War, South-South diplomacy, and how decolonization both remade and strengthened the interstate system. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history a

No 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 jihadists are in fact engaged in their own form of universalism: armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire. Drawing on 15 years of interviews and research conducted in Arabic, Bosnian/ Serbian/ Croatian, Urdu, French, and Italian, and following the stories of former fighters across the Middle East, the Balkans, the United States, and Europe, anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li uses the lens of universalism to revisit the pivotal post-Cold War moment when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated globa

The 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: A Case Study of Entrapment in the Syrian Civil War”, published in Brill’s International Negotiation, use the Syrian War as a case study to explain the factors that lead to an intractable crisis—and the ones that don’t. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

How 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 identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Murad 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 thought. Idris begins with Plato’s Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace. War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice).

In 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-Juwayni (d. 1085), Siddiqui examines the hermeneutical choices, operations, and conundrums that go into the negotiation of epistemic certainty in the realms of law and theology with the imperative of historical change and dynamism. The distinguishing hallmark of this book is the way it conducts a thoroughly interdisciplinary examination of early Muslim intellectual thought by putting Islamic law, theology, and politics into a productive and rather profound conversation. The outcome is a study that combines philological prowe

With 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 warning to President Bashar al-Assad, this time there was no warning and no explanation. This was a covert operation, with one goal: to destroy a nuclear reactor being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy in the Syrian desert. From the “you are there” opening scene, the book is both a page-turner and robust journalism. Katz takes the reader on a complex journey through politics and personalities, intelligence, diplomacy and most of all, courage that led to the successful deterrence of an existential threat.

Nicholas 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 the two communities. It paints in graphic detail the incestuous and inseparable relationship between sports and politics and the importance of soccer, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, in identity and nation formation as well as nation building. It also demonstrates in graphic detail how first Jews and then Palestinians exploited soccer to first achieve international recognition of their struggles and then as nations by dispatching teams to tour other countries and being granted membership in world soccer bo

Departing 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. Just as the “Arab” man’s pathologized sexuality played a key role in discussions of French defeat in Algeria as a “failure” of French masculinity on the political “Right,” so too did he become a “heroic” figure for the post-decolonization “Left.” From gay liberation to feminism, debates about sexual norms, prostitution, and rape, the “Arab” man appeared again and again in forms that replayed and riffed off of the sexual orientalism of the colonial period. Drawing attention to the ways the “erotics of Algerian difference” sh

Desert 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 Nations and the International Federation of Landscape Architects and argues that what is happening in Dubai represents a significant discrepancy between theory and practice. This book offers a new perspective on landscape design that has until now been unexplored. It would be beneficial to academics and students of geography, landscape architecture, urban design and urban planning – particularly those with an interest in Dubai or the many cities in the region that are experiencing Dubaiification. Julian Bolleter is the Depu

The 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 free decision within certain legal bounds, in her study titled “Navigating Discretion: A Diplomatic Practice in Moments of Socio-political Rupture”, published in Brill’s The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. She explains how the notion of discretion is under-used in diplomacy research but is crucial when it comes to making situational judgement calls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Law 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 rabbis’ willingness to limit their own power. Hoffman examines the central legal role accorded to individuals' knowledge of their bodies and mental states in areas of law as diverse as purity laws, family law and the laws of Sabbath. By focusing on subjectivity and self-reflection, the Babylonian rabbis transformed earlier legal practices in a way that cohered with the cultural concerns of other religious groups in Late Antiquity. They developed sophisticated ideas about the inner self and incorporated these notions into their

In 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 analysis. What makes talking about slavery so difficult? What are the dominant discourses on and attitudes about slavery that have dominated Muslim history? What are some of the major points of overlap and fissure between Western and Muslim understandings of slavery? And how must one confront the ethical and interpretive challenges brought by the presence of slavery in Islam? These are among the questions Brown explores and addresses in this monumental work of scholarship that is sure to spark many conversations and debat

Revisionism, 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 Critics, and the Drag of Philological Time”, published in Brill’s Phenomenogical Encounters. He focuses on the work and commentary of Al-Ṣafadī, a Turkic author, to show how modern scholarly agendas may have influenced the chronological plane of Arabic literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

With 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 gave rise to local phenomena without erasing local agency and uniqueness? Where do we account for power in our analyses of local and global historical developments? Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (UNC Press, 2019) by Alex Dika Seggerman deftly takes up the challenge posed by these and other questions by punctuating its mark both in the field of global modernism and in modern Arab and Islamic art history, offering the commensurate theories and frameworks necessary to help move th

Partitioning 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 instead what drove and constrained British policymaking around partition, and why partition was simultaneously so appealing to British policymakers yet ultimately proved so difficult for them to enact. Taking a broad view not only of local and regional factors, but also of Palestine’s place in the British empire and its status as a League of Nations mandate, Sinanoglou deftly recasts the story of partition in Palestine as a struggle to maintain imperial control. After all, British partition plans imagined space both for a Zio

If 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 same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague

“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 renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. For the first time ever the stories are told of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In these authors’ hands, Jerusalem itself—perche

In 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 colonialism, post-colonial state-formation, and urbanization. Throughout her sweeping account of 20th-century Kirkuk, Bet-Shlimon is sensitive to how stories about the past can speak to the present-day concerns of Kirkuk’s Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen populations. At the same time, she is attentive to how power shapes historical narratives and has fueled competing claims about Kirkuk and its place in the modern Iraqi state. By focusing on this peripheral but important city, Bet-Shlimon’s City of Black Gold offers its readers cru