Middle East Centre Booktalk

Dr Ibrahim Al-Marashi reflects on the process of researching and writing the latest edition of his book, ‘A Concise History of the Middle East’. This book talk on ‘A Concise History of the Middle East’ will discuss history-in-the-making. Close to a year after 7 October 2023, the reverberations of these events will be felt for generations to come, yet are uncertain. Nevertheless, this ‘History’ tex...

Journalist and scholar, Dr Ezgi Başaran, presents her book which traces the links between the AKP, Tunisia’s Ennahda, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood after the Arab Spring. Since the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Ben Ali, delegations from Turkey’s Justice and Development Party – the AKP, including parliamentarians and ministers, visited Cairo and Tunis. Simila...

Professor Malika Zeghal (Harvard University) presents her new book 'The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa', an innovative analysis that traces the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam. In The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton University Press, 2024), Malika Zeg...

Ali Mirsepassi in conversation with Stephanie Cronin about his new book

Book Launch for "The Damascus Events: the 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World" By Eugene Rogan, Published in hardback by Allen Lane, 2 May 2024. A watershed moment in the history and the making of the modern Middle East. Renowned Arab scholar, Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule at a formative juncture that was to reshape t...

Professor Ardi Imseis new book explores the UN’s management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the Organisation’s position and international law. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the United Nations (UN) on the question of Palestine. What forms has t...

Dr. Diana Galeeva introduces her book which examines the relations between the Gulf States and Russia from the Soviet era to the present day. In recent decades Russia has played an increasingly active role in the Middle East as states within the region continue to diversify their relations with major external powers. Yet the role of specific Russian regions, especially those that share an 'Islamic...

This lecture explores Israel’s secret relations with its neighbors during the years 1948-2022. In order to survive in a hostile environment in the Middle East, Israeli decision makers developed a pragmatic regional foreign policy, designed to find ways to approach states, leaders and minorities willing to cooperate with it against mutual regional challenges (such as the Periphery Alliance with Ira...

Dr Hertog presents the key arguments of his new short monograph “Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism” published by Cambridge University Press. The book argues against the received wisdom that neo-liberal reforms are the main culprit explaining slow growth, corruption and inequality across low- to mid-income Arab countries. It instead proposes that it is the uneven...

Dr Michael Willis' new book offers an explanation of this unexpected development known as the Hirak Movement, examining the political and social changes that have occurred in Algeria since the ‘dark decade’ of the 1990s When mass protests erupted in Algeria in 2019, on a scale unseen anywhere in the region since the Arab Spring, the outside world was taken by surprise. Algeria had been largely una...

A new theoretical framework for how democracy can emerge in the Middle East and wider Muslim world, where political conflicts over religion often predominate. Abstract: This talk focuses on the speaker's recently published book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). It provides a new theoretical framework for how democracy can emerge in...

A talk based on John McManus’s book, Inside Qatar: hidden stories from one of the richest nations on earth. A social anthropologist, McManus lifts a lid on the hidden worlds of Qatar’s gilded elite, its spin doctors and thrill seekers, its manual labourers and domestic workers. He attempts to go beyond the government PR and the negative headlines about its treatment of migrant workers to capture w...

Aaron Rock-Singer presents their latest book "In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East". Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practices—praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation—are understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. In this talk, which is...

Ian Martin presents his latest book on Libya: All Necessary Measures? The United Nations and International Intervention in Libya. In the book, he asks and offer personal answers to these questions: Was the international intervention in Libya a justified response to an impending massacre and wider threat to civilians, or were other motivations involved in seeking to oust Gaddafi and shape the futur...

A vivid and authoritative account of the making of the modern Middle East, from the BBC’s long-serving correspondent in the region. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor (former Middle East Editor), has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. In this new book, in part based on his acclaimed podcast, Bowen takes us on a...

Join us for Booktalk Episode 9, Professor Deborah Starr (Cornell University) in conversation about her new book, Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema, published by California Press. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion. Extract from publisher’s website: In this book, Deborah Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema....

Join us for Booktalk Episode 8, Dr Carl Rommel (University of Helsinki) in conversation about his new book Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics, published by University of Texas Press in July 2021. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion. The book is available for purchase for customers in Europe and the Middle East from https...

Join us as we listen to Dr Chihab El Khachab (King’s College, Cambridge) in conversation about his new book – Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry. Published by American University in Cairo Press. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion. The book is available for purchase from the book distributors of the publisher, ema...

For our sixth episode of MEC Booktalk, guest author David Warren (Washington University in St Louis) discusses his recent book, Rivals in the Gulf, published by Routledge in January 2021. David Warren is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St Louis. This episode is hosted by Dr Usaama al-Azami (Departmental Lec...

Guest author Dr Fatemeh Shams (Assistant Professor of Modern Persian Literature, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania) talks with Booktalk host Dr Zuzanna Olszewska (University of Oxford). Dr Zuzanna Olszewska is Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of the Middle East, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. Book...

Join us for the fourth MEC Booktalk episode where Dr Usaama al-Azami talks with guest author Andrew March about his new book, The Caliphate of Man: The Invention of Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, published by Harvard University Press, 2021 The book can be purchased direct from the publisher's distributor by emailing cs-books@wiley.com and quoting h0339 for a 30% discount. Andrew Ma...

Join us for the third MEC Booktalk episode where Dr Usaama al-Azami talks with guest author Ahmed El Shamsy about his new book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition. The book can be purchased direct from the publisher's website at a 25% discount until 28/04/21, by quoting DIS21 at check-out: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Episode 2, with Dr Faisal Devji, (St Antony’s College, Oxford), talks with Joshua Craze (University of Chicago) and writer Aaron Tugendhaft about Aaron's new book The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet, University of Chicago Press 2020. Aaron Tugendhaft is an author and educator based in Berlin. He studied art history, political philosophy, and the history of religion at the University of...

First episode of Booktalk, where host Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, Oxford) talks with David Rundell on his book Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads, Bloomsbury Publication (2020. The book is available for purchase with the 30% discount code: VOM30 from https://www. Bloomsbury.com/uk/vision-or-mirage-9781838605933 (NB discount code expires end of February 2021) David Ru...