New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace (USIP, 2022) is an insider’s account of secret negotiations to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal―negotiations that came tantalizingly close to success. Ambassador Frederic Hof, who spearheaded the US-mediated discussions in 2009-11, takes readers behind the scenes in Washington, Damascus, and Jerusalem, w...

Humans love stories. And no collection of stories is more beloved worldwide than the Middle Eastern folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. The original collection only contained about 40 stories. It was compiled into a manuscript sometime between the 8th century and the 14th century during the Islamic Golden Age. The stories were made popular in the West by the French translator Antoine...

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein's book Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford UP, 2022), the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity of those involved--Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable; locals, refugees, the displaced...

For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As Nicholas Morton reveals in The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single gener...

In mid-September of this year, a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died under suspicious circumstances after her arrest by the morality police for improperly covering her hair. Her death set off a huge wave of protests across Iran – the biggest in many years. The protesters’ rallying cry was “Women, Life, Freedom,” and women have indeed taken a prominent role in the demonstrations that followe...

In this episode I have interviewed Gabriel Polley, winner of the Ibrahim Dakkak Award for the best essay published in 2021 by the Jerusalem Quarterly. Narratives of the modern history of Palestine/Israel often begin with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Britain's arrival in 1917. However, this work argues that the contest over Palestine has its roots deep in the 19th century, with Victorians...

Tens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948 (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the...

Sheikh Yusūf al- Qaraḍāwī is regarded as the most influential contemporary Muslim religious figure. His best-selling book, Al-Ḥalal wal-Ḥaram fi al-Islam ("The Forbidden and the Permitted in Islam") is perhaps one of the most widely read Islamic works, after the Qur’ān. The subject of jihad in Palestine is a salient feature of Qaraḍāwī’s thought and is addressed frequently in his books. His views...

Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Cornell UP, 2022) explores how activists in 1968 transformed university campuses across Europe and North Africa into sites of contestation where students, administrators, and state officials collided over definitions of modernity and nationhood after empire.  Burleigh Hendrickson details protesters' versions of events to...

In 874 CE, the eleventh Imam died, and the Imami community splintered. The institutions of the Imamate were maintained by the dead Imam's agents, who asserted they were in contact with a hidden twelfth Imam. This was the beginning of 'Twelver' Shiʿism.  In Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi‘ism, 850-950 CE (Cambridge UP, 2022), Edmund Hayes provides an innovative approach to exploring...

Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt curr...

Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler consider...

During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyāʾ Qazwīnī authored what became one of the most influential works of natural history in the world: Wonders and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above, the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and everything in between, Qazwīnī offered a captivating account of the cosmos. With fine painting...

Ha-Kluv (The Cage) is a Hebrew anthology of selected short stories by Fida Jiryis, which she originally published in Arabic. The stories speak of the life of Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. Through these snapshots of daily life, the book attempts to portray the complex realities of living on both sides of the divide, examining issues of politics, identity, gender, poverty, and the hum...

George Tyrrell insisted that the quest for the historical Jesus was no more than scholars staring into a well to see their own reflections staring back. Jesus is the mirror image of those who study him. A similar phenomenon accompanies the quest for the historical Magi, those mysterious travelers who came from the East, following a star to Bethlehem. In this work, ancient historian and scholar Eri...

Today I talked to Alda Benjamen about his book Assyrians in Modern Iraq: Negotiating Political and Cultural Space (Cambridge UP, 2021) Examining the relationship between a strengthened Iraqi state under the Baʿth regime and the Assyrians, a Christian ethno-religious group, Benjamen studies the role of minorities in twentieth-century Iraqi political and cultural history. Relying on extensive resear...

A history of pastoral nomads in the Islamic Middle East, Nomads in the Middle East by Beatrice Forbes Manz (Cambridge University Press, 2021) charts the rise of nomadic power from the formation of Islam through the Middle Ages, when Mongols and Turks ruled most of the region, to the decline of nomadic power in the twentieth century. Offering a vivid insight into the impact of nomads on the politic...

In the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard. That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliocozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokoham...

The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2022) by Ahmad al-Jallad presents evidence for religious identity and ritual practices among the Safaitic-writing nomads of pre-Islamic Arabia. For this evidence, al-Jallad relies on a large corpus of rock-carved inscriptions in the Safaitic language. Unlike Islamic-period lite...

Mark D. Calder's Bethlehem's Syriac Christians: Self, Nation and Church in Dialogue and Practice (Gorgias Press, 2017) is anthropological study of Syriac Orthodox Christian identity in a time of displacement, upheaval, and conflict. For some Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, their self-articulation - the means by which they connect themselves to others, things, places and symbols - is decis...

The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopo...

In July 1815, six Iranian students arrived in London under the escort of their chaperone, Captain Joseph D'Arcy. Their mission was to master the modern sciences behind the rapid rise of Europe. Over the next four years, they lived both the low life and high life of Regency London, from being down and out after their abandonment by D’Arcy to charming their way into society and landing on the gossip...

Two celebrated Egyptologists bring to vivid life the intriguing and controversial reign of King Tut's parents. Akhenaten has been the subject of radically different, even contradictory, biographies. The king has achieved fame as the world's first individual and the first monotheist, but others have seen him as an incestuous tyrant who nearly ruined the kingdom he ruled. The gold funerary mask of h...

What are the implications of climate change for twenty-first-century conflict and security? Rising temperatures, it is often said, will bring increased drought, more famine, heightened social vulnerability, and large-scale political and violent conflict; indeed, many claim that this future is already with us. Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Sec...

Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same n...