New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Seán William Gannon's book The Irish Imperial Service: Policing Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores Irish participation in the British imperial project after ‘Southern’ Ireland’s independence in 1922. Building on a detailed study of the Irish contribution to the policing of the Palestine Mandate, it examines Irish imperial servants’ twentieth-centu...

In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. Maps divide the walled Old City into four quarters, yet that division doesn’t reflect the reality of mixed and diverse neighbourhoods. Beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, much of the Old City remains little known to visitors, its people overlooked and their stories untold.  Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New...

Peter Oborne’s The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam (Simon and Schuster 2022) is as much a history of US, British, and French attitudes towards Islam and Muslims as it is about a relationship that was almost doomed from the outset. Not because of inherent problems with either the essence of the West or the essence of Islam but due to prejudice, bias, and, certainly in the 21st ce...

One 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 desi...

European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and l...

Lori 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 als...

'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 p...

Media 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 sta...

Dynasties 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...

Argentina 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, a...

For 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 s...

In 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 twenti...

Zionism 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...

Israel'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 supp...

Analysts 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 Societie...

Andrew 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 le...

In 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 thr...

Randa 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, dealin...

For 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 auth...

Textiles 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: Ottom...

Have 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 a...

NB: 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 becam...

Saudi 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 an...

As 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 resettl...

The 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 w...