New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Skill—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...

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) 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...

On 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...

Seamlessly 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: Th...

Peter 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...

Metrics 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 entrep...

In 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...

Islam'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...

Beautiful 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 S...

Usaama al-Azami’s Islam and the Arab Revolutions: The Ulama Between Democracy and Autocracy (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on the responses of several prominent Muslim religious scholars towards the 2011 Arab popular revolts, particularly in Egypt, that toppled long-standing autocratic leaders. It also looks at their reaction to the subsequent military coup in 2013 that overthrw Egypt’s first and only...

More than one million Indians travel annually to work in oil projects in the Gulf, one of the few international destinations where men without formal education can find lucrative employment. Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford University Press, 2021) follows their migration, taking readers to sites in India, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, from villag...

Crippling sanctions, inflation, and unemployment have increasingly burdened young people in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Coming of Age in Iran: Poverty and the Struggle for Dignity (NYU Press, 2020), Manata Hashemi takes us inside the lives of poor Iranian youth, showing how these young men and women face their future prospects. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Hashemi follows their stories, on...

The Ottoman Empire has been many things throughout its long history. One of the greatest and gravest threats to Christian Europe. A source of inspiration for Renaissance and Reformation thinkers. An exoticized realm of sultans, slaves and harems. An equal and key partner in the European system of international relations. And, near its end, “the sick man of Europe”. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, an...

Mona Kareem speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Mapping Exile: A Writer’s Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait,” which appears in a portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf, in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Mona talks about her family’s experience living in Kuwait as Bidoon, or stateless people, and why examining and writing about that exper...

Iraq has in the last year taken a lead in sponsoring talks between Middle Eastern arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in an effort to prevent tension in the region spinning out of control. The Iraqi role is remarkable given that Saudi Arabia for more than a decade after the 2003-led US invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein wanted nothing to do with the country’s post-Saddam leadership....

When France fell to Hitler's armies in June 1940, a flood of refugees fleeing Nazi terror quickly overwhelmed Europe's borders and spilled across the Mediterranean to North Africa, touching off a humanitarian crisis of dizzying proportions. Nelly Benatar, a highly regarded Casablancan Jewish lawyer, quickly claimed a role of rescuer and almost single-handedly organized a sweeping program of wartim...

In How ISIS Fights: Military Tactics in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Omar Ashour has written a detailed and data-rich analysis of ISIS's way of war. He analyzes the tactical and operational levels of war to depict what makes ISIS successful and unique. He reveals that ISIS was tactically and organizationally innovative, redefining not just what a terrorist organization is, bu...

Libya stands out as an example of a complex, internecine Middle Eastern and North African conflict in which regional and global powers as well as jihadists exploit tribal and sectarian rivalries. The rivalries fuel a seemingly endless wave of chaos and violence in a part of the world that is pockmarked by ungoverned spaces. In Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, Libya expert Jason Pack demonst...

In Quagmire in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Dr. Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl provides the first treatment of quagmire in civil war, moving beyond the notion that quagmire is intrinsic to certain countries or wars. In a rigorous but accessible analysis, he explains how quagmire can emerge from domestic-international interactions and strategic choices. To support the argument, Dr. Schulhofe...

Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan. Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it...

Noor Naga speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about co-editing The Common’s first-of-its-kind portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf, which appeared in Issue 22. Noor penned an introduction to the portfolio, titled “Who Writes the Arabian Gulf?”, which explores her experience growing up in the Gulf with no real contemporary literature written for, by, or about that diverse population. Noor...

Timothy Brennan is Professor of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of several seminal books in literary studies, including Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies, published by Stanford University Press in 2014, Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz published by Verso in 2008, and Wars of Position: The Cultura...

During World War I, the British Empire enlisted half a million young men, predominantly from the countryside of Egypt, in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) and put them to work handling military logistics in Europe and the Middle East. British authorities reneged on their promise not to draw Egyptians into the war, and, as Kyle Anderson shows, the ELC was seen by many in Egypt as a form of slavery. T...

In Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke UP, 2021), Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, app...

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either.” The relationship between religion and state presents complex challenges to liberal democracies around the world. In this work, Gideon Sapir and David Statman Propose a comprehensive theory about state and religion relations, providing tools to think systematically about questions in this field...