New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization th...

Muhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage by Michael Muhammad Knight (UNC Press, 2020) joins the emerging subfield of literature in Islamic Studies exploring embodiment and materiality as concepts for making sense of the spatial and temporal developments of Muslim subjectivities. Knight’s monograph is the first to delve into these themes as it concerns the Prophet Muhammad’s bo...

On Good Friday, 1626, Franciscus Quaresmius delivered a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem calling on King Philip IV of Spain to undertake a crusade to 'liberate' the Holy Land. Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade (Routledge, 2019) introduces readers to this unique call to arms with the first-ever edition of the work since its publica...

Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020), co-edited by Pedro Machado, Joseph Christensen, Steve Mullins) is the first book to examine the trade, distribution, production, and consumption of pearls and mother-of-pearl in the global Indian Ocean over more than five centuries. While scholars have long recognized the importance of pearling to the social...

Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most prolific and influential Islamic thinkers to date, and was even the only pre-modern Muslim author cited in the 9/11 Report. His supporters and detractors alike have engaged his scholarship extensively for hundreds of years, and Hoover’s monograph, Ibn Taymiyya (2020), in English, as part of Oneworld’s “Makers of the Muslim World” series therefore offers an invaluabl...

John Tolan’s latest book Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton UP, 2019) is a fascinating and rich survey of the complex perceptions of Muhammad as understood by Christian Europeans. Using sources that range from art to literature to history to theater to religion, Tolan shows that portrayals of Muhammad are varied and complex – ind...

With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqis abroad, hoping to return one day to a better Iraq, became uncertain exiles. Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford UP, 2020) tells the human story of this exile in the context of decades of U.S. imperial interests in Iraq—from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba'th coup and support of Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gu...

In Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Walker Robins explores how Southern Baptists engaged what was called the “Palestine question”: whether Jews or Arabs would, or should, control the Holy Land after World War I. He argues that, in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, most Southern Baptists did not directly engag...

History is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of young, energy-rich monarchies of the Gulf that often punch above their weight in geopolitics and geoeconomics. Yet, that is the rich, mostly unknown story of Qatar that Michael Quentin Morton tells in his book, Masters of the Pearl: A History of Qatar (Reaktion Books, 2020). It is a story that sheds light on a country that is rul...

In many popular accounts of contemporary “Western” society there is an inherent contradiction between the principles underlying liberal secularism and Islam. This type of binary discourse about “religion” and “secular” naturalizes these differences and promotes the seeming rigidity of the two categories. But secularism is much messier than that. Danielle Haque, Associate Professor at Minnesota Sta...

Tell This in my Memory : Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press) is a study of slavery, liberation, and remembrance between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Examines the mechanisms of enslavement and emancipation through narratives told by captive and their descendants as well as European missionaries. The power of the narrative Eve Tr...

Against the backdrop of four decades of continuous conflict in Afghanistan, the Pashtun male protagonists of this book carry out their daily effort to internally negotiate, adjust (if at all), and respond to the very strict cultural norms and rules of masculinity that their androcentric social environment enjoins on them. Yet, in a widespread context of war, displacement, relocation, and social vi...

Dónal Hassett’s Mobilizing Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939 (Oxford UP, 2019) is at once a history of colonialism and of the “Great War”. Considering the ways that the conflict from 1914-1918 shaped the colonial politics of the “interwar” years in the Algerian context, the book looks at how segments of Algerian society with differing interests, incl...

Sir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fascination with the Ottoman empire and Islam between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the latter half of the 18th century. This beautifully argued, erudite monograph traces a textured encounter betw...

Political scientists Alan Chong and Quang Min Pham bring with their edited volume, Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), originality as well as dimensions and perspectives to the discussion about the Belt and Road that are highly relevant but often either unrecognized or underemphasized. The book is about much more than the material aspects of China’s...

Sayyid Fadl, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, led a unique life—one that spanned much of the nineteenth century and connected India, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire. For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford University Press) tells his story, part biography and part global history, as his life and legacy afford a singular view on historical shifts of power and soverei...

Farzaneh Hemmasi is the author of Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California's Iranian Pop Music (Duke UP, 2020). The title obviously refers the song "California Dreamin'," but in this case the "Dreaming" refers to the active imagining, or reimagining, of Iranian and Persian identity by the artistic community that relocated to southern California following the 1979 Islam...

The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel’s famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic...

In this wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fund...

Dr. Sophie Richter-Devroe’s book, Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (University of Illinois Press, 2018) offers an analysis of the forms assumed by women’s political resistance in Occupied Palestine and interrogates how an understanding of such activism might be expanded if one attends to the ‘everyday’. During the last twenty years, Palestinian women...

As the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedd...

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi, Associate Professor of History at McGill University in his new book Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), offers a radically d...

What are the African Middle Ages? A place, certainly, and a time period, evidently. But also a “documentary regime,” argues François-Xavier Fauvelle. How do we reconstruct these centuries of the African past in the face of a daunting lack of sources? In thirty-four thoughtful vignettes, Fauvelle takes us along for the ride as he wrestles with this question. From Aksum to the Swahili coast, and Sij...

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood. Vi...

“Consider the works of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning African American writer, literary and social critic, and activist Toni Morrison (b. 1931),” writes Majid Daneshgar. “Hers—like Said’s—are popular in the West and cover most of the principal themes covered by Orientalism, including otherness, outsider-ship, exploitation and cultural colonialism and imperialism. Yet … one would be hard-pressed...