New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran: The Autobiography of Mahboob Qirvanian provides a translation of a compelling autobiography that chronicles the life of Mahboob Qirvanian, from childhood and enslavement in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire to his eventual liberation in Iran. The Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran is a poignant and compelling ac...

In this double interview I talked to Michael Kinnamon, author of A Rooftop in Jerusalem and Philip Graubart author of Here There Is No Why. A Rooftop In Jerusalem: When Daniel Jacobs decides to spend his junior year abroad in Israel, he never dreams he'll fall in love with both Jerusalem's Old City and an Israeli woman, Shoshana. It's the year religion becomes a part of his identity, from the heig...

To seek asylum, people often have to cross borders undocumented, embarking on perilous trajectories. Due to the war in Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban, and severe human rights violations, over the past decades thousands of people have risked their lives to seek safety. By what means do they make these journeys, especially when they lack money and passports? Over the course of three years, Han...

Orthodox Choreographies: Boundaries, Borders and Materiality in Jerusalem's Old City (Gorgias Press, 2024) offers a comprehensive anthropological study of lived Christianity in Jerusalem’s Old City, with a special focus on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Anastasis. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores the experiences of the Rum Orthodox community, exam...

The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Gina Vale explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization through the lives and words of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. While the roles and activities of foreign (predominantly Western), pro-IS women have garnered significant attention, the experiences and insights of local civilian...

Dr. Rosemary Admiral provides a groundbreaking history of women’s legal engagement in Marinid Morocco between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries that fundamentally challenges contemporary assumptions about women’s relationships to Islamic legal traditions. Drawing on a rich collection of fatwas (legal documents) from Fez and surrounding areas, Dr. Admiral demonstrates how women—some without fo...

Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power distributed among mountain fort...

Following the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine, Jews across the British Empire—from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, London to Calcutta—found themselves at the heart of global Jewish political discourse. As these intellectuals, politicians, activists, and communal elites navigated shifting political landscapes, some envisioned Palestine as a British dominion, leveraging imperial power for Jewish st...

The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule (Stanford UP, 2024) examines how the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigated the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In this social and cultural history, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day...

Starting in the 1970s, Palestinian theater flourished as part of a Palestinian cultural spring. In the absence of local radio, television, and uncensored journalism, theater production became the leading form of artistic expression, and Palestinian theater artists self-identified as a movement. Although resistance was not their sole function, these theater makers contributed to an active cultural...

Turkey is among a league of revisionist powers who are challenging the world order. Erdogan and his Islamist movement have aimed to create the “New Turkey”, preparing for a future that is less dependent on Western treaty allies and with an alliance structure of its own. In New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country (I. B. Tauris, 2025), Selim Koru discusses the poli...

Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa. The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monument...

Hadi Abdullah's Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution (DoppelHouse Press, 2025), translated by Alessandro Columbu, is no ordinary diary. It’s a testimony written in the heat of events (demonstrations in Daraa and Homs, the bombardments of Aleppo, sieges, and funerals). Through Hadi’s words, we glimpse the Syrian revolution not through statistics, but through the eyes of someone wh...

Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee e...

A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity (U California Press, 2025) traces the rhetorical strategies of religious radicalization that encouraged fifth- and sixth-century miaphysite Christians to be willing to suffer physical deprivation and harm rather than abandon the church that the late Roman Empire defined as heresy after the Co...

Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of...

A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made b...

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels. In Assassins and T...

In this episode, New Books Network Host Nina Bo Wagner speaks with Karen Bartlett about The Escape From Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance (The New Press and Duckworth, 2025). The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became jud...

Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), notes that “British India” once spanned all the wa...

Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power di...

The Book of Travels Ḥannā Diyāb: A Conversation with Johannes StephanThe Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights. Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and i...

Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (open access) examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and econ...

Archives are not only sources for history but have their own histories too, which shape how historians can tell stories of the past. In Managing Paperwork in Mamluk Cairo: Archives, Waqf and Society (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Daisy Livingston explores the archival history of one of the most powerful polities of the late-medieval Middle East: the ‘Mamluk’ sultanate of Cairo. Relying on surviving origina...

What are the prospects for democracy in Syria? Is this the right question to ask? What do we need to better understand about Syria’s new leader, its civil society, and the challenges it faces in a new era for Syria? Join Rana Khoury, Daniel Neep, and Emily Scott for this special joint episode of the Localization in World Politics and People, Power, Politics podcasts. Rana B. Khoury is assistant pr...