New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how did the Iranian revolution impact and shape Foucault’s thought? These are among the questions addressed by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in his exciting new book Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the...

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Green, Professor of South Asian and Islamic history at UCLA, examines how these terrains of exchange transformed Islam during the modern period from roughly 1800-1940 in his book, Terrains of Exchange: Rel...

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than jus...

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Sephardi Jews with roots in the Ottoman Empire who sought citizenship within European nations for a variety of reasons, including socio-economic mobil...

The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, an internationally recognized award given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to a photographer...

You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points...

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: A...

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism,...

From his modest beginnings in southern Iran, the Persian king Cyrus II went on to conquer three of the dominant kingdoms of the ancient Near East those of the Medians, the Lydians, and the Babylonians and establish the first world empire. In Discovering Cyrus: The Persian Conqueror Astride the Ancient World (Mage Pub, 2013), Reza Zarghamee draws upon the available written sources and archaeologica...

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), Elizabeth Hurd, Associate Professor of Religion and Political Scien...

Bard Kartveit‘s Dilemmas of Attachment: Identity and Belonging among Palestinian Christians (Brill, 2014) is an outstanding book, which carefully describes the constraints faced by Palestinian Christians, particularly in the unique context of the Bethlehem area, painting a nuanced picture of the ways in which such realities are experienced and narrated in relation to questions of identity. The acc...

Marc Lynch is the author of The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2016). Lynch is a professor of political science at George Washington University and blogs at the Monkey Cage. From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria, the Arab Spring saw protesters storm to the street demanding reform and revolution. Five years later, most of these countries remain forever changed yet...

Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, dramatically shifted how people think about the production of knowledge and representations of the Other. His ideas have been championed and critiqued with dozens of books expanding his work on the construction of the East in western imagination. However, very rarely have we investigated the dual move of representing the Other and self-representation from the...

In Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2015), Irene L. Gendzier, Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, examines new evidence of the role of oil politics in the founding of U.S. policy towards Israel. Gendzier discusses and contextualizes the response of U.S, policy makers...

In her stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, presents a riveting narrative of the intersection of literature, religion, and history in early modern Muslim societies. She does so by focusing on the chronicle of a common Barber in 18th-century...

As the title of the monograph suggests, Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) by Asma Afsaruddin, guides the reader through an organized and compelling narrative of reflections on hot-button topics in the modern world. The monograph offers a provocative balance of historical contextualization, close reading of texts, review of key scholars, and political analysis. Given i...

In Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Brandeis University Press, 2015), Hillel Cohen, senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the outbreak of violence in Palestine in 1929. It was that year, not 1948 or 1967, that marked year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict that persists today. Cohen’s method is not only to examine the events, but how the events get written down...

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is one of the most famous Muslim thinkers in history. His autobiographical account, The Deliverer from Error, tells us of his spiritual crisis and transformative experience of journeying, which lead to his subsequent life as a pious recluse. From this experience al-Ghazali wrote his magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, filled with mystical knowledge. A...

In Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the Indiana University, puts the Babylonian Talmud in its Persian context. He lays out a research program for Talmud studies that is contextual, rather than literary or exegetical. Analyzing refe...

In her excellent new book The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (UNC Press, 2015), Kishwar Rizvi, Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, interrogates the interaction of history, memory, and architecture by exploring arguably the most important sacred space in Islam: the mosque. By combining the study of religion, history...

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are allowed to pass in silence. The hundredth year anniversary of the Genocide of the Armenians has gotten somewhat lost amidst the outpouring of books about the war.  Still, we’ve seen a small number of exc...

In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, explores shifting meanings of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. By brilliantly combining historical and ethnographic inquiry, Najmabadi highlights the co...

In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, explores shifting meanings of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. By brilliantly combining historical and ethnographic inquiry, Najmabadi highlights the co...

Winner of the 2015 American Anthropological Associations Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and the 2014 JMEWS Book Award of the Association for Middle East Womens Studies, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2012) by Marcia C. Inhorn challenges the Western stereotypical image o...

In the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism began to settle in Palestine. Their goal was not only to establish a politically sovereign state, but also to create a new, modern, Hebrew nation. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement realized its political goal. It then sought to acculturate the multitude of Jewish immigrant groups in the...