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PODCAST

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

89:18

Cristiana Strava, "Precarious Modernities: Assembling...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/12

What does living “precariously” mean in Casablanca? In 2014 it meant being labeled tcharmil (seeming to endanger public order) and swept up by the police, if you were an unemployed young man sporting a banda haircut and gathering with your mates on a street corner. Cristiana Strava witnessed this and other neglected aspects of urban vulnerability while conducting extensive fieldwork in Hay Mohammedi, a renowned working-class neighborhood on the margins of modern Morocco’s economic mecca,

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30:02

Robert D. Kaplan, "The Loom of Time: Between Empire...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/11

The Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades. Robert Kaplan—author, foreign policy thinker, longtime writer on international affairs—has written about what he terms the “Greater Middle East”, a region that spans from the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia and eastwards to

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44:03

Catholic in Palestine (with Fr Firas Abedrabbo)

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/11

There have been Christians in the Holy Land for two thousand years; “we are the first church,” says Father Firas Abedrabbo who is from Bethlehem and works in Ramallah. He studied law in France and speaks excellent English and spoke with me about his experience as a priest in Palestine (the West Bank) during the Gaza War. We talk politics and history, but we also talk about how people in the middle of a war can see God’s love and His participation in our daily lives, even (or perhaps especially) in

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42:57

Emily Drumsta, "Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/09

In Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation (U California Press, 2024), Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic

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40:20

Eric Calderwood, "On Earth Or in Poems: The Many...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/08

During the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus (Harvard UP, 2023) shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination,

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57:00

Sumita Pahwa, "Politics as Worship: Righteous...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/08

Despite expectations that the deeply held political and religious organizing principles at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood would prove incompatible and contentious should the organization ever come to power, the Brotherhood succeeded in maintaining a united identity following the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak and the election of a Brotherhood-majority government. To understand how the movement threaded these disparate missions, Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim

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59:30

Annika Schmeding, "Sufi Civilities: Religious...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/07

Annika Schmeding’s new book Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan (Stanford UP, 2023) is a deeply sensitive and rich study of a variety of facets of Sufism in contemporary Afghanistan. Focused on the intersection and interaction of Sufism and Afghan civil society, this book simultaneously offers a layered and often moving account of Sufism in Afghanistan, while also presenting an excellent critique of Western NGO driven understandings of civility and civil society

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40:05

Esra Mirze Santesso, "Muslim Comics and Warscape...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/07

Recent decades have seen an unprecedented number of comics by and about Muslim people enter the global market. Now, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023) offers the first major study of these works. Esra Mirze Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East--from blockbusters like

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81:52

Loren D. Lybarger, "Palestinian Chicago: Identity in...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/03

Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Loren D. Lybarger's book Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (U California Press, 2020) charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects they

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69:11

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, "Merits of the Plague"...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/04/02

Six hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been willed by

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55:47

Alessandro Columbu, "Zakariyya Tamir and the Politics...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/29

Zakariyya Tamir is Syria’s foremost writer of short stories, and his works are widely read across the Arab world. In Zakariyya Tamir and the Politics of the Syrian Short Story: Modernity, Authoritarianism, and Gender (I. B. Tauris, 2023), the first English-language monograph on Tamir’s entire oeuvre, Alessandro Columbu examines Tamir’s literary development in the context of changing political contexts, from his beginnings as a short story writer for local magazines in the late 1950s until the Syrian

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38:59

Rana AlMutawa, "Everyday Life in the Spectacular...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/26

Everyday Life in the Spectacular City is a groundbreaking urban ethnography that reveals how middle-class citizens and longtime residents of Dubai interact with the city's so-called superficial spaces to create meaningful social lives. Rana AlMutawa shows that inhabitants adapt themselves to top-down development projects, from big malls to megaprojects. These structures serve residents' evolving social needs, transforming Dubai's spectacular spaces into personally important cultural sites. These

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44:31

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/26

Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa.Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural

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34:50

Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age:...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/26

Global adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies? Why do

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33:50

Laura Menin, "Quest for Love in Central Morocco:...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/23

Following the 2011 wave of revolutions and protests in North Africa and the Middle East, new discussions of individual freedoms emerged in the Moroccan public sphere and human rights discourse. A segment of the public rallied around the removal of an article in the penal code that punished sexual relationships outside of marriage. As debates about personal and sexual freedom gain momentum, love and intimacy remain complex issues. Moving between public, clandestine, and online interactions, Quest

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48:36

Eileen Kane et al., "Russian-Arab Worlds: A...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/20

The roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford UP, 2023) presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and/or Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer’s diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. These

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67:46

Jörg Matthias Determann and Shoaib Ahmed Malik,...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/19

Over the last thirty years, humanity has discovered thousands of planets outside of our solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life could be imminent. This book explains how such a discovery might impact Islamic theology. It is the foundational reference on the subject, comprising a variety of different insights from both Sunni and Shi'i positions, from different Muslim contexts, and with chapters that compare and contrast Islamic perspectives with Christianity. Together, they address some

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64:13

Yaacov Nir, "Establishment and History of the Cyprus...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/19

Yaacov Nir's Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949) (Cambridge Scholars, 2024) explores the nature of the severe conflict over immigration to Palestine during the post-Second World War period, and the British policy of deportation to Detention Camps in Cyprus (1946-1949). It considers the perspective of actors such as the British Foreign Office, dominated by stubborn Ernest Bevin, and the Colonial Office, the Palestinian Jewish community and its

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71:04

Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service:...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/17

In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists fought

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48:06

Julie Kalman, "The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2024/03/14

On July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony.The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and

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364 results

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