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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

64:48

Faisal Devji, "Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/22

Faisal Devji's Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale UP, 2025) is a compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor. Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam's birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim

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65:01

Killian Clarke, "Return of Tyranny: Why...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/21

Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule?Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution, in Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Killian Clarke explains both why counterrevolutions emerge and when they are likely to succeed. He forwards a movement-centric argument that emphasizes the strategies

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76:50

Basit Kareem Iqbal, "The Dread Heights: Tribulation...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/14

Basit Kareem Iqbal's new book The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham UP, 2025) uses ethnographic scenes from Jordan and Canada to contextualize the role of Muslim charities and community organizations that support displaced refugees from the Syrian catastrophe. Through these encounters, however, we learn not only of the limitations of secular humanitarian projects, but we are also privy to the deep theological enterprise of notions of trial and tribulation of

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40:01

Justin Marozzi, "Captives and Companions: A History...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/13

Slavery has been a ubiquitous practice throughout much of world history–and the Muslim world was no exception. Slave soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs can be found throughout Muslim writings—which, as Justin Marozzi points out in his book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Pegasus Books, 2025), ends up giving us a selective and narrow view of who slaves were, and what they did.Justin tries to dive into this history–sometimes very patchy

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67:05

Eric H. Cline, "Love, War, and Diplomacy: The...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/12

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites,

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52:47

Aaron Magid, "The Most American King: Abdullah of...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/12

The Most American King: Abdullah of Jordan (Universal Publishers, 2025) is the first comprehensive biography on Jordan’s King Abdullah. Drawing on interviews with over 100 individuals, including Abdullah's classmates, former Jordanian ministers, and CIA directors, The Most American King offers a thorough account of this key Arab leader. Aaron Magid, a former Amman-based journalist, charts Abdullah’s path to power from a Massachusetts prep school to a British military academy to the throne. This book

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109:59

Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/06

Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants utilized the technologies of colonial capitalism — banks,

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55:19

Sarah Griswold, "Resurrecting the Past: France's...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/03

In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in a post-1918 fight over the French past—a contingent and contradictory but always hard-charging struggle over a forgotten "heritage mandate." Many scholars, clergy, pundits, politicians, and investors perceived the moment Allied forces entered Jerusalem in December 1917 to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand French influence, evoking the vision

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70:02

Patrick Brittenden, "Algerian and Christian:...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/11/02

Algerian and Christian are two words that many people do not put together. Dr. Patrick Brittenden does. In this episode, we talk with Patrick about his new book Algerian and Christian: Christian Theological Formation, Identity and Mission in Contemporary Algeria (Regnum Books International, 2025). He invites readers into the complex, often painful, yet deeply hopeful journey of following Jesus in a land where faith in Christ is seen as foreign. In a country founded on a vision of being irreducibly

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67:59

13.3 – Ismail Patel and Hatem Bazian

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/31

In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward spoke with Ismail Patel and Hatem Bazian about Pro-Palestinian resistance and the nature of protests - from the Iraq war demonstrations to the recent protests after the events of October 7th 2023. This conversation extended into the nature of colonial projects of occupation and the role coloniality still plays in conflicts today. Hatem Bazian is a Palestinian scholar in the Departments of Near Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at

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52:28

Aria Fani, "Reading Across Borders: Afghans,...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/31

The dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through literature.Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged through contact with Europe alone, Reading Across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (University of Texas Press, 2024) demonstrates how the cultural forms of Iran and Afghanistan as nation-states arose from their shared Persian heritage and cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century. In

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36:22

James Grehan, "Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/17

It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civility and facilitate social interaction. But if we look more closely, they can tell us much more than we might first suppose, revealing what conventional accounts of state, economy, and religion often ignore. With Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2025), Dr. James Grehan offers a panoramic

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43:42

Moudhy Al-Rashid, "Between Two Rivers: Ancient...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/16

In 1923, archaeologist Leonard Woolley stumbled upon a room that dated back to 530BC, the time of the Babylonians. Oddly, the room was filled with artifacts that were thousands of years older. A clay drum led Woolley to speculate that he might have stumbled across the world’s first museum.Whether that was really the case is still somewhat unknown. But this room is the inspiration behind Moudhy Al-Rashid’s book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton /

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37:03

Hamid Dabashi, "After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/15

In this episode, we speak with Hamid Dabashi about his new book, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket, 2025), published by Haymarket Books. Written amid the ongoing war in Gaza, the book confronts what Dabashi describes as the moral and philosophical crisis of the modern West. After Savagery challenges long-standing traditions of Western thought, arguing that their universal claims often conceal a history of exclusion and erasure. Dabashi calls for

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60:38

Mahboob Qirvanian and Behnaz Mirzai, "Life of an...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/14

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 account of one man’s journey through struggle, resilience, and unimaginable suffering. In the early

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42:00

Karl Ittmann, "Fuelling Empire: The British Imperial...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/14

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, British companies used the resources of empire to create an imperial oil industry that controlled 20% of global oil reserves by 1939 and allowed for the movement of capital and labor between regions and companies. The imperial oil complex encompassed colonies—Burma and Trinidad—and dependent states-Iraq and Iraq. In both, the imperial state used its political and military power to support British oil interests. The oil complex drew on the resources of empire

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68:29

Philip Graubart, "Here There Is No Why" and Philip...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/12

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 heights of a simple rooftop. A year he encounters the tragic complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian

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51:19

Hannah Pool, "The Game: The Economy of Undocumented...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/10/07

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, Hannah Pool accompanied a group of Afghan friends and families as they attempted "The Game" - Game zadan:

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64:05

Georgios Tsourous, "Orthodox Choreographies:...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/09/30

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, examining their internal dynamics and relationships with other Christian groups. Within the Church of the

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49:00

Rosemary Admiral, "Living Law: Women and Legality in...

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies ·

2025/09/29

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 formal education—strategically navigated complex legal landscapes to protect their interests, expand their

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364 results

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