New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford UP, 2023) is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history. Country of Words taps into the power of Palestinian literature to defy conventional linear, chronological, and artificial national frames of representation. Despite the fact that an unprecedented number of the world's population live as refugees, exiles, or stateless

Bedross Der Matossian's The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2023), based on new research, sheds light on the history of the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party, a major Armenian revolutionary party that operated in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Persia and throughout the global Armenian diaspora. Divided into sections which cover the origins, ideology, and regional history of the SDHP, the book situates the history of the Hnchaks within debates around socialism, populism, and nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The SDHP was not only an Armenian party but had a global Marxist outlook, and scholars in this volume bring to bear expertise in a wide range of histories and languages including Russian, Turkish, Persian and Latin American to trace the emergence and role this influential party played from their split with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the events of the Armenian genocide to the formation of the first Armenian Republic and

For almost seven centuries, two powers dominated the region we now call the Middle East: Rome and Persia. From the west: The Roman Republic, later the Roman Empire, later the Byzantine Empire. From the East: The Parthian Empire, later replaced by the Sasanian Empire. The two ancient superpowers spent centuries fighting for influence, paying each other off, encouraging proxy fights in their neighbors, and seizing opportunities while the other was distracted with internal strife. The relationship culminates in an almost-three-decade long war that so exhausts the two powers that they both end up getting overrun by the Arabs years later. Adrian Goldsworthy gives a detailed account of this long history in his recent book Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry (Basic Books: 2023), starting from the (alleged) first contact in 92 BC through to the collapse of Persia in the seventh century. The two of us are going to try our best to talk about this long history in our interview today. Adrian Goldsworthy is an

Nicholas Morton’s The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the military history of the medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where ethnic, religious, dynastic, and commercial interests collided and the causes of war could be numerous. Conflicts persisted for decades and were fought out between many groups including Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, and the Crusaders themselves. Nic Morton recreates this world, exploring how each faction sought to advance its own interests by any means possible, adapting its warcraft to better respond to the threats posed by their rivals. Strategies and tactics employed by the pastoral societies of the Central Asian steppe were pitted against the armies of the agricultural societies of Western Christendom, Byzantium, and the Islamic World, galvanising commanders to adapt their practices in response to their foes.  In this episode, Nic

Beginning in August 1946, stateless and visaless Jews, most of them survivors of the Nazi death camps, who sought to immigrate to the Land of Israel were intercepted by the Royal Navy and deported to the nearby island of Cyprus, where they were detained in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Despite occupying a dramatic and fateful position in modern history, this saga has remained largely inaccessible due to the widespread dispersal of the primary sources and the linguistic difficulties presented by them.  To address these problems, Yitzhak Teutsch's book The Cyprus Detention Camps: The Essential Research Guide (Cambridge Scholars, 2019) scrutinizes the scholarly literature, consulting hundreds of primary sources, many of them previously unknown, on three continents, bringing together interviews with scores of eyewitnesses, and translating foreign-language terms into English. The result is a comprehensive, meticulously footnoted guide that uses such tools as maps, a detailed timeline, and biographical entries t

Some people are good at what they do, some are enthusiastic about their work. This guest brings both to bear in his exploration of the ancient past. Today we are privileged to talk with a distinguished figure in the world of archeology whose enthusiasm doesn’t quit. Professor. Aren Maeir is not only an accomplished archaeologist, but he is also a captivating storyteller who brings the past to life through his discoveries. Professor Aren M. Maeir is Director of the Tel es Safi/Gath Archeological Project in Israel. He is an expert in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, with a particular focus on the Bronze and iron Ages of the Ancient Near East. Professor Maeir is based at (and formerly served as the chairmen of) the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, and serves as the head of the Institute of Archaeology. Maeir is also the co-director of the “Minerva Center for the Relations between Israel and A

American Jews began debating Palestinian rights issues even before Israel’s founding in 1948. Geoffrey Levin recovers the voices of American Jews who, in the early decades of Israel’s existence, called for an honest reckoning with the moral and political plight of Palestinians. These now‑forgotten voices, which include an aid‑worker‑turned‑academic with Palestinian Sephardic roots, a former Yiddish journalist, anti‑Zionist Reform rabbis, and young left‑wing Zionist activists, felt drawn to support Palestinian rights by their understanding of Jewish history, identity, and ethics. They sometimes worked with mainstream American Jewish leaders who feared that ignoring Palestinian rights could foster antisemitism, leading them to press Israeli officials for reform. But Israeli diplomats viewed any American Jewish interest in Palestinian affairs with deep suspicion, provoking a series of quiet confrontations that ultimately kept Palestinian rights off the American Jewish agenda up to the present era. In Our Palesti

The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination. Dr. Karen Pinto is an Associate Scholar in Religious St

October 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. A panicky cabinet meeting debated the use of nuclear weapons. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the "debacle." But, argues Uri Kaufman in Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East (St. Martin's Press, 2023), from the perspective of a half century, the War can be seen as a pivotal victory for Israel. After nearly being routed, the Israeli Defense Force clawed its way back to threaten Cairo and Damascus. In the war's aftermath both sides had to accept unwelcome truths: Israel could no longer take military superiority for granted--but the Arabs could no longer hope to wipe Israel off the map. A s

The world is reeling from the savage terror attack that brutalized, raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis and civilians from at least 25 other countries, continuing to hold many of them hostage – and from the ongoing war that followed. After Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, some thought it would become more moderate. That was wishful thinking. The barbaric massacre of October 7, 2023 made it clear that Hamas is a terrorist group intent on destroying Israel and hoping to spark a regional – and even wider-war. We talk with Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism expert with extensive field experience in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and author of Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (Yale UP, 2008). This important book provides the most fully researched assessment of Hamas ever written. It draws aside the veil of legitimacy behind which Hamas hid, by presenting concrete, detailed evidence from an extensive array of international intelligence materials, including recently declassified CIA,

In Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes towards it, creating new ideas of religion and rule. Examining links between the Indian Subcontinent and the Ottoman Middle East through multilingual sources – from first-hand accounts to administrative archives of hajj – Choudhury uncovers a striking array of pilgrims who leveraged their experiences and exchanges abroad to address the decline and decentralization of an Islamic old regime at home. Hajjis crucially mediated the birth of modern Muslim political traditions around South Asia. Hajj across Empires argues they d

Why did no other ancient society produce something like the Bible? That a tiny, out of the way community could have created a literary corpus so determinative for peoples across the globe seems improbable. For Jacob Wright, the Bible is not only a testimony of survival, but also an unparalleled achievement in human history. Forged after Babylon's devastation of Jerusalem, it makes not victory but total humiliation the foundation of a new idea of belonging. Lamenting the destruction of their homeland, scribes who composed the Bible imagined a promise-filled past while reflecting deeply on abject failure. More than just religious scripture, the Bible began as a trailblazing blueprint for a new form of political community. Its response to catastrophe offers a powerful message of hope and restoration that is unique in the Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds.  Wright's Bible is thus a social, political, and even economic roadmap - one that enabled a small and obscure community located on the periphery of l

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world’s view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert’. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced tos rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that was still raging over a decade later. In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but

Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and extending French sovereignty over Algeria, this system deprived Algerian Muslims of full citizenship rights while reinforcing French colonial authority. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a rigorous and provocative critical "history of the present" that illuminates the persistence of the "Muslim question" in contemporary France. In chapters focused on polygamy, repudiation, and child marriage, the book traces the ways that the French fantasies of the family, including the sexualization of Muslim women and a preoccupation with the

This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929-1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida's book Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, 2020) links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence. Based on the survivors' testimonies, wh

When Algerians of the 1920s and 30s imagined the future of their country, women’s liberation was foundational to their vision. From the first generation of French-educated schoolteachers, to urban domestic workers who challenged spatial and economic divisions, to nationalist journalists pushing back against French colonial claims, Sara Rahnama describes how a range of Algerian actors conceived of women’s rights and responded to new developments in their own country and across the Middle East.  The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2023) reveals a broad consensus that the advancement of Muslim women was necessary to Algeria’s progress. Rahnama draws on new sources to explain the “ecosystem of intellectual energy devoted to Muslim” that debated girls’ education, women’s employment, voting rights, and women’s and men’s headwear. The book places Algeria in a broader regional conversation, as writers turned to Islamic teachings and history and looked to cont

Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning. The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other c

In Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Adam Mestyan (Duke University) argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism. Rather, they spurred from the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–WWI Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. The polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority.  Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on hitherto unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and

In Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press, 2023), İlkay Yılmaz reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yılmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Hamidian government targeted “internal threats” to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yılmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to targeting groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries. Taking up these new policies on surveillance, mobility, and control, Ottoman Passports offers a timely look at the origins of contemporary immigration debates and the hi

While a positive correlation between capitalism and democracy has existed in Western Europe and North America, the example of late-industrializing nations such as Turkey has demonstrated that the two need not always go hand in hand, and sometimes the interests of business coincide more firmly with anti-democratic forces.  In Democracy and Capitalism in Turkey: The State, Power, and Big Business (Bloomsbury, 2023), Devrim Adam Yavuz explores the factors that compelled capitalists in Turkey to adopt a more pro-democratic ideology by examining a leading Turkish business lobby (TÜSIAD) which has been pushing for democratic reform since the 1990s, despite representing some of the largest corporation owners in Turkey and having supported the state's authoritarian tendencies in the past such as the military coup of 1980. Drawing on roughly 70 interviews with influential members of TÜSIAD and individuals close to them, the book reveals that business leaders were willing to break away from the state due to the conflic