New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Robin Andersen, professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and author on war reporting, discusses her book The Complicit Lens. She examines how mainstream US media shaped narratives after October 7, the targeting and silencing of Palestinian journalists, editorial directives that avoided words like genocide, and how propaganda and ownership ties influenced coverage.

Zeina Al-Azmeh, a political sociologist at Cambridge who studies exile and intellectual life, discusses Syrian thinkers uprooted after 2011. She explores their lives in Paris and Berlin. Short takes cover the methodological challenge of using interlocutors' writings, the idea of persecution capital, the double gaze toward the West, radical embeddedness, trauma work, and what regime change means for intellectual legitimacy.

Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of Shi‘i life, pilgrimage, and healing, especially for Iraqi refugees until the 2011 Syrian uprising. By combining meticulous fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with rich historical and social context, Szanto shows how these contested rituals served as both spiritual expression and pathways to worldly and psychological healing. The book examines controversial Muharram practices, especially self-flagellation, not simply as ritual acts but as deeply meaningful responses to trauma, displacement, and the search for justice and healing. In doing so, Szanto pays close attention to how people actually live their religion: through relationships with saints, engagement with religious authorities, media, ritual performance, and forms of spiritual healing. In this conversation, Szanto and I explore specific Muharram practices, including self-flagellation, the wedding of Qasim, and other ritualized forms of mourning, as well as gendered dynamics in who participates and why. We discuss what these practices looked like on the ground—what Muharram in Sayyida Zaynab felt like, how different communities understood and debated these rituals, and what purposes they served for those who participated in them. We talk about the Zaynabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discuss relationships with saints, spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music, and ritual performance mediate piety. Szanto also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences observing and engaging with these rituals. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Islamic studies generally, Shi‘i studies, Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Dylan Baun, historian of modern Lebanon and transnational left movements, discusses his microhistory of Imad Nuwayhid. He traces Imad’s life from Ras al-Matn to Beirut and Europe. Topics include archival sleuthing, the ethics of writing about the dead, Cold War hotel enclaves, 1960s radicalization, shifting party memory, and how personal lives intersected with militant politics.

Mostafa Hussein, assistant professor of Jewish–Muslim studies at the University of Michigan, explores Hebrew Orientalism and Jewish engagement with Arabo-Islamic culture in late Ottoman and British Palestine. He discusses bilingual intellectuals, Arabic’s role in reviving Hebrew, contested place-names and landscape claims, shifting politics under British rule, and the ambivalent blend of admiration and hierarchy in cultural exchange.

Craig Perry, an Emory scholar of medieval Jewish and Islamic history, discusses findings from the Cairo Geniza. He explores overlapping slave trades in medieval Egypt. He traces legal statuses, manumission practices, and gendered experiences of enslavement. He also considers Jewish-Muslim comparisons, ransom and redemption, and how historians should approach past slavery.

In Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016 (Springer Nature, 2026), James Bultema identifies and investigates four central factors that gave rise to the Turkish Protestant movement in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on qualitative interviews and historical studies the book explores the complex interplay of religious freedom, missionary activity, interdependent choice, and multilevel plausibility structures. An imperfect but sufficient religious freedom created the soil for the growth of mostly tiny Turkish Protestant churches that were countercultural and vulnerable, but also vitally interconnected. This work provides an extensive mission history of the Turkish Protestant movement. The book is part of the Springer series Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies and was awarded the Science Award on Religious Freedom 2026 the Freie Theologische Hochschule (FTH) Gießen, Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Nathaniel Greenberg, Arabist and Arabic professor at George Mason University, explores U.S. Arabic-language public diplomacy after 9/11. He traces Cold War continuities, the rise of Al Hurra and Radio Sawa, covert blogger support, digital outreach and analytics, and how these efforts shaped later global information battles. The conversation highlights institutional flaws, media experimentation, and regional pushback.

Fida Jiryis, translator and editor who brought her father's work into English. Sabri Jiryis, Palestinian scholar and lawyer who traced Zionism's origins. They discuss why the translation matters now. They explore Zionist primary sources, land acquisition, early leaders like Herzl and Weizmann, the Balfour Declaration, mandate institutions, and how these developments link to the region's ongoing strife.

Christian Henderson, a lecturer and author on Gulf political economy, discusses how Gulf states function as 'inverted farms' that import vast amounts of food. He traces agrarian change from pre-oil eras to oil-era agribusiness. Topics include Gulf-driven supply-chain power, land deals like Toshka, food security as biopolitics, and regional investment strategies reshaping North Africa and the Levant.