New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers (Fordham UP, 2026) investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history. Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives. The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be. Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media. Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, 2016, winner, MLA First Book Prize) and serves as editor of the journal Comparative Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Stanley Reed has been covering energy and the Middle East from London for more than three decades, most recently for The New York Times. With the war in Iran and its threat to global energy supplies as backdrop, we have a wide-ranging conversation about the Age of Oil. Despite longstanding predictions of Peak Oil, this era is by no means over, Reed tells me. Big Oil is used to political risk, as in the Persian Gulf region. Even now, the oil majors are busy exploring for deposits in Namibia. Venezuela could become a major producer again. The fundamental determinant, Reed says, is not the supply of fossil fuels but the demand for their use. The global Age of Oil, which began in the 19th century with commercial extractions in the United States and Caspian Sea region, huffs and puffs its way along in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

From its birth in seventh-century Arabia, Islam has been a faith on the move. In Worlds of Islam: A Global History (Basic Books, 2026), James McDougall explores its origins and transformations from Late Antiquity to the digital age. Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia, and the remote interior of China. By the nineteenth century, Islam encompassed a world of great diversity, from Muslim-ruled empires to nations where Muslims lived out their faith among many others. In the twentieth century, while monarchs in the Gulf asserted dynastic privilege and fundamentalists in Egypt and Pakistan preached social morality, revolutionaries from Algeria to Indonesia fought for national self-determination, and activists in North America and Europe campaigned for civil liberties and social justice. As empires fell and new superpowers rose, Muslims proved to be as adaptable and dynamic as modernity itself. Sweeping and authoritative, Worlds of Islam narrates the epic story of how Muslims emerged as a community, built empires, traversed the globe, came to number in the billions, and became modern. James McDougall is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. He previously taught at Princeton and at SOAS, London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

What did slavery actually look like in the everyday lives of Jews in the medieval Middle East? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Craig Perry to discuss his groundbreaking book Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton UP, 2026). Drawing on the extraordinary archive of the Cairo Geniza, Perry reconstructs a hidden world of enslaved people, merchants, and households in medieval Egypt. These fragments—letters, contracts, and legal questions preserved for centuries in a synagogue—reveal how slavery shaped Jewish and Islamic society at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. From global slave trading networks that stretched from Europe and Africa to India, to the intimate spaces of kitchens and courtyards, Perry uncovers how enslaved people lived, labored, resisted, and sometimes entered Jewish communities after gaining their freedom. The story even reframes familiar rituals: medieval Jewish children could look around the Passover table and see slavery embodied in the people serving the meal. Together, Perry and Katz explore how this overlooked history forces us to rethink medieval Jewish life, the social realities behind religious texts, and the complex entanglements of Jews with the broader Arab-Islamic world. About the Guest Craig Perry is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. A specialist in the social and economic history of the medieval Middle East, his research focuses on slavery, law, and everyday life in Jewish and Islamic societies. He also is the editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420. About the Host Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud, including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Through his writing, teaching, and podcast conversations with scholars and public thinkers, Katz brings cutting-edge scholarship into dialogue with contemporary Jewish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice. Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Jeffrey W. Knopf, a Middlebury Institute professor and co-author, discusses U.S. coercive strategies toward Syria over chemical weapons. He recounts the 2012 red line, the 2013 sarin crisis, and the Russia-mediated disarmament. He assesses why deterrence often failed, how assurances and survival motives shaped outcomes, and critiques simplistic "resolve plus bombs" approaches.

Vali Nasr, Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Iran analyst born in Tehran, discusses Iran’s surprising wartime resilience and thorough advance planning. He explains Iran’s strategy of extending the battlefield and targeting U.S. assets. He explores regime cohesion, the Revolutionary Guard’s role, complex ethnic identities, and regional consequences of a potential collapse.

Mai Serhan, a Palestinian writer based in Cairo with an MSt in creative writing from Oxford, discusses diaspora and fractured family ties. She reads fragmented scenes spanning Cairo, China and beyond. Conversation covers imagining an inaccessible homeland, blending poetry and prose, writing about an estranged father, and the challenges of publishing and public reaction.

Eray Çaylı, scholar and author of Earthmoving, draws on fieldwork and artist collaborations in Northern Kurdistan. He explores how extractivism, war, and visuality intertwine. Short scenes include hafriyat trucks, collaborative art spaces like Loading, and visual strategies that challenge displacement and colonial logics.

David Frankfurter, a Boston University scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions and magical texts, discusses the Brill guide he edited. They explore how ancient cultures labeled ambiguous rituals, the range of texts and artifacts treated as magical, and material and social contexts that shape perceptions of ritual power. Short, clear, and provocative conversations about terminology, sources, and why magic still fascinates.