New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt's colonial economy and forms of subjectivity.Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt(Stanford University Press, 2019) recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.You can learn more about Lukas Rieppel here, or find him on twitter here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Building on nearly two decades of scholarship about sectarianism and communal relations in the Modern Middle East, Ussama Makdisi’s latest book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World(University of California Press, 2019) dispels the myth that the Middle East is inherently or inescapably sectarian and complicates the often overstated binary of “secular” and religious. Makdisi proposes a new paradigm for understanding the myriad visions of anti-sectarianism and pluralism in the region, which he calls “the ecumenical frame.” This capacious “ecumenical frame” includes political leaders and activists, intellectual elites, and ordinary people who worked – and still work – toward peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. Forged in the crucible of 19th century violence and political reform, this desire to reconcile the promises of unity and equal citizenship with the remarkable diversity of the Arab world has withstood war, colonialism, and authoritarian rule. Age of Coexistence offers a provocative engagement with existing literature on sectarianism, secularism, colonialism, and Arab nationalism in a way that is also accessible to a wider, non-scholarly audience.Ussama Makdisi is a Professor of History and the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University and a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley. He is the author of a number of groundbreaking studies on the history of religion and politics in the Modern Middle East, including The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000), Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), and Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs Books, 2010).Joshua Donovan is a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of History. His dissertation examines competing conceptions of identity and subjectivity within the Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In this new book, Revolution and its Discontents, Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s (of Goldsmiths University of London) studies the rise and evolution of reformist political thought in Iran and analyses the complex network of publications, study circles, and think tanks that encompassed a range of prominent politicians and intellectuals in the 1990s. The book maps maps and analyses a wide filed of political and ideological issues that are keys to understanding Iran’s revolutionary state. Among others, they include the ruling political theology of the ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’, the political elite’s engagement with questions of Islamic statehood, democracy, and constitutionalism, and their critiques of revolutionary agency and social transformation.Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In today’s podcast, host Robert Elliott speaks with Dr. Perin Gürel about her new book The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey(Columbia University Press, 2017), which examines how Turkish perceptions of the United States intersected with debates around "westernization" in the twentieth century.In a 2001 poll, Turks ranked the United States highest when asked: "Which country is Turkey's best friend in international relations?" When the pollsters reversed the question―"Which country is Turkey's number one enemy in international relations?"―the United States came in second. How did Turkey's citizens come to hold such opposing views simultaneously? In The Limits of Westernization, Gürel explains this unique split and its echoes in contemporary U.S.-Turkey relations.Using Turkish and English sources, Gürel maps the reaction of Turks to the rise of the United States as a world-ordering power in the twentieth century. As Turkey transitioned from an empire to a nation-state, the country's ruling elite projected "westernization" as a necessary and desirable force but also feared its cultural damage. Turkish stock figures and figures of speech represented America both as a good model for selective westernization and as a dangerous source of degeneration. At the same time, U.S. policy makers imagined Turkey from within their own civilization templates, first as the main figure of Oriental barbarism (i.e., "the terrible Turk"), then, during the Cold War, as good pupils of modernization theory. As the Cold War transitioned to the War on Terror, Turks rebelled against the new U.S.-made trope of the "moderate Muslim." Local artifacts of westernization―folk culture crossed with American cultural exports―and alternate projections of modernity became tinder for both Turkish anti-Americanism and resistance to state-led modernization projects.Robert Elliott is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Guides have been written to the city of Cairo for generations. Whether they’re for foreigners who’ve come to the city or its residents. However, it might be safe to say thatA Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo (American University in Cairo Press, 2018) is a beast unto itself. It takes the names of streets in Central Cairo and uses them as a basis for its telling of Cairo’s urban history. Structured like a dictionary of sorts, it is the kind of book that can be read cover-to-cover or in snatches here and there. In this interview, we cover the origins of the project, how it was written, and ultimately what shapes the city of Cairo itself.Humphrey Davies is the translator of a number of Arabic novels, including The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (AUC Press, 2004) and Leg Over Leg by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (NYU Press 2014), in addition to novels by Naguib Mahfouz and Gamal al-Ghitani. He has twice been awarded the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.Lesley Lababidi is the author of Cairo Practical Guide (AUC Press, 2011, 17th ed.), Cairo’s Street Stories: Exploring the City’s Statues, Squares, Bridges, Gardens, and Sidewalk Cafés (AUC Press, 2008), Cairo: The Family Guide (AUC Press, 4th ed., 2010), and Silent No More: Special Needs People in Egypt (AUC Press, 2005). An active and well-traveled blogger, she currently lives between Cairo, Beirut, and Lagos.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In his splendid military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Matthew Hughes of Brunel University shows how the British Army was so devastatingly effective against colonial rebellion in the mid to late 1930s by the Palestinian Arabs. The Army had a long tradition of pacification to draw upon to support operations, underpinned by the creation of an emergency Mandate / colonial state in Palestine. After conquering Palestine in 1917, the British established a civil Government that ruled by proclamation and, without any local legislature, the colonial authorities codified in law norms of collective punishment that the Army used in 1936. The Army used 'lawfare', emergency legislation enabled by the colonial state, to grind out the rebellion. Soldiers with support from the RAF launched kinetic operations to search and destroy rebel bands, alongside which the villagers on whom the rebels depended were subjected to curfews, fines, detention, punitive searches, demolitions and reprisals. Rebels were disorganised and unable to withstand the power of such pacification measures. Professor Hughes opus is the definitive account of the British military suppression of the Arab Revolt. Based upon voluminous archival research, It is difficult to imagine that it will be superseded anytime soon. According to Chatham Houses’ International Affairs, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine is “one of the most important and comprehensive accounts”, of this historical episode.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Differently than existing accounts that concentrate on Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, Kfir Cohen Lustig's Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary (Verso, 2019) suggests a new theoretical and historical approach to Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as to the contemporary system of world literature by accounting for the consequences of neoliberal globalization to literary form and its political import. The book proposes that until the neoliberal moment the difference in the socio-poetic form between Western Europe and Israel and Palestine lay in the concepts of autonomy and temporality: if in Western European societies autonomy is defined as an a-priori, ready-made property of the self-legislating subject, in Israel and Palestine, between the 1940s and the 1990s, autonomy was a collective product to be made in time. Autonomy here was the result of a social struggle with nature and with the “enemy” that subordinated the private to the public, the particular to the universal, body to spirit, making impossible the emergence of a liberal subject and its attendant category of aesthetic autonomy a la Kant. In this historical condition, Israeli and Palestinian literature developed a gamut of literary responses and political positions that competed over the imagination of social and aesthetic autonomy.In the global neoliberal period when privatization processes in Israel and Palestine rearticulate the public and private spheres and make possible both liberal and aesthetic autonomy, social life and literature begin to revolve around the experience of self-legislating subjects for whom the world is no longer an object to be made but a text to be read. Now, private life, taking after the “particular” in Kant’s reflective judgment, seems independent from its social determining law and turns into an autonomous appearance or text akin to Adorno’s Schein and Derrida’s textuality respectively. Once the structure of aesthetic appearance/text characterizes the social itself and infiltrates the very raw materials of the literary artwork, Israeli and Palestinian literature engage in narratives of national and global mapping that attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to decipher and retrieve the political conditions of local life which exceed the nation state and question the coherence of private life. With this new aesthetic and social form, Israeli and Palestinian literature begin to resemble contemporary Western European and American literature, a change unaccounted for in contemporary theories of world literature and requires a new concept of global literature with which the book closes.Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. 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 enterprise of journalism is in crisis. Today’s journalists face accusations of “fake news” on the one hand, and harassment, arrest, and even the murder of reporters on the other.At the same time, we who rely on journalists for information, are constantly bombarded by breaking news. Confronted by video and print updates in real time, it is increasingly challenging to keep up with, let alone understand, world events. Barrels of information continually roll towards us; how can we find the time and space to stop and consider – to digest the content of news and to reflect on what it all means? Seen through the whirlwind of information, the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, can appear more confusing and chaotic than ever.Enter Seth Frantzman. His new book After Isis: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East (Gefen House Publishing, 2019) is just what is needed to help deal with the news confusion. The brutal Syrian civil war and the war against Isis left hundreds of thousands dead, and made millions more refugees. Frantzman spent months traveling throughout the Middle East to get a first-hand view of the region, its people and politics in war’s aftermath. He shares his insights and understanding in this important work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpacking these gendered and hierarchical dynamics around ethics and comportment, Aybui masterfully applies feminist and gender analysis to deconstruct ethical texts. In light of her findings, she calls for a “philosophical turn” that must employ critical gender analysis when reading these texts not only in the context of Islamic philosophy, but broadly in the study of Islam. The book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Islamic philosophy and gender and Islamic studies.M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2019), Charlie Laderman exposes the way that imperial ambitions suffused the ideas and practices of turn-of-century humanitarian intervention. Beginning his story in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire, Dr. Laderman demonstrates how the successive waves of violence perpetrated against Armenian Christians provoked new ways of thinking about imperial governance, the practice of intervening on humanitarian grounds, and notions of “civilization” itself.Laderman’s book opens in the mid-19th century Ottoman Empire, when both Eastern and Western European states stood poised to further destabilize the Ottoman government with repeated interventions and invasions into its territory, ostensibly on behalf of the Ottoman Empire’s non-Muslim subjects. The Ottoman administration’s precarity, coupled with intensifying religious and ethnic tensions along the Empire’s far-flung borders, created conditions that were ripe for violence and abuse. By the 1890s, this violence became directed squarely at the Armenian Christian minority in the eastern province of Anatolia. The repeated waves of violence committed against the Armenian Ottomans after 1894 became what both Laderman and his historical actors call the “Armenian Question”—a problem that British and U.S. officials, American missionaries, and the broader American public became increasingly desperate to “solve.”Laderman structures his book around the kinds of “solutions” that American and British politicians, missionaries, and journalists proffered in response to escalating violence toward Armenians. In Laderman’s telling, the Armenian massacres became a lens through which British and American officials came to interpret the practices of “enlightened” versus “barbaric” imperial rule—and it made them puzzle whether or how a prospective Anglo-American alliance might secure a more “stable” and humanitarian global order. In recovering this history, Dr. Laderman challenges the notion that humanitarian intervention originated as a form of international politics only in the latter half of the 20th century. He ultimately demonstrates just how crucial the Armenian Genocide was in early 20th-century conceptions and praxes of imperial internationalism—and what this meant for the Anglo-American relationship and global governance more broadly after the First World War.Charlie Laderman is a Lecturer in International History at the War Studies Department of King’s College, London. He was previously a Fox International Fellow and Smith Richardson Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University, and a Harrington Faculty Fellow at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin.Sarah Nelson is a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University’s department of history, and a joint-PhD candidate in Comparative Media Analysis and Practice (CMAP). Her dissertation addresses the history of international telecommunications governance, tracing the long history of attempts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies