New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Recent years have seen new waves of research in Syriac studies, the medieval Middle East, and family history. Combining all three, Lev Weitz’s Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), revisits the early years of Islamic civilization by looking at an oft-neglected population in the secondary literature, Syriac Christians. Weitz’s study uses marital practice from the seventh through tenth centuries to illustrate how Islamic law influenced the development of Christian law and the role religious authorities –that is the Christian bishops– had to play in it. We talk through polygamy, confessional boundaries, and what households meant now and then; Weitz also fills us in on what the growing field of Syriac studies looks like, how it is changing, and how a scholar of the medieval Middle East gets their sources. Lev Weitz is an historian of the Islamic Middle East. He is an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America, in the Department of History; he also directs the Islamic World Studies program at Catholic University. For academic year 2018-19, he will be a fellow of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.  He did his PhD at Princeton University at the Department of Near Easter Studies.  His scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the Middle East’s history from the coming of Islam to the present. 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

Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State (Brookings, 2018) provides a unique insight into Pakistan’s complex and multi-layered relationship with militancy and the role of the state in Islamicizing society in a way that Pakistanis may in overwhelming majority reject violence, yet endorse attitudes that are not only militant but create an environment conducive to extremism. Based on rigorous analysis of survey data as well as multiple interviews and a keen understanding of the country’s history, Madiha Afzal weaves a highly readable story that focuses not only on the colonial legacy that led to Pakistan’s creation and the often troubled relationship with the United States that left Pakistanis with a bitter taste of betrayal in their mouths but also on how successive Pakistani governments laid the foundations for en environment conducive to extremism through legislation as well as the education system. She highlights how intolerance and anti-pluralist attitudes were nurtured by amending the constitution to declare groups viewed as heretic by mainstream Islam as non-Islamic, enacting a draconic anti-blasphemy law that lends itself to abuse and by mandating throughout the education system a slanted and problematic study of Pakistan as well as of Islam. With her study, Madiha has made a significant contribution to understanding Pakistan at a time that it is approaching a crossroads at which its multiple problems and issues no longer can simply be managed but will have to be tackled. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Cyrus Ali Zargar, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, is the author of The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (Oneworld, 2017). Zargar explores how the study of good character and the pursuit of perfection, or virtue ethics, was part of a broader discursive network that included Islamic jurisprudence, theology, philosophy and mysticism. Using the metaphor of the polished mirror and the tradition of storytelling shared by Islamic philosophers and Sufis, Zargar frames virtue ethics not as a fixed notion, but as part of a network that broadly engages ideal positive character traits. Each chapter of the book focuses on various philosophers or Sufis from the years 900 to 1300. Each of these figures variously framed ethics through sacred revelation (Qur’an) and prophetic tradition (hadith) all the while incorporating rationality or traditions of exemplary saintly figures. Despite their differing modes and methodologies, at times, their conclusions were similar. For instance, the philosophers, such as Avicenna and Ibn Tufayl, having gleaned from the ancient Greek traditions, amplified traits of friendship and love for the betterment of society. While for some Sufis, the quest for human perfection set them on a path that focused on the cultivation of internal qualities, as seen in the tales of Ansari, ‘Attar, and Rumi. The stories told here are provocative, humorous, and truly pedagogical. They help the reader transcend normative notions of ethics, especially as limited to Islamic jurisprudence and positive law, and highlights the complex ways in which philosophers and Sufis were intimately focused on being good and doing good as taught through storytelling. This book is a must for anyone working on Islamic philosophy and Sufism. 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 Middle Eastern and Islamic intellectual history, there has long been an assumption of decline in the eighteenth century, right before the nineteenth century, when the nahda or Arabic intellectual renaissance, began: intellectuals were caught in a period of stagnation and retrograde. Ahmad Dallal pushes back against this in Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth Century Islamic Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), bringing together an intricate matrix of ideas stemming from multiple fields of knowledge. He pins this all together with the notion of reform, all the while reminding us that reform is also about tradition.  He starts with Wahhabism, carefully dissecting the thought of Muhammad ibn Abdel Wahhab, and then connects it to eighteenth century responses to Wahhabism. From there on, he draws in Hadith studies, Sufism, the concept of Ijtihad in legal reasoning, and legal theory to paint a tapestry of interlaced and dynamic ideas. Overwhelmingly, Dallal demonstrates that reform was tied to giving practicing Muslims increasing control over their own faith.  Beyond that, Dallal talks to us about Islamic studies, Orientalism, and modernity, elucidating why we need to bring the 18th century back into the fold of Islamic and Middle Eastern intellectual history. Ahmad Dallal is the dean of Georgetown University in Qatar. He was professor of history (2009-2017) and was the provost at the American University in Beirut (AUB) from 2009 to 2015. 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

Inspired by the usage of the term ‘enclosure’ to describe the Separation Wall in Israel-Palestine on a visit he made to the West Bank, Gary Fields in Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (University of California Press, 2017) draws upon the past to speak to the Palestinian present and explain Palestinian dispossession. We talk through why Fields thinks it is necessary to use a long lens to think about the discourses framing the conflict in Israel/Palestine, specifically the English enclosures, which changed the nature of access to common land across the English countryside and Amerindian dispossession in colonial America. As land, discourse, and people themselves shape the practice of enclosure, we hone in on the politics of writing about Palestine and Palestinians, as well as how Fields’ other work fits into his academic work. Enclosure is on the short-list for the Palestine Book Award for the 2018 year. Gary Fields is professor of communication at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in City and Regional Planning.  He often uses photo and film to explore his research interests and writes widely beyond the academy. 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

With Us and Against Us: How America’s Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers readers a fresh, insightful and new perspective on US counterterrorism cooperation with complex countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen and Mali. These US partners work with the United States to defeat militant groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Yet, they often are both firefighters and arsonists because they frequently simultaneously support groups that engage in political violence and/or pursue policies likely to produce a new generation of militants. US partners, moreover, at times adhere to worldviews that potentially create breeding grounds for extremism. Drawing on his extensive scholarship as well as his experience as a senior advisor to the US Department of Defense during the Obama administration, assistant professor Stephen Tankel takes the reader on a well-written, highly readable tour of the complexities and pitfalls of cooperation on counterterrorism in a post-Cold War world. Tankel unravels a minefield populated by unrealistic US expectations, an over-reliance on military tools, and lack of understanding of threat perceptions among America’s partners as well as the differing priorities that US partners have. In doing so, Tankel contributes to both the study of political violence and the far broader contexts that nourish it and the continuous debate among policymakers and pundits on how to counter it. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

For the most part women in the classical world have suffered from what Duane W. Roller terms “near-invisibility,” obscuring the consequential roles that at times they played in government and politics. In his book Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), Roller recounts the lives of more than a half-dozen women in the last decades of the 1st century BC and early decades of the 1st century AD to show how they exercised power during the early years of the Roman Empire. Drawing upon a tradition of royal women in the ancient Near East, these women – Cleopatra Selene, Glaphyra of Cappadocia, Salome of Judaea, Dynamis of Bosporous, Pythodoris of Pontos, Aba of Olbe, and Mousa of Parthia – all played crucial roles as rulers in kingdoms on the periphery of the Augustan empire. As Roller explains, their success in maintaining their positions both depended in part upon the support of powerful women in the Augustan family and, in turn, served as role models for royal women in the Roman imperial courts for centuries afterward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. 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 Beyond Post-Zionism (SUNY Press, 2015), Eran Kaplan locates the post-Zionist debates, which have brought into question some of the core tenets of Zionist ideology, within the context of the changes that Israeli society and culture have undergone over the past three decades.  Beyond Post Zionism also explores some of the key post-Zionist arguments—that Zionism at its core was a colonialist and orientalist movement—by offering a new analysis of key Zionist and Israeli texts from a perspective that emphasizes the historical conditions behind the rise of the Jewish national movement and its growth.  One of the book’s core arguments is that Post Zionism was an ideology that arose out of the optimism of the last two decades of the previous century, when economic and political developments led some in Israel to assert that Jewish nationalism and the Jewish state were historical anachronisms standing in the way of integrating Israel into the global market and the new world order.  In Beyond Post Zionism Kaplan suggests that the series of political crises that Israel has experienced in the new millennium may suggest that the state and its institutions may yet be relevant in the lives of contemporary Israelis just as early Zionism had been for many Jews in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, while holding the promise for a resolution of the conflicts that have consumed public life in Israel from its inception. Yaron Peleg is the Kennedy-Leigh Reader in Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2016). 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 sparkling new book, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), Ata Anzali, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, offers a sweeping and brilliant intellectual history of the concept of ‘Irfan in medieval, early Modern, and modern contexts. Combining a mesmerizingly layered analysis of previously unexplored manuscripts with close attention to shifting social and political contexts, Anzali shows, with dazzling nuance, the processes and dynamics that informed the institutionalization of ‘Irfan in Iran. This nimbly written book will be of considerable interest to scholars of Muslim intellectual history and Religious Studies. In this conversation, we talked about the key themes, theoretical interventions, and arguments of this book. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies