New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

How does a group become defined as white? And does that group define themselves that way as well? Neda Maghbouleh‘s new book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017), uses interview and ethnographic data to better understand how Iranian Americans perceive themselves and are perceived. “Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility,” Iranian Americans often straddle a space in which they are sometimes defined as white but other times not. Through the voices and experiences of 80 young people, Maghbouleh exposes the reader to the inner workings of their lives at school, at home, and abroad. By comparing and contrasting experiences in different social systems and situations, the reader becomes immersed in the lives of these youth and is connected to their racialized experiences. At home, these youth are often told that they are white and that they should be proud of their heritage; however, the youth know these stories would not be understood or accepted by peers. At school, the youth are quite often “browned” and bullied by peers and others outside their homes. Maghbouleh also examines the interesting scenario of the “flip side” when the youth travel to Iran, elaborating on their experiences there where they sometimes feel too “American.” This book does a stellar job of grounding findings within the stories of those interviewed. Additionally, it builds up the historical background for the reader, using important legal cases, in which the whiteness of Iranians and other groups are tried, to set the stage for present day experiences of Iranian Americans. Overall, this book presents a solid overview and understanding of the ways in which Iranian American youth experience race in America. This book is rich with information and stories, but completely accessible to the lay reader or even scholars who do not study race. This book would be good for upper level undergraduate Sociology classes and the perfect addition to a graduate level Sociology of Race class. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. 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 her new book, Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Karen Ross conducts an in-depth analysis of Jewish-Palestinian youth encounter peace-building programs in Israel. She adopts a narrative approach and carefully considers how these youth programs impacted their young participants in long-term, positive and profound ways. Of particular interest is her insights about how to research and evaluate the “impact” of education programs in a non-linear, non-causal and broadly conceived approach. Her work has rich and multi-layered practical implications for the continuous peace-building efforts both within and out of the Israeli/Palestinian context. Karen Ross is an assistant professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are youth culture, identity formation, qualitative research methods, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Fashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 300+ eye-opening pages to it. Defining it as, not a history, but “a history of several lived presents.” Largely focusing on Turkey, Western Europe, and North America, Lewis walks us through the landscape of Muslim fashion, incorporating marketing, global trends, social media, and the perspectives of those who wear the clothes themselves, Muslim women. We see how religion and identity shape what people wear, how they don’t necessarily have to even fit within the set of decisions that one makes when picking ones clothes, and how functionality is also key. Ultimately, Muslim Fashion is about the role of personal choice in how Muslim women express themselves through dress and will go far in challenging assumptions about Muslims and specifically, young Muslim women. NA 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

Normally, we feature books, but this time we’re highlighting an independent press making waves in academic works on the ancient Near East, Syriac, Islam, Jewish studies, and more: Gorgias Press. Based in New Jersey, the press has grown since its inception in 2001 to include the publication of journals, open-source projects, and countless monograph and handbook series. We talk to the founder, George Kiraz, also director of the Beth Mardutho (The Syriac Institute) about how the press came about, what goes into running such a press, the press’ philosophies, and future plans. George Kiraz himself is a tremendous scholar of Syriac and a pioneer in digital humanities, among whose many publications include The Syriac Dot and many linguistic texts.     NA 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 The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives of Southeast Asian migrant workers and African asylum seekers in Israel. She depicts an image of a reality of poverty, harassment, and abuse that often goes largely unseen. Based on a decade’s worth of experience in the field, The Unchosen sheds light on Israel’s often brutal treatment of these marginalized and frequently silenced peoples, providing them with a space where their voices can be heard. Mya Guarnieri Jaradat is a journalist and writer who spent nearly a decade covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Her work has been published in a number of literary and media outlets, including the Nation, Al Jazeera English, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Narrative, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review. 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

Adam Gaiser‘s majestic new book Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), treats readers to a dazzling analysis of a wide range of Shurat/Kharijite texts centered on the themes of martyrdom, asceticism, and the body. Providing a rare and sympathetic window into this often misunderstood tradition, Gaiser presents a compelling and nuanced account of ways in which discursive concepts, constructs, and narratives accumulate in a tradition overtime. In our conversation, we talked about a number of the book’s major themes including the meaning and significance of the category of Shira’, Shurat and Ibadi poetry, and intra-Kharijite contestations over the boundaries of religious identity. This beautifully written book is sure to interest and spark conversations amongst scholars of Islam, asceticism, literature, and poetry. 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 at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. 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

As the basis for a major world religion, the Qur’an is one of the most influential books of all time. But when it first appeared, the Qur’an was in Arabic. Most Muslims today are not native-Arabic speakers. Bruce B. Lawrence deals with this issue of translation and more by specifically focusing on the Qur’an (or the Koran) in English in the aptly titled The Koran in English: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2017). He goes back to the earliest English translations, which he terms the “Orientalist Koran,” by non-Muslims, then explores how Muslims themselves translated the document and how modern concerns shape contemporary interactions with the Qur’an. Translation, politics, and belief weave together a biography of the Koran in English that reflects how millions of Muslims today interact with their faith. NA 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 What is Modern Israel? (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2016), Yakov Rabkin, a professor of history at the University of Montreal, discusses some of the most fundamental issues pertaining to the history and socio-politics of Israel. He does not shy away from dealing with some of the most sensitive and controversial issues, such as the Christian roots of Zionist ideology, the commemoration and political uses of the Holocaust in Israel, and the problematic stance of Zionist ideology towards Jewish tradition. Rabkin’s earlier work has charted some of the main streams of Jewish opposition to Zionism. In this book, he offers a coherent Jewish critique of his own. 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 question of how to write the history of the modern Middle East is a much contested one. Do we write national histories, focused on modern-nation states? Do we treat the Middle East as an integrated unit? What even constitutes the Middle East? At that, how do we deal with the great changes that swept the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Cyrus Schayegh in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2017) introduces the concept of transpatialization, which denotes simultaneous processes of globalization, urbanization and state formation, to present a vision of bilad al-sham, or the Levant transitioning from the rule of the Ottoman Empire to the mandatory system to independence. NA 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

Despite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusalem Calling’: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas Press, 2013). She weaves together different narratives to tell the story of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), launched in 1936 as an attempt by the mandate government to cater to different audiences, shaping middle class culture in the mandate territory in the process. The PBS reflected the concept of the dual commitment the British had to both the Arab and Jewish populations of the Mandate, in addition to demonstrating how the populations engaged with radio as an emerging form of media. NA 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