New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn‘s An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2014) offers what is in many ways is an untold, insider’s account of the birth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda during the anti-Soviet jihad, and their subsequent cooperation (or indeed lack thereof) in the pre- and post-9/11 world. By living first in Kabul, and then Kandahar, Afghanistan, the authors gained more privileged access to individuals involved with Afghan history in the 1980s-2000s than perhaps anyone outside of Western intelligence agencies. By speaking with Taliban officials — indeed Van Linschoten and Kuehn’s previous project was editing the memoirs of Taliban senior official Abdul Salam Zaeef – and former “Afghan Arabs”, the authors enriched their research immensely. The result shows in the final product: a nuanced, deeply layered, and meticulously investigative look at a fascinating subject. An Enemy We Createdshould be seen as paradigmatic for future research on militant organizations, and offers up an immense challenge to those experts who would seek to write on such topics from the comfort of Western armchairs.” 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 Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, suspended earlier by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a new period of parliamentary politics in the Empire. Likewise, the revolution was a watershed moment for the Empire’s ethnic communities, raising expectations for their full inclusion into the Ottoman political system as modern citizens and bringing to the fore competitions for power within and between groups. In Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014), Bedross Der Matossian examines how Ottoman ethnic communities understood and reacted to the revolution. Focusing on the Arab, Armenian and Jewish communities, and using sources in multiple languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Ladino and Ottoman Turkish, Der Matossian highlights the contradictions and ambiguities in interpretations of  Ottomanism and its reification as political structure. How, for example, could these groups express loyalty to the ideas of the revolution while protecting their own communal interests? For the Young Turks, the goal of the revolution was first and foremost to centralize power and to preserve the territorial integrity of the Empire. They saw constitutionalism and parliamentarianism as vehicles to this end. For the non-dominant ethnic groups in the Empire, however, the Revolution meant freedom and equality, often understood as political decentralization and the preservation of their ethnic privileges. Through in depth analysis of revolutionary festivals, debates in the ethnic press, electoral campaigns, parliamentary discourse and then reactions to the 1909 counter-revolution, Der Matossian shows us that the dreams of the revolution were shattered under the weight of the incompatibility these understandings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Christian C. Sahner‘s Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present (Oxford University Press, 2014) resists easy categorization into genre: it as at once a travel log, an impassioned lecture on Syrian antiquity, and a commentary on Syria’s long journey into its present disaster. Sahner offers a unique perspective as an academic with a strong grasp of Levantine geopolitics and archaeology alike, and ably traces back the fault lines of modern Syria to the events of the region’s late antique period. His interactions with locals during his extended stays in the region, which he documented in a diary that would later become the seed for the book, offer fascinating anecdotes that shed light onto Syrian civil society’s perceptions of itself. I expect the book will be enjoyed by a wide audience, including scholars intrigued by geopolitics, travellers interested in a deeper context, and policymakers with a penchant for history. 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 Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of Western publishers, editors, and journalists who search in her book for the exotic Iranian subject and the trauma of the Eastern Other. She turns a critical eye on the expectation that she perform an unveiling and reveal knowledge about the Other’s otherness. Insisting that “pain is pain” everywhere and that the Other’s foreignness also resides in oneself, she instead talks about her own sense of dislocation and loss upon returning to Tehran to start a clinical practice after twenty years in the United States. Iranian patients face problems specific to their country’s politics and culture, to be sure, but for Homayounpour, experience in the consulting room confirms the universality of the Oedipus complex. In response to a colleague in Boston who questioned whether “Iranians can free associate,” Homayounpour quips that “they do nothing but, and that is their problem.” While in the United States neurotics are rumored to have disappeared from psychoanalytic couches, replaced by patients with supposedly more “primitive” narcissistic organization and borderline personality disorders, in Tehran, claims Homayounpour, consummately neurotic analysands dominate the clinical landscape, speaking constantly of sex, sexuality, and typically Oedipal conflicts. The resemblance of Iranian analysands to the patients of Freud’s Vienna has nothing to do with Eastern essence or backwardness, of course, and everything to do with collective fantasy, analytic training, cultural structures, and varying iterations of capitalism. In the book as well as in our interview, Homayounpour’s poetics and politics brim with warmth and hospitality – not a humanitarian hospitality, or altruism, that too easily transforms into guilt and then sadism, she hastens to clarify, but one that emerges from gratitude and an ability to be with the other’s difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

During the past several years, numerous books and articles have appeared that grapple with the legacy and lessons of the recent U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This development should surprise few. The emergence of the jihadist group ISIS in Iraq and Syria raises profound questions about what the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 accomplished. It also raises important questions about the manner in which the United States left Iraq, including the decision to evacuate all American troops from the country in 2011. As the U.S. continues to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, commentators continue to debate the future of this country in light of the Taliban’s enduring strength and doubts about the effectiveness of the Afghan government. In his new book Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), the retired General Daniel Bolger analyzes the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the perspective of a retired general who commanded troops during these conflicts. Written in a clear, easy-to-follow style, Bolger explains how a mixture of flawed assumptions, arrogance, and poor strategic decisions doomed the United States to “lose” these wars. Instead of blaming civilian leaders for botching the execution, he explains how the military leadership failed to develop a long-term strategy well suited to winning these wars as they turned into counterinsurgency conflicts. He even criticizes U.S. military leaders, including himself, for not driving home the point that building stable, prosperous countries in Iraq and Afghanistan would probably require a permanent commitment of U.S. troops (i.e., like Korea) and the expenditure of American resources well into the future. Along with taking military leaders to task, Bolger also addresses a number of misconceptions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.For example, he shows the limitations of suggesting that the United States “missed” an opportunity to capture Osama bin Laden before he escaped to Pakistan near the end of 2001. He also helps clear up misapprehensions about the U.S. failure to find WMDs in Iraq after the invasion took place and the successes of the Iraqi “surge.” In sharp contrast to accounts that focus on destructive impact of U.S. military might, Bolger provides an excellent account of how fears of civilian casualties in Afghanistan limited the use of firepower in ways that increased the casualty rates of American troops. However readers evaluate Bolger’s arguments and insights, they will benefit from reading his book. With humility and candor, he makes the important point that there is no time like the present to begin analyzing the lessons of the past so American military leaders and politicians will not repeat the mistakes that they made in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drawing on the lessons of history and limitations of human nature, he also reminds Americans that the do not have it within their grasp to transform “foreign” societies into liberal-democratic states in the near future and rid the world of terrorism once and for all. Recognizing the limits of their power, Americans can best serve the world by conducting “limited” military operations designed to “contain” threats, thereby buying time for groups of people like the Iraqis and Afghans to build their own brighter futures. 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 summer of 2009, Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan when they unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by a border patrol. Accused of espionage, the three Americans ultimately found themselves in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison, where they discovered that pooling their strength of will and relying on each other were the only ways they could survive. In their poignant memoir, A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) “the hikers” finally tell their side of the story. They recount the deception that lured them into Iran in the first place and describe the psychological torment of interrogation and solitary confinement. We follow them as they make surprising alliances with their fellow prisoners and even some of their captors, while their own bonds with each other are tested and deepened. The story is also an indictment of US foreign policy and its inability to produce a diplomatic solution to secure the hikers’ release. Told through a bold and innovative interweaving of the authors’ three voices, here is a rare glimpse into prison life, Iran-US relations and a timeless portrayal of hardship and hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Many people have described Muslims modernities as being fundamentally disrupted by individual and civilizational encounters with western society. Wether rejecting or accepting alternative modes of thinking Muslims have responded to these new challenges with increasing regularity for over 200 years. Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) focuses on one of the central tasks for Muslims in the contemporary period, namely the interpretation of scripture and tradition. Jonathan A. C. Brown, Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, carefully maps out multiple Muslim interpretive strategies in order to reveal the links and legacies between the pre-modern and contemporary periods. After a detailed explanation of pre-modern schools of thought, attitudes towards scripture, and hermeneutical methods Brown tackles the fragile relationship between text, community, and reader in determining ‘Truth’ in changing circumstances. We see that very often the interpretive methods used to deal with contradictions or discerning boundaries of permissibility were the same but led to divergent answers. Brown interrogates these larger issues through numerous case studies and examples. In our conversation we only scratched the surface of this detailed book. We discussed changing norms by which scripture are judged, women led prayer, the noble lie, tradition betraying or redeeming scripture, Shah Wali Allah, the Arab Spring, Sheikh Muhammad al-Gahzali, authenticity and the use of dubious hadith, verse 4:34 and the role of courts, and the historical precedent  of saying “No” to scripture. 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 gets to count as Islam? In the current political climate this question is being repeated in a variety of contexts. The tapestry of various Islamic identities is revealed in an investigation of gender. In The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (Bloomsbury, 2014), Amanullah De Sondy, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami, tackles the construction of Muslim manhood in several interpretive traditions. These forms of masculinity – both ideal & reviled – are taken across a wide spectrum of thought, from Islamist perspectives to those challenging patriarchy. Many of the discussions revolve around similar themes, most importantly family, marriage, sexuality, and veiling. Other constructions of masculinity challenge heteronormativity within Muslim identities. The Qur’an is central to many of the interpretations discussed in the book but De Sondy demonstrates that here too we are not presented with a singular and clear ideal of masculinity. Qur’anic descriptions of male prophets, including Adam, Joseph, Muhammad, and Jesus, each complicate a simple narrative of Muslim manhood. In our conversation we discuss hermeneutical strategies, feminists approaches to the Qur’an, notions of love and sexual boundaries, the Mughal poet Mirza Ghalib, gender fluidity, Sufism in South Asia, prophethood, and same-sex love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost the entire duration of the American invasion and occupation, beginning shortly after 9/11. In her new book The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), Gall combines searing personal accounts of battles and betrayals with moving portraits of the ordinary Afghans who endured a terrible war of more than a decade. Her firsthand accounts of Taliban warlords, members of the Pakistani intelligence community, American generals, Afghan politicians, and the many innocents who were caught up in this long war are riveting.  Her evidence that Pakistan protected and fueled the Taliban and protected Osama bin Laden is convincing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Sarah Bowen Savant, Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University in London, addresses important questions about conversion among Persian peoples from the ninth to eleventh century CE in her work The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Memory is the centerpiece of her study. In the first half of her work, Savant’s analysis of memory, known as mnemohistory, coalesces around certain “sites of memory” which can include people, such as Salman al-Farisi, places, and events, with particular attention paid to conquest (futuh) narratives. These cases demonstrate how Persian identity was woven into the framework of pre-Islamic history and early Islam. However, remembering is not the only aspect that helped shape Persian, Muslim identity; forgetting is an equally important element according to Savant. Forgetting allowed irreconcilable features of Persian identity and history to be limited. The second half of her work highlights important strategies of forgetting, such as the replacing one past with an alternative account or the use of unfavorable elements of pre-Islamic Persia. Savant’s exploration of memory and its impact upon Persian, Muslim identify helps to answer important questions about conversion in early Islam. Readers, both scholars of Islam and historians in general, will find Savant’s work illuminating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies