New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Islam's contributions to the natural sciences has long been recognized within the Euro-American academy, however, such studies tend to include one of a number of narrative tropes, either emphasizing the "Golden Age" model, focusing on scientific productions in Baghdad and other centers around the first millennium CE; emphasizing Islam's role in transmitting and preserving Greco-Roman learning, and enabling it to be re-translated into Latin around the time of the Renaissance; and the vast majority suggest that the majority of Islamic scientific output came to a halt around toward the end 16th century.In Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth-Century Morocco (Cambridge UP, 2021), Justin K. Stearns argues that there is ample evidence that scientific production continued apace, if, in fact, we know where to look for it. Demonstrating the vibrancy of seventeenth century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how science flourished during this period, albeit in a different manner than that of Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world.Challenging these depictions, Stearns uses numerous close readings of legal, biographical, and classificatory texts - alongside medical, astronomical, and alchemical works - to establish a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in the scholarly and educational landscapes of the early modern Maghreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Morocco and elsewhere.Justin K. Stearns is Associate Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, where his research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Middle East. He is the author of Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (2011), and an edition and translation of al-Hasan al-Yusi's The Discourses, Vol. I (2020).Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. 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 Kaʿba is the famous cuboid structure at the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca. In his book The Kaʿba Orientations: Readings in Islam's Ancient House (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Simon O'Meara (SOAS) looks at the way Muslims from the beginnings of Islam to the 18th century engaged with the existence of such a structure, as a location, as an architectural object, as a direction, as a focus of devotion and prayer. He studies both material and visual as well as literary engagements through which Muslims pilgrims and scholars interpreted their own place in the world in relation to a location held to be the world's axis, and the consequences from a religious and psychological perspective of the often fraught and violent history of the built structure itself, its uses, and the emotional connection that millions of Muslims continue to feel towards it to this day.Miguel Monteiro is a PhD student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Twitter @anphph Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Aubrey L. Glazer's Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide (Academic Studies Press, 2013) immerses readers in the experience of the contemporary kabbalistic Hebrew poet, serving as a gateway into the poet’s quest for mystical union known as devekut. This journey oscillates across subtle degrees of devekut―causing an entranced experience for the Hebrew poet, who is reaching but not reaching, hovering but not hovering, touching but not touching in a state of mystical vertigo. What makes this journey so remarkable is how deeply nestled it is within the hybrid cultural networks of Israel, crossing over boundaries of haredi, secular, national-religious, and agnostic beliefs among others. This volume makes a unique contribution to understanding and experiencing the mystical renaissance in Israel, through its multi-disciplinary focus on Hebrew poetry and its philosophical hermeneutics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

One of the world’s most multicultural cities, twentieth-century Cairo was a magnet for the ambitious and talented. During the 1920s and ’30s, a vibrant music, theater, film, and cabaret scene flourished, defining what it meant to be a “modern” Egyptian. Women came to dominate the Egyptian entertainment industry—as stars of the stage and screen but also as impresarias, entrepreneurs, owners, and promoters of a new and strikingly modern entertainment industry.In Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s (W. W. Norton, 2021, in arrangement with Saqi Books), Raphael Cormack unveils the rich histories of independent, enterprising women like vaudeville star Rose al-Youssef (who launched one of Cairo’s most important newspapers); nightclub singer Mounira al-Mahdiyya (the first woman to lead an Egyptian theater company) and her great rival, Oum Kalthoum (still venerated for her soulful lyrics); and other fabulous female stars of the interwar period, a time marked by excess and unheard-of freedom of expression. Buffeted by crosswinds of colonialism and nationalism, conservatism and liberalism, “religious” and “secular” values, patriarchy and feminism, this new generation of celebrities offered a new vision for women in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Nada Moumtaz’s God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021) is an ethnography anchored in deep study of the Muslim scholarly tradition, the urban landscape, and Lebanon across the Ottoman, Mandate, and post-independence periods. At the center of the book is the waqf, often translated as “pious endowment.” An act and a practice exhibiting or embodying both change and stability since the nineteenth century, the waqf allows Moumtaz to reinterpret major categories in anthropology, Islamic legal studies, and history, including charity, family, the economy, the public and private, and the state. This is the second New Books Network interview devoted to this much-anticipated book, a careful, wide-ranging, and ambitious work poised to influence conversations in multiple disciplines.Interviewers: Janna Aladdin and Julian Weideman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Dilek Kurban’s Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey's Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2020) considers the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) engagement with Turkey’s ongoing Kurdish conflict. Tracing the legal mobilization of Kurdish people alongside legal and political histories, Kurban’s work highlights the factors enabling ongoing violence in the Kurdish region. As Kurban argues, considering the effectiveness of supranational courts, like the ECtHR, in cases like that of Turkey invokes difficult questions about international human rights regimes. Limits of Supranational Justice contributes to studies of supranational courts and legal mobilization—as well as broader conversations about human rights—by pointing to new avenues of sociolegal inquiry alongside the broader sociohistoral context in the case of Turkey.Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims of belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

When I/we think about the early modern relationship between France and Persia, Montesquieu's 1721 Lettres persanes is a text that comes to mind immediately. Susan Mokhberi's The Persian Mirror: Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2019) is a kind of a pre-history of Montesquieu's work that is, in different ways, more of a commentary on France and the French than Persia or Persians during this period. The Persian Mirror's several chapters examine a range of cultural and political texts, including letters, literature, travel writing, and material artifacts from the period, excavating the French relationship to Persia and Persian culture as both reflective and distorting.Distinct from other sites in the region, Persia fascinated the French who were also hopeful that a political alliance with the Safavid Empire might work to counter the powerful Ottoman Empire. French observers in the period lingered on different forms of affinity between France and Persia while also tracking and commenting on the cultural divide that was evident in diplomatic and other exchanges between the two powers. The book brings together analysis of the French cultural imagination of Persia with a careful reading of real-life encounters such as the visit to France by the Persian ambassador Mohamed Beg in 1715. In addition to the perceptions of a common ground between cultures and political regimes, Franco-Persian relations also included misunderstanding and conflict. Concerns about the resemblance between France and Persia morphed and grew as political critiques of despotism, political power, decadence, and inequality emerged and proliferated in the period. After the fall of the Safavid Empire, France's anxious attention focused with increasing intensity on the Ottoman Empire into the later eighteenth century.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.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

Carl Rommel, a Swedish social anthropologist, explores the turbulent intertwining of football, politics, and identity in Egypt. He discusses how football, once a symbol of the Mubarak regime, became a medium for revolutionary expression during the 2011 uprisings. Rommel highlights the significant role of Ultras fans, who navigated their passion amidst political dissent, particularly after the tragic Port Said massacre. He uncovers shifting notions of masculinity and emotion related to sports culture, questioning football's potential for fostering political change in modern Egypt.

Chronicling the retreat of mobile pastoralization from Mediterranean coastlines, Andrea Duffy's Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World (U Nebraska Press, 2019) investigates a mystery: where did the sheep go? Duffy seeks the answer by exploring the relationship between forestry policy and pasteurization by comparing and contrasting the implementation of French Forestry in France's Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. Anxieties over deforestation drove the French forestry regime to marginalize active transhumant pastoral communities around the inner sea while altering imperial institutions and Mediterranean landscapes. The focus on the Mediterranean engages with a transnational study exhibiting the visible and invisible patterns and distinctions over time and shared space. Overstepping the political divisions among states highlights the geographical and ecological features framing the importance of diverging geographical and ecological features helpful in studying environmental studies. The Mediterranean framework of her argument works to investigate social and cultural connections while cutting across traditional political and ideological frontiers. An accessible, well-researched, and well-organized Nomad's Land demonstrates the legacy of Scientific Forestry, which contributed to the decline of forests and mobile pastoralism, reshaped traditional lands into a modern Mediterranean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California, and provides us with fascinating insights into medieval society. How did the First Crusade happen? What could have suddenly caused tens of thousands of knights, commoners and even nuns at the end of the 11th century to leave their normal lives behind and trek thousands of miles across hostile territory in an unprecedented vicious and bloody quest to wrest Jerusalem from its occupying powers? Jay Rubenstein, historian of the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual worlds of Europe in the Middle Ages, carefully explores those questions based on his extensive research while discussing the Apocalypse: the crusaders’ sincere belief that the end of the world was approaching and their opportunity to participate in the last stage of the divine plan.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.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