New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Today, I am introducing a recording of an event on Israel-Palestine organized by members of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The event took place on May 19th, 2021 and was co-sponsored by the Jadaliyya e-zine as well as the New Books Network.Here is the text of the event poster: When it comes to Palestine, there is a sharp disconnect between the ways academics specializing in the contemporary Middle East frame the dispute, and the discussions by journalists and mainstream media outlets. The current crisis must be placed within its longer context that includes decades of occupation of Palestinian territory by the Israeli military and Israeli settlers. This panel seeks to reframe the issue by providing scholarly, historical perspectives on the multiple factors that have led to the current events taking place in the Jerusalem neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah, which are now expanding outward. Furthermore, this panel will speak not to intellectual abstractions, but will provide academic contexts to pragmatic concerns that journalists and readers should understand and consider when reporting on or reading about the current situation in Palestine today.Panel Moderator: Dr. Sarah Shields is Professor of Middle East History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Panelists:Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University.Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of the Arab Studies Journal, co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and editor of Journal of Palestine Studies.Mouin Rabbani is a researcher and analyst specializing in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the contemporary Middle East, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.Podcast Host:Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 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 ground-breaking work, Michael Sells (the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and Professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago) translates sixty-one poems that form the Tarjuman al-ashwaq or The Translator of Desires by Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (Princeton University Press, 2021). The poems are presented here both in Arabic and English, and are accompanied by an introduction and commentary. The masterful and accessible translations are truly a thrilling literary experience. Ibn ‘Arabi’s poems evoke numerous themes, such as of flora and fauna, nature, sacred spaces, especially of the Kaaba, love, longing, and grief. For instance, the longing of a lost beloved, which Sufis would have read as the Divine, is a central thematic thread woven throughout the collection of poetry, and is gendered feminine. The collection of poems along with Sells critical introduction and notes provides stunning insights to both the tradition of Arabic love poetry and to the mystical thought and poetic prowess of Ibn 'Arabi. This collection of poems will be of interest to anyone interested in Arabic poetry, Islamic literature, Ibn 'Arabi, Sufism, and much more.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Mirza Ghalib is one of the most celebrated poets in the Urdu literary canon. Yet, at the time, Ghalib was prolific in both Urdu and Persian. His output in Persian output dwarfs his Urdu writing (at least in its published form), and he often openly dismissed his Urdu works, once writing:Look into the Persian so that you may see paintings of myriadshades and hues;Pass by the collection in Urdu for it is nothing but drawings andsketches.Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep: A Critical Biography (Allen Lane, 2021) by Professor Mehr Afshan Farooqi explores the work of Mirza Ghalib to perhaps explain why the power made the switch from Urdu to Persian and back to Urdu.In this interview, I ask Mehr to introduce us to Ghalib and his work. We explore Ghalib as both a poet and a person, and why he made the switch from writing in Urdu to Persian and back again.Mehr Afshan Farooqi is currently an associate professor of Urdu and South Asian Literature at the University of Virginia. Her research publications address complex issues of Urdu literary culture particularly in the context of modernity. A well-known translator, anthologist, and columnist, she is the editor of the pioneering two-volume work The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature. More recently, she has published the acclaimed monograph The Postcolonial Mind: Urdu Culture, Islam and Modernity in Muhammad Hasan Askari. Farooqi also writes a featured column on Urdu literature of the past and present in the Dawn. Mehr can be followed on Twitter at @FarooqiMehrYou can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ghalib: A Wilderness At My Doorstep. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Everything, in the end, comes down to Exodus. Everything that we are as a civilization goes back to Exodus. Every person, religious or not, who wants to consider him or herself educated needs to engage with Exodus.And, fortunately for us, the noted academic Leon Kass has provided us with that unique thing—a book that is both magisterial and readable. We will discuss with him his 2021 work, Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2012).Kass examines Exodus in meticulous detail. We learn, among other things, that Exodus is a story of how all human beings can rise from the depths of despair and oppression and of how one group, in particular, formed a society that has influenced many others down to this day in everything from compassion for the downtrodden to humane treatment of animals to wise stewardship of the land. Not to mention the fact that our foundational laws and traditional family and current government structures derive from the events narrated in Exodus.Kass writes, “I undertook this study mainly to explore basic questions of people formation: What makes a people a people? What forms their communal identity, holds them together, guides their lives? For what should they strive? Exodus speaks to these questions through two unfolding and intersecting stories: the founding of the Israelite nation via deliverance and command, and the growing knowledge of God via divine revelation.”This is the perfect treatise for general readers on questions that are as relevant as ever: What is justice? What do we want our nation to be? What is my personal responsibility to others?The book also brims with drama—we are dealing here, after all, with Moses and mountaintops, pharaohs and plagues, God’s love and human faithlessness. For those not raised in religious households, this book is a gateway to understanding those who were and enriches us culturally.We will focus primarily in this interview with Dr. Kass (he is also a physician and one of the leading bioethicists of our times) on the role that the Sabbath plays in Exodus and in our own lives. His treatment of that subject alone demands attention.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahweh-worshiping Midianites of the Early Iron Age brought their deity along with metallurgy into ancient Palestine and the Israelite people. Join us as we talk with Robert Miller about his latest book, Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021).Robert Miller, II, O.F.S., Ph.D., is Ordinary Professor of Old Testament and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at The Catholic University of America.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu 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 scene is Turkey in the mid-to-late Seventies. A young male college student hops onto a bus. He sits next to a cute female student from his class, but before they can strike up a conversation, they see a right-wing passenger, walk up to another passenger and hit him on the head with a hammer. The young woman screams. The two students get off the bus, only for the female student to call the male student a “disgusting fascist” and leave in anger.Scenes like this are seen in Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured Lives in a Time of Violence (Princeton University Press, 2021) is a graphic novel written by Professor Jenny White and illustrated by Ergün Gündüz. The book combines Jenny’s own experiences in Turkey with insights gleaned from interviews to illustrate Turkey’s political conflict in the late 1970s, between right-wing and left-wing movements.You can watch a promotional video for the book, and the book can be ordered from the Princeton University Press website. Jenny has also put together a Spotify playlist of songs from the era. Those interested in an academic treatment of these ideas can read her 2017 article in The Brown Journal of World Affairs titled “Spindle Autocracy In The New Turkey”.In this interview, I ask Jenny to talk about central figures in her telling of Turkish politics, and how their views developed over time. We talk about that period of Turkish contemporary history and what it was like. And we also discuss her choice of format: why write a graphic novel?Jenny White is a social anthropologist and professor at the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University. She is former president of the Turkish Studies Association and former president of the American Anthropological Association Middle East Section. She has published four books and numerous articles about contemporary Turkish society and politics. She also has published a series of three novels set in 1880s Istanbul.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Turkish Kaleidoscope. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Christine M. Philliou's Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California Press, 2021) challenges conventional understandings about the transition from the Ottoman Empire to Republic of Turkey. From its earliest days, the dominant history of the republic was told as a triumphant narrative of national self-determination and secular democratic modernization. In that officially sanctioned account, the years between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Turkish state marked an absolute rupture, and the Turkish nation formed an absolute unity. In recent years, this hermetic division has begun to erode--but as the old consensus collapses, new histories and accounts of political authority have been slow to take its place. In this richly detailed alternative history of Turkey, Philliou focuses on the notion of political opposition and dissent--muhalefet--to weave together the Ottoman and Turkish periods. Taking the perennial dissident Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965) as a subject, guide, and interlocutor, she traces the fissures within the Ottoman and the modern Turkish elite that bridged the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey. Exploring Karay's political and literary writings across four regimes and two stints in exile, along with his direct confrontation with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at a crucial moment in 1919, Philliou upends the official history of Turkey and offers new dimensions to our understanding of its political authority and culture.Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. In Television ad the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Local Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.Wazhmah Osman is a filmmaker and an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Globalization and Development Communication, Media Studies and Production, Media & Communication at Temple University. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Before the Transatlantic slave trade ravaged the western coast of Africa, immense numbers of persons were taken from their homes and carried across the Black and Mediterranean Seas as involuntary passengers. This trade is the subject of Hannah Barker’s remarkable study, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).Professor Barker provides a comprehensive overview of this tangled, multiethnic trade in human beings. Professor Barker is uniquely equipped to do so because she brings a knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. Since this trade brought captives both to Mamluk Egypt and late medieval Italy, previous studies, hampered by linguistic limitations, have not examined the trade in its totality. Barker is able to marshal both Arabic and Latin sources to provide a truly comprehensive picture of slaving and slavery. The result is a work that is both detailed and synoptic, and is essential reading for scholars of late medieval Europe and North Africa.Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Eleni Kefala's book The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Dumbarton Oaks, 2021) probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlán. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies