New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Temple UP, 2020) challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world.Moussawi’s intrepid ethnography features the voices of women, gay men and, genderqueers in Beirut to examine how queer individuals negotiate life in this uncertain region. He examines “ al-wad’,” or “the situation,” to understand the practices that form these strategies and to raise questions about queer-friendly spaces in and beyond Beirut.Disruptive Situations also shows how LGBTQ Beirutis resist reconciliation narratives and position their identities and visibility at different times as ways of simultaneously managing their multiple positionalities and al-wad’. Moussawi argues that the daily survival strategies in Beirut are queer—and not only enacted by LGBTQ people—since Beirutis are living amidst an already queer situation of ongoing precarity.Alongside the main contours of the book, our conversation covered discussions of “queer flexible methodology,” navigating disruption throughout fieldwork, and assumptions accompanying “insider/native ethnography.” This book will be of interest to those interested in gender and sexuality studies, sociology, anthropology, and urban studies.This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”Ghassan Moussawi is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. 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 current moment it has become increasingly clear that US society is deeply entangled in racist policies and logics of white supremacy. While this affects numerous communities, anti-Muslim racism has continued to grow over the years. In With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and US Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Sohail Daulatzai, Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Junaid Rana, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, turn their attention to the intersection of racecraft around Muslims and imperial projects of domination by gathering committed scholars and activists to reflect on how we’ve gotten here and how we can move forward. The collection of over 20 essays contend with political dissent and the promise of activism, migration and assimilation, suspicion and surveillance, and the intellectual and cultural archives that provide imaginative strategies for possible futures. In our conversation we discuss the patterns of the Muslim Left and the Muslim International, the racialization of Muslims, Palestine and American Muslim politics, Muslim belonging in the contexts of liberal multiculturalism and settler colonialism, countering extremism programs, the media reinforcement of stereotypes, and the resources Muslims can draw upon for solidarity politics.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.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

Ulrike Freitag’s A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge University Press), offers a rich urban and biographical history of Jeddah.Known as the 'Gate to Mecca' or 'Bride of the Red Sea', Jeddah has been a gateway for pilgrims travelling to Mecca and Medina and a station for international trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean for centuries. Seen from the perspective of its diverse population, this first biography of Jeddah traces the city's urban history and cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to its present-day claim to multiculturalism, within the conservative environment of the Arabian Peninsula.Contextualising Jeddah with developments in the wider Muslim world, Ulrike Freitag investigates how different groups of migrants interacted in a changing urban space and how their economic activities influenced the political framework of the city. Richly illustrated, this study reveals how the transformation of Jeddah's urban space, population and politics has been indicative of changes in the wider Arab and Red Sea region, re-evaluating its place in the Middle East at a time when both its cosmopolitan practices and old city are changing dramatically against a backdrop of modernisation and Saudi nation-building.Ulrike Freitag is a historian of the Modern Middle East with a special interest in urban history and the Arabian Peninsula in its global context. She directs Zentrum Moderner Orient and teaches at the Freie Universität. She is author of Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut (Brill, 2003).Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

In this episode, we speak with Alyssa Gabbay about her recent new book Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima (I.B. Tauris, 2020). The book shows that contrary to assumptions about Islam’s patrilineal nature, there is in fact precedent in pre-modern Islamic history of Muslims' recognition of bilateral descent, or descent from both the mother and the father – though, of course, bilateral descent was by no means universally acknowledged.Although not the only example of this argument, Muhammad’s daughter Fatima is essential to the study because of her status in both Sunni and Shi’i societies historically as well as because especially Shi’is have used the example of Fatima, through whom Muhammad’s lineage can be traced, to argue in support of bilateral descent. In our conversation, we discuss the concept of bilateral descent and its three components of women as mothers, heiresses, and successors; Fatima’s relevance and significance to the discussion of descent and as a representative of bilateral descent; parallels between Mary the mother of Jesus and other pious women in Muslim history; Fatima’s claim to fadak as her inheritance and its impact on Sunni and Shi’i history; and female rulers in Muslim history. The book would make for an enjoyable and educational read for anyone interested in gender studies, Islam and gender, female authority, biographical studies, medieval Islam, and Islamic history, and would make for a great resource for both undergraduate and graduate Islam courses.Shehnaz Haqqani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and questions of change and tradition in Islam. She also vlogs on YouTube; her videos focus on dismantling the patriarchy and are available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClvnmSeZ5t_YSIfGnB-bGNw She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.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

Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return."In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group―unlike countless others that were displaced in the aftermath of World War II and other conflicts―has remained unsettled, demanding to settle in the state of Israel. Their belief in a "right of return" is one of the largest obstacles to successful diplomacy and lasting peace in the region.In The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (All Point Books, 2020), Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf―both liberal Israelis supportive of a two-state solution―reveal the origins of the idea of a right of return, and explain how UNRWA – an agency created for the Palestinians and not for the millions of other refugees - the very agency charged with finding a solution for the refugees – colluded with Palestinian, Arab and international political pressure to create a permanent “refugee” problem.Schwartz and Wilf make a compelling and well-documented argument that this Palestinian demand for a “right of return” has no legal, moral or historical basis and make an impassioned plea for the US, the UN, and the EU to recognize this fact, for the good of Israelis and Palestinians alike.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel ttps://newbooksnetwork.com/category/van-leer-institute/  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 were some of the major transformations taking place for Muslim communities in the Russian Empire of the eighteenth century? How did the introduction of a state-backed structure for Muslim religious institutions alter Islamic religious authority in the empire? And who exactly was Abu Nasr Qursawi and what was his reformist project to grapple with this situation?These are some of the questions asked by Nathan Spannaus in his book, Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abu Nasr Qursawi and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book offers a novel intervention in the study of early-modern Islamic thought, whose conventional geographical contours often focus on the Middle East and South Asia. Spannaus shows us that eighteenth-century Russia was also blooming with its own indigenous Islamic scholarly discourses that encompassed theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and more. These discourses were neither totally disembodied from wider concurrent global trends in Islamic thought, nor completely dependent on them. He examines the work of one Abu Nasr al-Qursawi, an erudite and intrepid scholar who criticized clerical institutions for stagnating the development of Islamic jurisprudence and theology by foreclosing independent juristic reasoning. In doing so, Spannaus meticulously demonstrates how Qursawi radically critiqued the established tradition while simultaneously embarking on his project of interpretive reform, all while maintaining fidelity to the discursive modes and fields of that tradition.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai highlights many complexities in the history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange.Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, Desai introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.Gaurav Desai is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Micheal Rumore is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His work focuses on the Indian Ocean as an African diasporic site. He can be reached at mrumore@gradcenter.cuny.edu.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

In this revised edition of her classic and groundbreaking work, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (University of Texas Press, 2019), Asma Barlas demonstrates how a Muslim believer can fully adopt an antipatriarchal reading of the Qur’anic text while maintaining belief in its Divine Providence. The intervention she makes is thus as useful to those studying the Quran (and scriptural interpretation more broadly) in the western academy as it is to Muslims searching for renewed ways to interpret their Divine Scripture in a more egalitarian spirit.Barlas cogently argues that just as patriarchy is read into the text, it can also be unread, and provides a methodology by which this can be done. In the process, she critiques both those within her tradition who hold to fixed patriarchal or authoritarian readings of scripture and those outside of her tradition who believe that her efforts are futile. Barlas’s hermeneutic privileges the text without being strictly textualist. That is to say, she is conscious of—and likewise calls her readers to be attuned to—the role played by power in the construction of interpretive knowledge. For example, she argues that even if the Qur’an is emphatic and explicit in affirming that God is genderless, this has not prevented a masculinization and an anthropomorphization of God through certain (male-dominated) theological and spiritual discourses and language.In our interview, we take a journey through the three parts of her book: (1) Texts, Contexts, and Religious Meaning (2) God, the Prophets, and Fathers and (3) Unreading and Rereading Patriarchy. With deep moral clarity, Asma Barlas aims to recover what Leila Ahmad (1992) has called the ‘stubbornly egalitarian’ voice of Islam by illuminating the polysemic voice of the Qur’an. We additionally discuss the two new chapters in this revised edition of the book: “Abraham’s Sacrifice in the Qur’an: Beyond the Body” which elaborates on the Qur’anic rejection of representations of fathers as surrogates of a divine patriarch; and “Secular/Feminism and the Qur’an” where she engages with—and responds to—her secular and feminist interlocutors/critics on the subject of Qur’anic interpretation. This book is a passionate clarion call to dig deeper into how we receive, understand, and interpret scripture regardless of our faith commitments.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians.In When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018), Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Sports scholars Danyel Reiche and Tamir Sorek’s edited volume, Sport, Politics, and Society in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2019), makes a significant contribution to what remains a largely understudied, yet critically important segment of Middle Eastern political and social life. It does so by discussing in eleven chapters multiple aspects and consequences of the region’s incestuous relationship between sports and politics. These range from corruption, the role of the private sector, an emphasis on elite sports and projection of the state at the expense of grassroots sports to battles for identity expressed among others in memories to how sports chants in Israel reflect society’s political and social moods as well as it fault lines, the struggle of women to overcome deeply entrenched social modes and how social media helps them with branding. The edited volume is not only an at times ethnographic dive into Middle Eastern sports’ multiple facets but also in many ways a mapping of how much remains to be explored. This is a volume that should attract the attention of anyone who is interested in the Middle East, sports and/or gender issues as well as readers whose focus is a specific country like Turkey, Israel, Palestine or Jordan or a group of nations like the Gulf states. Whatever one’s preference is, Reiche and Sorek have produced a volume rich in texture, insight and breadth that is likely to prompt the reader to think differently about the political and societal importance of Middle Eastern sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies