New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book centers on the emergence of the evocation of wonder as a key aesthetic experience and criterion connected to the beauty and eloquence of speech in medieval Muslim intellectual thought. With breathtaking clarity and painstaking elaboration, Harb charts the key literary tropes, categories, and strategies, as well as the broader intellectual and theological stakes, such as the question of the Qur’an’s inimitability, invested in how poetry was imagined, experienced, and evaluated in this context. The strength of this book lies in the meticulous care with which it walks readers through a complex yet deeply fascinating discursive arcade of thinkers, texts, and poetic registers. While focused on the thought of the preeminent eleventh century scholar ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Arabic Poetics presents and explores a panoply of scholars and texts situated at the intersection of religion, and literature. Written with sparkling clarity, this book will also make an excellent text to teach in various undergraduate and graduate courses on the Muslim Humanities, Arabic, Religion and Literature, and Religious Studies more broadly.SherAli Tareen is Associate 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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. 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

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx famously claimed that philosophers had previously only attempted to interpret the world; the point, however, was to change it. In the 20th century, no philosopher had as great an effect on the world than Marx, with various intellectual and political movements across the world claiming various parts of his thought and using them to develop and change their own parts of the world.One of these movements, Socialist Lebanon, took root in the 1960s, and much Arab political thought has developed in its shadow ever since. Composed of a variety of activists and intellectuals, their attempts to adapt and develop Marxist thought for their own particular context remains important both for understanding Middle East history, as well as current political possibilities for the Arab world today. This is the set of animating ideas that drive Fadi A. Bardawil in his new book, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2020)Fadi Bardawil received his PhD from Columbia University and is an assistant professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke 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

During the opening decades of the Cold War, US policymakers and academics used modernization theory to provide an alternative model to communism for improving living standards. As Begüm Adalet demonstrates, Turkey was both a model case of elite-led modernization and a laboratory for development projects that could then be exported to other societies. Through her analysis of the flow of aid money and expertise between the US and Turkey, the planning of the American-funded Turkish highway network, and the development of the Turkish tourism industry, Adalet highlights how the production of social scientific knowledge is fundamentally entwined with the problems of political order: social scientific theories are produced in material space, through uncertain encounters between transnational actors and policy networks. Furthermore, her examinations of the works and career trajectories of figures like political scientist Dankwart Rustow and sociologist Daniel Lerner show how the political and ideological imperatives of US foreign policy shape social scientific knowledge production, even as the figures involved may express doubts about the feasibility of political projects and initiatives.Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2018) invites political scientists, development economists, and other social scientists involved in the study of the Global South to reflect on how geopolitical power imbalances and hegemonic projects affect the production of social scientific knowledge. 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 Allah: God in the Qur’an (Yale University Press, 2020), Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that contrary to many scholarly and popular claims about the God of the Qur’an as either merciful or vengeful, God is in fact both. He suggests that God’s nature is a mystery and the descriptions of God, as both merciful and vengeful, are intended to have an impact on the audience of the Qur’an. Through productive comparisons between the Qur’an and the Bible, Reynolds also discusses the common themes and descriptions of God shared by these scriptures, such as the – of course, vengeance and mercy of God, but also divine scheming, God’s derision of unbelievers, and ideas of God as the Father, the Ruler, the Judge, and/or similar characteristics. Other themes covered in the book include heaven and hell, and the fate of sinners and unbelievers in the Qur’an and the exegetical tradition, the idea of humans as having been created in God’s image, and the idea of the Qur’an as a literary truth versus a historical truth, the latter point helping explain any inconsistencies in the stories that the Qur’an tells.The book would be of interest to folks teaching theology and comparative religions courses, particularly Abrahamic religions. Its accessible writing style makes it especially useful for undergraduates and for non-specialists looking to better understand God in either just the Qur’an or in the Qur’an and the Bible.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 focused on dismantling the patriarchy and 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

We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication and sedentary settlement. Only around 3100 BCE, some four millennia after the earliest farming and settling down, did they begin making their presence felt. What happened in these four millennia is the subject of this book: a deep history by “a card-carrying political scientist and an anthropologist and environmentalist by courtesy”, which aims to put the earliest states in their place.James Scott joins us for the fourth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to talk about state fragility and state persistence from Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia, the politics of cereal crops, domestication and reproduction, why it was once good to be a barbarian, the art of provocation, the views of critics, and, human and animal species relations and zoonoses in our epidemiological past and pandemic present.To download or stream episodes in this series please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science.Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. 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 demobilizes a once mobilized society? How does international involvement amplify or suppress these dynamics?In Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2020), Dana El Kurd’s new book uses a case study to interrogate how the Palestinian Authority – as an indigenous institution – more successfully demobilized Palestinian society than Israeli occupiers. Despite Israel’s greater resources and international backing, the Palestinian Authority, paradoxically, was able to accomplish what the Israelis could not: the polarization and demobilization of the Palestinian population.The Palestinian Authority (PA) -- insulated from domestic constituents and consumed with addressing international pressures rather than negotiating with Palestinian society – strengthened authoritarian practices. The use of authoritarianism polarized the public over both international involvement and the practice of authoritarianism. El Kurd’s rich case study illustrates how certain authoritarian strategies used by the PA increased societal polarizing – and that polarization negatively affected mobilization and the capacity for collective action. El Kurd uses a mix of survey data, interviews, and field research to demonstrate how international involvement results in insulation that may increase authoritarianism. She not only provides a nuanced look at the Palestinian Authority but applies her findings to Iraqi Kurdistan and Bahrain in one of the concluding chapters. The podcast concludes with incisive comments about how the Trump administration’s disengagement may ironically open opportunities for rebuilding the capacity for Palestinian collective action.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Yaacov Yadgar discusses his new book, Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with Peter Bergamin. An important and topical contribution to the field of Middle East studies, this innovative, provocative, and timely study tackles head-on the main assumptions of the foundation of Israel as a Jewish state. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, Yaacov Yadgar provides a novel analysis of the interplay between Israeli nationalism and Jewish tradition, arriving at a fresh understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its focus on internal questions about Israeli identity. By critiquing and transcending the current discourse on religion and politics in Israel, this study brings to an international audience debates within Israel that have been previously inaccessible to non-Hebrew speaking academics. Featuring discussions on Israeli jurisprudence, nation-state law, and rabbinic courts, Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis will have far-reaching implications, not only within the state of Israel but on politics, society and culture beyond its borders.Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on matters of Jewish identity, nationalism, secularism, modernity and tradition in Israel. He is the author of Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism (2017). 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 latest book, Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California(Stanford University Press, 2019), Sarah M. A. Gualtieri uncovers the dynamic and complex stories of Arabic-speaking migrant communities who came to call Southern California home. Rather than a simple story of departure and arrival, Gualtieri traces the surprising twists and turns of Syrian migrants who travelled throughout the United States, Latin America, and Canada, transcending, blurring and often unsettling national boundaries. During these international and intranational migrations, Syrian migrants forged interethnic alliances to counter pervasive prejudices and racialized immigration systems. What emerged, argues Gualtieri, were hybrid identities or a “mestizaje,” which complicates and challenges narratives of assimilation and identity formation in narratives about immigration in the United States. A methodologically innovative account, Arab Routes critically examines government records, oral histories, and rich forms of cultural production by generations of Arab Americans, highlighting the important role that Arabic-speaking communities played in creating and shaping a global Los Angeles. With fascinating anecdotes and keen analytical insights, Gualtieri counters historical silences and places the Syrian Pacific at the center of histories of migration in the Americas and the Middle East.Sarah M. A. Gualtieri is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, as well as History, and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California.Joshua Donovan is a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of History. His dissertation examines competing conceptions of identity and subjectivity within the Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora.  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 life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a stern moralist yet possessed of deep, and at times dark, passions? And why did scores of thousands of Jews, many of them from traditional, observant backgrounds, embrace Herzl as their leader?In his new book Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale UP, 2020), historian Derek Penslar shows that Herzl’s path to Zionism had as much to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism. Once Herzl devoted himself to Zionism, Penslar shows, he distinguished himself as a consummate leader—possessed of indefatigable energy, organizational ability, and electrifying charisma. Herzl became a screen onto which Jews of his era could project their deepest needs and longings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies