New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Harvests of Liberation offers a critical reinterpretation of Egypt's path to decolonization through the lens of its most important export crop: cotton. In this richly detailed and methodologically innovative work, historian Ahmad Shokr shifts the focus from nationalist rhetoric and elite politics to the material infrastructures, commodity chains, and agrarian reforms that underpinned Egypt's transformation from colonial dependency to postcolonial developmental state. Spanning the early twentieth century through the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the book traces how the cotton economy structured both imperial domination and national aspirations. Shokr examines how British colonial rule fostered monopolistic, extractive economic arrangements—what he terms “concessionary accumulation”—that privileged landlords, foreign financiers, and global markets. In response, Egyptian intellectuals, technocrats, and reformers came to see the rural economy not as peripheral but as central to national liberation. As economic crises—such as the Great Depression and World War II—disrupted global trade and weakened elite power, Egypt's nationalist vision shifted. The 1952 revolution ushered in a new model of “governmental accumulation,” where state-led institutions—agricultural cooperatives, land reforms, and price controls—sought to discipline markets and integrate the peasantry into a centralized vision of industrial growth and sovereignty. By weaving together political economy, environmental history, and postcolonial studies, Harvests of Liberation challenges conventional narratives of Egyptian independence. Shokr reveals how cotton's journey from Nile Valley fields to global markets was not just a story of economic change but one of contested meanings: about freedom, labor, and the power of the state. Essential reading for scholars of the Middle East, global capitalism, and decolonization, this book radically rethinks how empires end—and how modern nations are built. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real offers a history of Cairo's urban modernity using film as the primary source of exploration, and cinematic space as both an analytical tool and a medium of critique. Cairo has provided rich subject material for Egypt's film industry since the inception of the art form at the end of the nineteenth century. The “reel” city—imagined, perceived, and experienced—provides the spatial domain that mirrors change and allows for an interrogation of the “real” city as it encountered modernity over the course of a century.Bringing together chapters by architects and art and literary historians, this volume explores this parallel and convergent relationship through two sections. The first uses films from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century to illustrate the development of a modern Cairo and its modern subjects. The second section is focused on tracing the transformation of the cinematic city under conditions of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism, and gender tensions. The result is a comprehensive narrative of the urban modernity of one of the most important cities in the Arab world and Global South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

A bold, unforgettable novel of war, imagination, and survival. Thirteen-year-old Kamiran is fleeing the collapse of Syria when his body begins to harden literally—turning to chalk. As his transformation unfolds, he pours his memories, secrets, and darkly funny confessions into a piece of chalk he stole at school. Through the eyes of this precocious, resilient boy, Safe Corridor explores what it means to survive the unthinkable—with tenderness, fury, and imagination. Written by acclaimed Kurdish-Syrian novelist Jan Dost and translated by Marilyn Booth—winner of the 2019 International Booker Prize—Safe Corridor is a searing, surreal journey through displacement, coming of age, and the cost of war. Winner of the 2024 Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize. Jan Dost, born in 1966, is a native of Kobani in the Aleppo region of Syria. A student of natural sciences at the University of Aleppo (1985-89), he embarked on a career in journalism in the roles of reporter and editor, currently for the Kurdistan Chronicle (published in English in Erbil, Iraq) He is editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language magazine Kurdistan. Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The collection of wisdom fables known as Kalila and Dimna began its long literary life in Sanskrit more than two millennia ago, and was subsequently translated to numerous languages. But it is the Arabic version, adapted from Middle Persian by the eighth-century scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa, that has left the most substantial literary footprint. A foundational text of classical Arabic prose and the basis for translations into Hebrew, Syriac, Castilian, Latin, Persian, and more, versions of Kalila and Dimna exists in hundreds of manuscript copies held in libraries around the world. Kalila and Dimna is the focus of Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler's new work An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (Brill: 2024). In this collected volume, members of the Kalila and Dimna project discuss, from different perspectives, a core aspect of their work with this textual tradition: the study of variation and mutability. The aim is to shed light on Kalila and Dimna's so-called mouvance and establish typologies of textual mobility and instability across linguistic traditions and historical periods, as well as to develop analytical tools to describe, classify, represent, and interpret these dynamics. As will be shown, the progressive digitalization of philology in the last decades has offered the unique opportunity of putting the concept of mouvance into practice. Contributors include Theodore S. Beers, Jan J. van Ginkel, Khouloud Khalfallah, Mahmoud Kozae, Rima Redwan, and Johannes Stephan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach's—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library. William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political thought. Idris begins with Plato's Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace. War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice). We are urged to think about peace and the valence that is given to the word and the ideal—since the moral and the political understandings of peace are often entangled and part of what Idris is doing in his careful and thoughtful research is to tease out the political concept, apart from the often religious and moral ideal. This rich and complex analysis integrates a broad group of theorists—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb)—all of whom were examining the role of peace within politics and political thought. And Idris structures these thinkers into chronological and theoretical groupings, to explore the ways in which they were responding to each other, across time, but also to understand how different thinkers were connecting peace to other concepts. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought may leave the reader anxious but also enlightened in considering this idea and its perplexing place within the history of political thought. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Human Costs of War: 21st Century Human (In)Security from 2003 Iraq to 2022 Ukraine (Taylor & Francis, 2024) documents and analyses the direct and indirect toll that war takes on civilians and their livelihoods, taking a human security approach exploring personal, economic, political and community security in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, in the contexts of the War on Terror and the New Cold War. The book offers an understanding of war through the recording and comprehension of its civilian casualties and evaluates whether the force used has been proportionate to the threat that prompted it and the concern for human welfare. In the 21st century, the power of the USA has declined, while countries such as China and India become more powerful. The global power balance has been altered in a fundamental way towards a multi-polar world system, with the West no longer able to enforce its policies abroad. Regional and global governance are not assured, and devastating wars have taken a heavy toll in terms of death, poverty and displacement, which feed into the cycle of long-term insecurity. The authors argue that it is important for any conflict to be understood not only in terms of the perpetrators of violence, or of the political and economic reasons behind it, but also in terms of its impact on the civilian population and their security, focusing on conflicts in the Middle East which followed 9/11 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The book will be of interest to academics, the public, the media, security agencies and international organisations. It will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students of International Relations, International Law, Security, Politics, Policing, Human Rights, Ethics, Peace Studies, Eastern Europe, American Studies and the Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Israeli Documentary Poetry: Coming of Age with the State introduces and explores documentary poetry written by Israeli poets who came of age during the first two decades of the state and who, since the 1970s and 1980s, have recorded their experiences of that period. This study offers a literary-cultural analysis of forty-two poems by thirty Israeli poets of various backgrounds, divided into themes such as: memories of the Holocaust and portraits of survivors and their offspring; transit locations and situations both en route to and within Israel; displacement as a shared fate of Jews and Arabs; school and classroom experiences; Mizraḥi women between Levantine patriarchy and Western liberalism; and languages of the diaspora versus Hebrew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Hello, I'm Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I speak with Linda Quiquivix, author of the new book Palestine 1492: A Report Back (Wild Ox Books, 2024). This is a book that so many of us need right now, and by "right now," I mean that I am recording this in July of 2025, when Palestinians in Gaza are on the verge of mass starvation as a result of a manufactured and illegal famine imposed by the Israeli army. Some 2.2 million people are experiencing "acute food insecurity," to use the United Nation's official phrasing for people being illegally deprived of humanitarian aid and forced to starve to death. Right now, we are witnessing horror on a mass scale, made all the more horrible because this is wholly preventable. Right now, we need voices who can help us to understand why this is happening, how it is we got here, and what we might do in response. Quiquivix offers us such a voice. In Palestine 1492, she undertakes a rich and wide-ranging analysis to show us how such colonial violence emerged and how we might resist it. In fact, Quiquivix goes further, sharing with us a political vision that strive toward peace, equality, and mutual acceptance of one another across our differences. A world, in short, without the violence done through and to uphold borders. I'm grateful to share with you this conversation with Linda Quiquivix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

When I sat down with Dr. Ory Amitay, his passion for myth, history, and ancient cultures was infectious. Our conversation about his new book, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History, Oxford University Press, 2025, quickly revealed that for Ory, the real intrigue isn't whether Alexander literally visited Jerusalem, but how and why this story was created and retold for centuries. Ory traced his fascination with this intersection of myth and reality back to his Israeli upbringing and Berkeley days, where he mastered ancient languages and ventured beyond traditional Jewish sources. He described how, over time, different versions of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem reflected shifting political climates—from the Seleucid takeover to Roman conquest. Myths, he explained, were tools to help communities navigate upheaval, envisioning themselves in relation to powerful foreign rulers.  Pressed for the historical “truth,” Ory smiled and emphasized that the stories' meaning—how they address the anxieties and hopes of their tellers—outweighs whether Alexander's visit “really” happened. As he pursues new projects, translating ancient versions of these tales and writing a book on Western civilization, I left inspired by his view that exploring old myths is also about understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, our stories about ourselves. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting, if it happened, passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World offers a dynamic new perspective on medieval Jewish legal thought and its integration in the wider Islamic world. Here, Marc D. Herman demonstrates that Jews were fully conversant in their contemporaries' ideas about revelation, law, and legal interpretation. Bookended by the two luminaries of medieval Judaism--Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides--After Revelation analyzes the legal theory that medieval Jews produced in Islamic lands, mostly in Arabic, and reveals previously unrecognized commonalities between Jewish and Islamic constructions of religious law. Herman tackles one of the central doctrines of post-biblical Judaism: that God had supplemented the written Hebrew Bible with an Oral Torah. Tracing this idea from Baghdad to Córdoba to Cairo, he shows that the Oral Torah took many new forms in the medieval Islamic world. After Revelation makes plain that medieval Judaism took the shapes that it did largely because of contact with Islam. You can pre-order this book now, and it will be published on August 5, 2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad (Stanford UP, 2025) offers a history of state-society relations in Baghdad, exploring how city residents managed through periods of economic growth, sanctions, and war, from the oil boom of the 1950s through the withdrawal of US troops in 2011. Interactions between citizens and their rulers shaped the social fabric and political realities of the city. Notably, low-ranking Ba'th party officials functioned as crucial intermediaries, deciding how regime policies would be applied. Charting the social, economic, and political transformations of Iraq's capital city, Alissa Walter examines how national policies translated into action at the local, everyday level. With this book, Walter reveals how authoritarian governance worked in practice. She follows shifts in mid-century housing and urban development, the impact of the Iran–Iraq and Gulf Wars on city life, and the manipulation of food rations and growth of black markets. Reading citizen petitions to the government, Walter illuminates citizens' self-advocacy and the important role of low-ranking party officials and state bureaucrats embedded within neighborhoods. The US occupation and ensuing sectarian fighting upended Baghdad's neighborhoods through violent displacement and the collapse of basic state services. This power vacuum paved the way for new power brokers, including militias and neighborhood councils, to compete for influence on the local level. Alissa Walter is Associate Professor of History at Seattle Pacific University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Bristol University Press, 2021), Lily Hamourtziadou's investigation into civilian victims during the conflicts that followed the US-led coalition's 2003 invasion of Iraq provides important new perspectives on the human cost of the War on Terror. From early fighting to the withdrawal and return of coalition troops, the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, the book explores the scale and causes of deaths and places them in the contexts of power struggles, US foreign policy and radicalisation. Casting fresh light on not just the conflict but international geopolitics and the history of Iraq, it constructs a unique and insightful human security approach to war. Lily Hamourtziadou is Senior Lecturer in Criminology with Security Studies and Deputy Course Director at Birmingham City University, and Principal Researcher of Iraq Body Count, which maintains the largest public database of violent civilian deaths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In December 2024, the long and bloody stalemate in Syria broke down. In a transformation breathtaking for its suddenness and speed, President Bashar al-Assad, the beating heart of Arab authoritarianism, fled to Russia, his dungeons emptying as rebels overcame the Syrian army with scarcely a fight. Euphoria at the collapse of a government people never voted for was tempered by fear for the future. The victorious insurgents were supported by outside powers and had a track record of brutality comparable to Assad's in addition to religious fanaticism. Syrians—whose fragile, cosmopolitan mosaic has been repeatedly shattered by foreign-backed sectarians—faced rule by an avowedly Islamist regime that pledged to break with its past and show tolerance to all religious communities. In this illuminating and concise survey, Charles Glass shows how Assad's misrule, Sunni fundamentalism, and Western deceit combined to create and prolong the Syrian disaster, which since 2011 has claimed more than two hundred thousand lives and driven more than eight million people from their homes. Glass has reported extensively from the Middle East and travelled frequently in Syria for more than fifty years. Here he melds reportage, analysis, and history to provide an accessible overview of the origins and permutations defining the conflict, situating it clearly in the broader crises of the region. In this new and thoroughly revised edition of his earlier Syria Burning, Glass brings the story to the present, showing how we got here and what a post-Assad settlement might bring. About the Author: Charles Glass was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1973, he has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of Syria Burning, Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, The Northern Front, Americans in Paris, The Deserters, They Fought Alone and Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. His website is www.charlesglass.net. About the Host: Stuti Roy is a recent graduate with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In this interview, Yardena Schwartz discusses her book Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, offering a nuanced exploration of the 1929 Hebron massacre and its enduring impact on the region's history and present-day realities. Through a conversation that weaves personal narrative, historical analysis, and contemporary reflection, Schwartz illuminates how the events of 1929—when nearly 70 Jewish residents of Hebron were killed by their Arab neighbors—became a pivotal moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict. When the Shainberg family in Memphis, Tennessee, discovers a box of century-old letters from their deceased uncle David in their attic, a journey begins: not only to learn about the young man who wrote the letters from the holy city of Hebron in British Mandate Palestine, but about the massacre that took his life in 1929. Award-winning journalist Yardena Schwartz draws from these letters, along with extensive research and wide-ranging interviews of Israelis and Palestinians now living in Hebron, to tell a timely, captivating narrative.  In David's last letter home, on August 20, 1929 he wrote about a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and said, “as we walked along Jerusalem's streets, we could almost imagine the streams of Jewish blood flowing at our feet, the horrible scenes of slaughter. Jewish sages, budding youth, tender babes in their mother's arms, all killed by the barbaric sword of the enemy". He was describing the slaughter from the Roman invasion of Jerusalem - yet just a few days later those same words could have been used to describe the scene in Hebron where David lost his life. The interview delves into the complexities of Hebron's past, once a city marked by coexistence, and the forces—propaganda, incitement, and shifting political landscapes—that transformed it into a symbol of division. Schwartz draws connections between the incitement and misinformation that fueled the violence in 1929 and the echoes of these dynamics in more recent events, such as the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. She emphasizes the importance of challenging false narratives and understanding the human stories behind historical tragedies. Throughout the conversation, Schwartz reflects on the challenges of researching and recounting such a fraught history, the erasure and distortion of memory in both Jewish and Arab communities, and the enduring hope for peace despite a century of conflict. The interview provides listeners with a compelling entry point into the tangled roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, highlighting why the lessons of 1929 remain urgently relevant today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In this interview, Yardena Schwartz discusses her book Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, offering a nuanced exploration of the 1929 Hebron massacre and its enduring impact on the region's history and present-day realities. Through a conversation that weaves personal narrative, historical analysis, and contemporary reflection, Schwartz illuminates how the events of 1929—when nearly 70 Jewish residents of Hebron were killed by their Arab neighbors—became a pivotal moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict. When the Shainberg family in Memphis, Tennessee, discovers a box of century-old letters from their deceased uncle David in their attic, a journey begins: not only to learn about the young man who wrote the letters from the holy city of Hebron in British Mandate Palestine, but about the massacre that took his life in 1929. Award-winning journalist Yardena Schwartz draws from these letters, along with extensive research and wide-ranging interviews of Israelis and Palestinians now living in Hebron, to tell a timely, captivating narrative.  In David's last letter home, on August 20, 1929 he wrote about a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and said, “as we walked along Jerusalem's streets, we could almost imagine the streams of Jewish blood flowing at our feet, the horrible scenes of slaughter. Jewish sages, budding youth, tender babes in their mother's arms, all killed by the barbaric sword of the enemy". He was describing the slaughter from the Roman invasion of Jerusalem - yet just a few days later those same words could have been used to describe the scene in Hebron where David lost his life. The interview delves into the complexities of Hebron's past, once a city marked by coexistence, and the forces—propaganda, incitement, and shifting political landscapes—that transformed it into a symbol of division. Schwartz draws connections between the incitement and misinformation that fueled the violence in 1929 and the echoes of these dynamics in more recent events, such as the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. She emphasizes the importance of challenging false narratives and understanding the human stories behind historical tragedies. Throughout the conversation, Schwartz reflects on the challenges of researching and recounting such a fraught history, the erasure and distortion of memory in both Jewish and Arab communities, and the enduring hope for peace despite a century of conflict. The interview provides listeners with a compelling entry point into the tangled roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, highlighting why the lessons of 1929 remain urgently relevant today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Two juxtaposed years frame the subject matter of Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile. In one, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet's troops stormed Chile's presidential palace. In the other, 1948, Zionist militias expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. That 1973 should move memories in Chile is obvious. That 1948 does is because Chile is home to the largest number of Palestinians outside the Middle East. Yet, while most are descended from people who migrated prior to the expulsion, 1948 and its consequences are what move Chilean Palestinians to act together politically, whereas 1973 divides them. In this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, Siri Shwabe discusses how her ethnographic research in Santiago explored the paradoxical relationship between the movement of two collective memories of violence and dispossession: an ambivalent one in the recent lived past, and the other residing in a distant land and the struggle for survival of an expelled and relentlessly attacked people whose trauma the diaspora adopts and differently experiences. Like this episode? Why not check out others on the New Books Network, including Kevin Funk talking about Rooted Globalism: Arab–Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries, or Tahrir Hamdi on Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity. Looking for something to read? Siri recommendsVibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

What if our society's deepest prejudices weren't about race, gender, or sexuality—but height? In his groundbreaking allegorical novel, acclaimed Jordanian author and activist Fadi Zaghmout imagines just such a world, crafting a powerful meditation on discrimination and desire that speaks directly to our contemporary debates about identity and inclusion. The Man of Middling Height (Syracuse University Press, 2025) follows a short dressmaker whose life is upended when she meets Tallan, a man whose middle height places him outside the rigid tall/short binary that governs their society. As their forbidden romance blossoms, they must navigate a world where height determines everything from social status to romantic possibilities. Through their story and those of surrounding characters—including a short person in a polyamorous relationship with two tall partners, and a tall activist who scandalously loves another tall person—Zaghmout deftly reframes contemporary discussions about gender identity and sexuality through the lens of height discrimination. Fadi Zaghmout is a Jordanian author and sexual freedoms and body rights advocate. He has published five novels, including The Bride of Amman, Heaven on Earth, Laila, and Hope on Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran offers an insightful look at the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, sparked by the tragic murder of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the “morality police” for violating hijab rules. Beyond its feminist undertones and the remarkable courage of the young protesters, what sets this uprising apart from previous ones is the abundant and diverse art it has inspired. This book, rather than merely analyzing the artworks that garnered attention on social media platforms, brings to light lesser-known grassroots artistic movements that played a crucial role within their immediate local communities. Engaging with primarily Iran-based artists, it uncovers their role in shaping guerrilla interventions and street occupations and in articulating distinct forms of peaceful civil disobedience. By drawing on a broad spectrum of historical and theoretical sources, this book further reveals the origins and inspirations of Iran's protest art. Focusing mainly on the interconnections between the public sphere, women's bodies, and feminist viewpoints, Women, Art, Freedom underscores the vital role of artists in championing global justice and equality.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (Princeton UP, 2024) by Michael A. Cook This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. It then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the key military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.At the same time, A History of the Muslim World contains numerous primary-source quotations that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past. Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (Princeton), A Brief History of the Human Race, and The Koran: A Very Short Introduction. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire', or more simply as the Raj. It was the British Empire's crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world's population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire', and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Himalayas. And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division. Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins and HarperCollins India, 2025) by Sam Dalrymple, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches. Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made. Dalrymple's stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

A vivid and intricate study of dance music traditions that reveals the many contradictions of being Syrian in the 21st century Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research, Shayna M. Silverstein shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (Wesleyan UP, 2024) situates dabke politically, economically, and historically in a broader account of expressive culture in Syria's recent (and ongoing) turmoil. Silverstein shows how people imagine the Syrian nation through dabke, how the state has coopted it, how performances of masculinity reveal--and play with--the tensions and complexities of the broader social imaginary, how forces opposed to the state have used it resistively, and how migrants and refugees have reimagined it in their new homes in Europe and the United States. She offers deeply thoughtful reflections on the ethnographer's ethical and political dilemmas on fieldwork in an authoritarian state. Silverstein's study ultimately questions the limits of authoritarian power, considering the pleasure and play intrinsic to dabke circles as evidence for how performance cultures sustain social life and solidify group bonds while reproducing the societal divides endemic to Syrian authoritarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete's temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which transformed his thinking and led him to forge ties with political groups and like-minded scholars. Said's subsequent writings, which cast light on the interplay between cultural representation and the exercise of Western political power, caused a seismic shift in scholarly circles and beyond. In this intimate intellectual biography, by a close friend and confidant, Nubar Hovsepian offers fascinating insight into the evolution of Said's political thought. Through analysis of Said's seminal works and the debates surrounding them, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) traces the influence of Foucault on Said, and how Said eventually diverged from this influence to arrive at a more pronounced understanding of agency, resistance, and liberation. He consequently affiliated more closely with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and more contemporaneously, with his friends the late Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Said held that it is the intellectual's responsibility to expose lies and deceptions of the holders of power. A passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, his solidarity did not prevent him from launching a sustained critique of the Palestinian leadership. Hovsepian charts both Said's engagement with the Palestinian national movement and his exchanges with a host of intellectuals over Palestine, arguing that Said's interventions have succeeded in changing the parameters of the discourse in the humanities, and among younger Jews searching for political affiliation. Drawing on his diaries, in which he recorded his meetings with Said, as well as access to some of Said's private letters, Hovsepian illuminates, in rich detail, the trajectory of Said's political thinking and the depth and breadth of his engagement with peers and critics over issues that continue to resonate to this day. Nubar Hovsepian is associate professor emeritus of political science at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is the author of Palestinian State Formation: Education and the Construction of National Identity, and he edited and contributed to The War on Lebanon. Hovsepian has devoted enormous time to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and served, from 1982 to 1984, as political affairs officer for the United Nations Conference on the Question of Palestine. Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Iran presents one of the most significant foreign policy challenges for America and the West, yet very little is known about what the country's goals really are. Vali Nasr examines Iran's political history in new ways to explain its actions and ambitions on the world stage, showing how, behind the veneer of theocracy and Islamic ideology, today's Iran is pursuing a grand strategy aimed at securing the country internally and asserting its place in the region and the world.Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, and original in-depth interviews with Iranian decision makers, Nasr brings to light facts and events in Iran's political history that have been overlooked until now. He traces the roots of Iran's strategic outlook to its experiences over the past four decades of war with Iraq in the 1980s and the subsequent American containment of Iran, invasion of Iraq in 2003, and posture toward Iran thereafter. Nasr reveals how these experiences have shaped a geopolitical outlook driven by pervasive fear of America and its plans for the Middle East.Challenging the notion that Iran's foreign policy simply reflects its revolutionary values or theocratic government, Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History (Princeton UP, 2025) provides invaluable new insights into what Iran wants and why, explaining the country's resistance to the United States, its nuclear ambitions, and its pursuit of influence and proxies across the Middle East. Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He served as the eighth Dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS between 2012 and 2019  and served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011. He has written a number of books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He has advised senior American policymakers, world leaders, and businesses, including the President, Secretary of State, senior members of the Congress, and presidential campaigns. He has written for New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others. Professor Nasr serves as the co-director of the SAIS Rethinking Iran Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, sits on the board of a number of academic institutions, has won a number of prominent grants, and holds a chair named after Henry Kissinger at the library of Congress. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book recommendations: The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Nicole F. Watts's Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan (NYU Press, 2025) is a harrowing portrait of Iraqi Kurdistan and its history, as it weathers Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurds, a civil war, the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the sustained neglect of the city of Halabja. Watts, a former journalist and now professor of political science, has spent over a decade researching the struggles of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and in vivid, lyrical prose, she tells their story through the eyes of Peshawa, a young Muslim Kurd whose family barely survived the bombing and then fled for their lives.Throughout the book, the thread of Peshawa's story immerses readers in the everyday and extraordinary world of Iraqi Kurds between the late 1980s and 2022, exploring the meaning of home and dislocation in the wake of war and genocide.Based on over a hundred in-depth interviews with Iraqi Kurdish activists, journalists, elected officials, and community organizers, and hundreds of hours of conversations with Peshawa and his family, Republic of Dreams brings to vivid life the story of modern Kurdistan, and the Kurdish national dream to have their own homeland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Children's picture books are some of the most transparently ideological materials available to parents and educators, and as cultural objects they are an expression of the zeitgeist of a particular era. They reveal much about the hopes, values, and aspirations of the society that produces them, as well as that society's vision of its place in the wider world at large.Children's Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society (AUC Press, 2025) by Dr. Yasmine Motawy examines a new wave of Egyptian picture books that was published in the current century to see how these books responded to larger societal trends and transformations in Egypt, as well as to explore the ideologies that lie behind them. Dr. Motawy argues that a host of factors, including the growth of gated communities and international schooling, the proliferation of lucrative literary awards, returning Gulf migrants, television dramas, and nationwide reading advocacy initiatives helped give rise to a new kind of children's picture book in Egypt.Dr. Motawy focuses on three clusters of selected picture books to investigate the extent to which these books reproduce hegemonic discourses or, alternatively, open up new horizons of childhood agency and societal transformation. The first cluster includes books that directly socialize the child by showing them ‘how things are done,' in both the domestic sphere and the increasing globalized spaces that children frequent with their families. The second cluster aims at reframing cultural notions around femininity through the retelling of folk and fairy tales, while the third cluster addresses children's abilities to assess the impact of their actions on their environment, and invites them to examine their personal suitability to positions of power and stewardship. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia (Stanford UP, 2024) offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents--hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often excluded from histories of this region--Laura Frances Goffman demonstrates how the Gulf and its Arabian hinterland served as a buffer zone between "diseased" India and white Europe, as a space of scientific translation, and, ultimately, as an object of development. In placing health at the center of political and social change, this book weaves the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula into global circulations of commodities and movements of people. As a collection of institutions and infrastructures, pursuits of health created shifting boundaries of rule between imperial officials, indigenous elites, and local populations. As a set of practices seeking to manipulate the natural world, health policies compelled scientists and administrators to categorize fluid populations and ambiguous territorialities. And, as a discourse, health facilitated notions of racial difference, opposing native uncleanliness to white purity and hygiene, and indigenous medicine to modern science. Disorder and Diagnosis examines how Gulf residents, through their engagements with health, fiercely contested and actively shaped state and societal interactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Sara Hillman, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and English at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Tazin and Sara discuss Qatar's multilingual ecology and its Linguistic Landscape, focusing on Sara's research on the emergence of Mandarin in Qatar amidst the interaction of multiple languages. Hillman, S., & Zhao, J. (2025). ‘Panda diplomacy' and the subtle rise of a Chinese language ecology in Qatar. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 46(1), 45-65. The conversation delves into the socio-political background that contextualizes the visibility of Mandarin in Qatari public spaces and education. Sara explains the impact of diplomatic relations and economic interactions that impact cultural exchange and accompanying language use. She also tells us about the use of other languages that serve as strategies for intercultural communication. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In the last third of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between totalizing doctrines—nationalist, Marxist, and religious—and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence and a widespread sense of malaise, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, injustice, failed development, and successive defeats by Israel. The foundational account of these responses, Contemporary Arab Thought illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab also connects Arab debates to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions. Since its first publication in 2009, this book has stood as the foremost account of contemporary Arab debates on culture, philosophy, modernity, tradition, identity, and liberation. It is widely used in Middle Eastern studies courses, and it has become a classic in the field of Arab intellectual history. Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia UP, 2025) now features an extensive new introduction that reconsiders post-1967 Arab intellectual history in light of the 2011 uprisings and the upheavals that have occurred over the intervening years. Kassab critically reflects on the book's arguments and the responses it has provoked, and she surveys the new preoccupations that have emerged in Arab debates since 2011. As crises again overtake the Middle East, this landmark work continues to offer indispensable insight into the richness of contemporary Arab thought. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is associate professor of philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Her books include Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (Columbia, 2019). The Arabic edition of Contemporary Arab Thought received the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Dave Margoshes' novel, A Simple Carpenter (Radiant Press, 2024)—which recently won a Saskatchewan Book Award and the Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Set in the early and mid-‘80s in the Middle East, A Simple Carpenter plays out against a backdrop of strife in Lebanon and ethnic/religious tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. This historical backdrop serves as an empathetic and thoughtful commentary on our modern political climate. Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, A Simple Carpenter follows the epic journey of a ship's carpenter stranded on a small Mediterranean island and visited by a frightening mysterious creature. He's lost his memory but has acquired the ability to speak, write and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later in Beirut he's hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for a group named Black September. On a quest to find his true identity he travels on foot across the hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange and magical communities evoking biblical times along the way. More about Dave Margoshes: Dave Margoshes is a Saskatoon-area poet and fiction writer. He began his writing life as a journalist, working as a reporter and editor on a number of daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and has taught journalism​ and creative writing​.He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies, in Canada and beyond, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes; he's been nominated for the Journey Prize​ several times and was a finalist in 2009. His Bix's Trumpet and Other Stories won two prizes at the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year. He also won the Poetry Prize in 2010 for Dimensions of an Orchard. His collection of linked short stories, A Book of Great Worth, was named one of Amazon. CA's Top Hundred Books of 2012. Other prizes include the City of Regina Writing Award, twice; the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry in 1996 and the John V. Hicks Award for fiction in 2001. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

A beautiful and compelling family memoir retracing the love story between Sabrin Hasbun's Palestinian father and Italian mother, and the life of her half-Italian, half-Palestinian family from the 1960s to 2020. After the loss of her mother, Sabrin tries to renegotiate her mixed identity and understand her mother's choices which led her from an oppressive childhood in a village in Tuscany to finding love and community activism in Palestine. This is a story about overcoming grief and what it means to lose not only loved ones, but also a place in the world and a sense of belonging. Sabrin Hasbun was born in Palestine, spent her childhood in Palestine and Italy, and now lives in the UK. She holds a PHD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and lectures in Creative Writing at Cardiff Met University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

A new history of Middle East oil and the deep roots of American violence in Iraq. Iraq has been the site of some of the United States' longest and most sustained military campaigns since the Vietnam War. Yet the origins of US involvement in the country remain deeply obscured--cloaked behind platitudes about advancing democracy or vague notions of American national interests. Historian Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt's work, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2021) exposes the origins and deep history of U.S. intervention in Iraq. The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy weaves together histories of Arab nationalists, US diplomats, and Western oil execs to tell the parallel stories of the Iraq Petroleum Company and the resilience of Iraqi society. Drawing on new evidence--the private records of the IPC, interviews with key figures in Arab oil politics, and recently declassified US government documents--Wolfe-Hunnicutt covers the arc of the 20th century, from the pre-WWI origins of the IPC consortium and decline of British Empire, to the beginnings of covert US action in the region, and ultimately the nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry and perils of postcolonial politics. American policymakers of the Cold War-era inherited the imperial anxieties of their British forebears and inflated concerns about access to and potential scarcity of oil, giving rise to a "paranoid style" in US foreign policy. Wolfe-Hunnicutt deconstructs these policy practices to reveal how they fueled decades of American interventions in the region and shines a light on those places that America's covert empire-builders might prefer we not look. Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and American Foreign policy at California State University, Stanislaus. Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in World History from James Madison University, where he currently works as an administrative staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Since 9/11 there has been a cultural and political blossoming among those of the Afghan diaspora, especially in the United States, revealing a vibrant, active, and intellectual Afghan American community. And the success of Khaled Hosseni's The Kite Runner, the first work of fiction written by an Afghan American to become a bestseller, has created interest in the works of other Afghan American writers. One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) (or "Afsanah, Seesaneh," the Afghan equivalent of "once upon a time") collects poetry, fiction, essays, and selections from two blogs from thirty-three men and women--poets, fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers and video artists, photographers, community leaders and organizers, and diplomats. Some are veteran writers, such as Tamim Ansary and Donia Gobar, but others are novices and still learning how to craft their own "story," their unique Afghan American voice. The fifty pieces in this rich anthology reveal journeys in a new land and culture. They show people trying to come to grips with a life in exile, or they trace the migration maps of parents. They navigate the jagged landscape of the Soviet invasion, the civil war of the 1990s and the rise of the Taliban, and the ongoing American occupation  Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based creator and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Reading Mohamed Choukri's Narratives: Hunger in Eden (Routledge, 2024) presents an intricate exploration into the life and literary universe of Mohamed Choukri, a towering figure in 20th-century Moroccan literature. Known primarily for his groundbreaking autobiographical work “al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī” (For Bread Alone), Choukri's literary influence extends well beyond this single work. Reading Mohamed Choukri's Narratives seeks to cast a light on his broader body of work, examining the cultural, societal, and personal influences that shaped his unique storytelling style. Through a deep analysis of his narratives, this book aims to unfold how Choukri portrayed the harsh realities he and others encountered, giving voice to the marginalized individuals and communities in Morocco. In this episode, Jonas Elbousty guides us into the profound world of Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri. Together, we explore Choukri's intimate portrayal of Tangier's marginalized voices and the intricate process of translating his evocative prose into English. Elbousty sheds light on Choukri's lesser-known works, revealing the enduring impact of his storytelling. This conversation offers a deep dive into the complexities of language, identity, and the transformative power of literature. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The Silk Road may be the most famous trade network in history. But the flow of silk from China to the Middle East and Europe isn't the only textile trade that's made its mark on Central Asia, the subject of Chris Aslan's latest book Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia (Icon Books, 2024), recently published in paperback. Drawing on over a decade's worth of experience in countries like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Aslan notes that there's really three “roads”: In addition to the famed Silk Road, there's also the Wool Road, tied to nomads across Central Asia, and the Cotton Road, a modern-day source of economic growth–and environmental damage. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Unravelling the Silk Road. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The Birthplace of Jesus Is in Palestine: A Memoir (Wipf and Stock, 2024) is a narrative of a Christian family in Bethlehem in the West Bank. Based on diary entries and interviews from 2000 to 2023, the Dutch author--an anthropologist and peace activist--chronicles the spontaneous reactions of his Palestinian children and wife navigating the challenges posed by curfews and checkpoints. Problems of Palestinian school life are shown from the perspective of teachers and students. Against the background of Israeli occupation and settlement building, the intricacies of Palestinian culture in its daily rhythms and domestic spaces come to life. Throughout the pages, the key Palestinian concept of sumud, or steadfastness, is explored. The memoir details acts of creative nonviolent resistance, individual protests, affirmations of cultural identity, and inspiring examples of Muslim-Christian community. The book also reveals unexpected connections between Palestinian culture in the Bethlehem area and broader Christian values and traditions. An afterword reflects upon implications of Israel's war in Gaza. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Emotion lies at the heart of all national movements, and Zionism is no exception. For those who identify as Zionist, the word connotes liberation and redemption, uniqueness and vulnerability. Yet for many, Zionism is a source of distaste if not disgust, and those who reject it are no less passionate than those who embrace it. The power of such emotions helps explain why a word originally associated with territorial aspiration has survived so many years after the establishment of the Israeli state.Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers UP, 2023) expertly demonstrates how the energy propelling the Zionist project originates from bundles of feeling whose elements have varied in volume, intensity, and durability across space and time. Beginning with an original typology of Zionism and a new take on its relationship to colonialism, Penslar then examines the emotions that have shaped Zionist sensibilities and practices over the course of the movement's history. The resulting portrait of Zionism reconfigures how we understand Jewish identity amidst continuing debates on the role of nationalism in the modern world. Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, where he was in inaugural holder of the Stanley Lewis Chair in Modern Israel Studies. Penslar has published a dozen books, most recently Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. Penslar is a past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

This is the first Syriac reader for the New Testament. It guides the reader through the Syriac New Testament Peshitta, glossing the uncommon words and parsing difficult word forms. It is designed for two groups of people. First, for students learning Syriac after a years' worth of study this series provides the material to grow in reading ability from the primary texts. Second, this series is designed for scholars, linguists, theologians, and curious lay people looking to refresh their Syriac, or use them in preparation for their work of study, and teaching. The Syriac Peshiṭta Bible: The New Testament (Gorgias Press, 2023) immerses the reader in the biblical texts in order to build confidence reading Classical Syriac as quickly as possible. To achieve this, all uncommon words that occur fewer than 25 times in the Syriac New Testament are glossed as footnotes. This enables the beginner or intermediate student to continue reading every passage unhindered. Therefore, this book complements traditional language grammars and is especially ideal for beginner and intermediate students learning to read Syriac. However, even advanced readers will appreciate the glossing of the occasional rare word. Other features include: Maps from the New Testament period with Syriac place names Paradigm charts of Syriac nouns and verbs A glossary of all the words not glossed below the text The base text is the Antioch Bible which includes the Peshitta for the canonical Syriac books, and later translations (probably Philoxenian) for the rest which makes this ideal for readers. For listeners who are interested in buying this tool for themselves, Gorgias has offered a 10% discount code for listeners of this podcast through the end of May 2025. If you order through the Gorgias website, simply enter the discount code NBNNTR10% at checkout. The book can be purchased from Gorgias here. A preview of the book can be found here. Timothy A. Lee is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on textual criticism of the Greek and Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical interpretation, ancient history, and theology. Some of his work is published in journals such as Revue de Qumran, Textus, the Journal of Septuagint and Cognate Studies, and Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. He has three previous degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Durham. Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford UP, 2020) by Todd Reisz is a critical historical account of Dubai's transformation into a global urban spectacle. Reisz examines how architecture, master planning, and international expertise contributed to the construction of Dubai's modern image, focusing particularly on the period between the 1950s and 1970s. Rather than narrating Dubai's development as a spontaneous miracle of oil wealth, Reisz reveals it as a meticulously crafted project, shaped by deliberate strategies to project modernity, power, and cosmopolitanism. Throughout the book, Reisz uses a wide range of archival materials, planning documents, interviews, and visual sources to trace how architecture and city-making became tools of governance and spectacle. He brings attention to the invisible labor—both technical and physical—that undergirded Dubai's rise. Yet, the workers, planners, and advisors often remain shadowy figures behind the gleaming facades they helped erect. One of the key figures Reisz highlights is British architect John Harris, whose firm was commissioned in the 1960s to create Dubai's first master plan. Harris's work embodied the desire to modernize without entirely erasing local culture. Yet, as Reisz notes, the imported modernist language of architecture often clashed with, or simply overrode, traditional urban forms. Dubai's early building boom was thus a hybrid project: shaped by Western notions of progress and functionality, but executed in a Gulf context where colonial histories and local aspirations intertwined. Importantly, Showpiece City challenges narratives that paint Dubai as either a rootless fantasy or a neoliberal dystopia. Reisz treats Dubai's history seriously, demonstrating that its urban form is the result of pragmatic decisions, diplomatic negotiations, and speculative gambles rather than mere vanity. He also critiques the romanticization of "traditional" Arab cities by showing that Gulf urbanism has long been dynamic, experimental, and globally connected. Showpiece City presents Dubai's urbanization not as an inevitable product of oil wealth or as a superficial extravagance, but as a complex, calculated project of image-making and infrastructural ambition. Reisz's work contributes to Middle Eastern urban studies by insisting that cities like Dubai deserve nuanced, historically grounded analysis rather than simplistic dismissals or celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2025) analyzes biblical and rabbinic texts, philosophical treatises, studies of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and a multiplicity of modern expressions for a comprehensive history of Jewish responses to and justifications of their diasporas. It shows that Diaspora Jews through the ages insisted that God joined them in their exiles, that "Zion" was found in Babylon and Eastern Europe, and that, as citizens of the world, Jews could only live throughout the world. The result is a convincing assertion that lament has not been the most common Jewish response to diaspora and that Zionism is not the natural outcome of either Jewish ideology or history. David Kraemer is Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he has also served as Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics for many years. As Librarian, he is at the helm of the most extensive collection of Judaica-rare and contemporary-in the Western hemisphere. He is the author of several books on Rabbinic Judaism and its texts, the social and religious history of Jews in antiquity, and Jewish rituals and their development. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines a poetic movement that rose from under official state discourse in 1970s Syria Closely examines a wealth of unknown primary poetic texts from Syria that make up a new poetics which challenges received ideas about modern Arabic poetry Rereads along transnational lines the works of famous Arabo-Syrian poets such as Nizār Qabbānī and Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ Offers a substantial rethinking of key terms in comparative literary studies — translation, translatability, vernacular —as seen through the lens of everyday poetics Describes the institutional culture of poetry translations in Syria and analyses the modes of circulation by which translations pollinated original works Expands the scope of postcolonial poetry in the globalised age by factoring in relationships between first-, second-, and third-world literary cultures This book distinguishes a Syrian style of qaṣīdat nathr (prose poem) as a piece of collaborative performance called shafawiyya, vernacularised poetic speech. It describes the poetic lineages, stretching from early Syrian independence to the 21st century, whose task it was to bring poetic expression closer to everyday life.

These poets are shown cultivating genres and translational practices rooted in a plebeian civilian identity that counters both heroised images of the prophet-poet and stern authoritarian rule. A comparative analysis is provided to understand shafawiyya poetics as a transnational mode of creative engagement. This analysis includes aesthetic affinities and instances of transmission between Arabic poetry and poetries written in formerly Soviet countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria). From this vantage point, matters of perennial debate in comparative literature - vernacular, translatability, postcolonial poetry - are shown from a new perspective.

The book closely examines a wealth of unknown primary poetic texts from Syria that make up the new poetics and challenge received ideas about modern Arabic poetry. It describes the institutional culture of poetry translations in Syria and analyses the modes of circulation by which translations pollinated original works. Behar rereads the works of famous Arabo-Syrian poets such as Nizār Qabbānī and Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ along transnational lines, offering a substantial rethinking of the key terms in comparative literary studies as seen through the lens of everyday poetics. Daniel Behar is Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interested in comparative analysis of modern Arabic poetry, theories of translation, and socialist literary imaginaries in Syria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Rav Kook's Vision: Halakhah, Secular Knowledge, and the Renewal of Judaism. Those of us who know something about Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook's life and philosophy know about his being stuck outside of the Land of Israel during WWI, being the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, and his encouragement of the secular Zionists who turned swamps into vegetation. But not many of us have analyzed the personal notebooks that the Rav left, commonly known as Shemonah Kevatzim (eight collections). Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Professor Marc B. Shapiro author of the acclaimed new book, Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook (Littman Library, 2025). Our conversation ranged from the philosophical underpinnings of Rav Kook's thought to its relevance for modern Orthodoxy and contemporary Jewish life. Using the notebooks and other information Marc B. Shapiro's Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New offers a window into the philosophical heart of Rav Kook's approach to halakhah and secular knowledge, using Rav Kook's own words to illuminate his radical, yet deeply rooted, vision for modern Judaism. I found it important to use those words and quotes when discussing the topic with Professor Shapiro. Rav Kook's words speak volumes – and you'll hear them throughout the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies