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Michael Christopher Low received his PhD from Columbia University in 2015. He is the director of the University of Utah's Middle East Center and his primary research and teaching interests include the Ottoman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean world, and environmental history. He is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020) which in 2021 won the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Book Award.Connect with Michael
Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University, where he has taught since 1991, a Fellow of St Antony's College and Director of the Middle East Centre. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is author of The Arabs: A History (2009, 2017), named a best book of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His new book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (2015), was named a best book of 2015 by The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. His earlier works include Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1999), for which he received the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Fuad Köprülü Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; and The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, second edition 2007, with Avi Shlaim). His works are translated into 18 languages.
Gillian Mosely (Film Director and Producer) joins Dr Anne Irfan, Professor Eugene Rogan and our Middle East Centre webinar audience to talk about her documentary film, The Tinderbox - Israel and Palestine: time to call time? Dr Anne Irfan (Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford) and Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony’s College, Oxford). Extract from British Council Film website: Knowledge is power, but lack of knowledge keeps power where politicians want it... From BAFTA-award-winning producer Gillian Mosely, in association with multi-award winners, Spring Films (NIGHT WILL FALL, THE ACT OF KILLING), THE TINDERBOX is a controversial, revealing, and timely new feature documentary exploring both sides of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It’s the first time the facts behind the divide have been brought to the screen in a single film, and delves deep into history, as well as hearing from contemporary Israeli and Palestinian voices. Exposing surprising, shocking and uncomfortable truths, not least for its Jewish director and onscreen investigator, this is an important film that will provide valuable context and help people make up their minds – or even change them. http://www.thetinderboxfilm.com A first-time director, Gillian Mosely began producing films in 1997, creating, developing, producing and exec producing a wide range of high end documentaries for Arte, BBC, Channel 4, Discovery, History, ITV, NatGeo, PBS and ZDF among others. In 2017 Gillian produced her first Feature Documentary: Manolo: the Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards (Netflix). TV films include “Ancient Egypt: Life and Death in the Valley of the Kings,” BBC2, and BAFTA, Royal Television Society and AIB award-winning “Mummifying Alan,” Channel 4, Discovery, NGCI. Dr Anne Irfan is Anne Irfan is Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration at the Refugee Studies Centre. She holds a Dual Master’s Degree from Columbia University and the LSE and a PhD from the LSE, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on the historical role of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Palestinian refugee camps. She previously taught at the University of Sussex and the LSE, and is an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. Anne’s research interests include global refugee history, UNRWA and Palestinian refugees, forced migration in the Middle East, the spatiality of refugee camps, and archival suppression. She is currently Co-Investigator on the British Academy-funded research project Borders, global governance and the refugee, examining the historical origins of the global refugee regime. In recent years, she has spoken at the UK Parliament in Westminster, and the UN Headquarters in New York and Geneva about the functions of the UNRWA regime and the exclusions facing Palestinian refugees from Syria. Anne’s work has been published in Journal of Refugee Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly and Forced Migration Review, as well as media outlets The Washington Post and The Conversation. Her article ‘Is Jerusalem international or Palestinian? Rethinking UNGA Resolution 181’ was named co-winner of the 2017 Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Best Essay on Jerusalem. She is currently working on a book about UNRWA’s institutional history. Professor Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford and Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College. He is author of The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920 (Penguin, 2015) which was named The Economist books of the year 2015 and The Sunday Times top ten bestseller; and The Arabs: A History (Penguin, 2009, 3rd edition 2018), which has been translated in 18 languages and was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His earlier works include Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1999), for which he received the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Fuad Köprülü Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, second edition 2007, with Avi Shlaim), which has been published in Arabic, French, Turkish and Italian editions; and Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2002).
This talk will look at how Arabs established a democratic government at Damascus in 1919-20 by forging a compromise between secular liberals, conservative Muslims, and leaders of non-Muslim communities as described in How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs. However, the Paris Peace Conference refused to recognize Arab democracy because it threatened British and French colonial rule in other Muslim countries. By authorizing the French army to occupy Damascus, the Conference destroyed not only the Syrian government, but also future prospects for Arab democracy. The book challenges previous understandings of the impact of World War I on the Middle East that focus on nationalism as the primary outcome. Not only did Arabs seek to revive liberal constitutionalism, but they also demonstrated a political sophistication that has been erased by colonizers. The events of 1920 tainted the new regime of international law under the League of Nations with racism and sparked the rise of anti-liberal Islamism. To view the accompanying presentation to this talk, please visit: https://cbrl.ac.uk/event/online-event-how-the-west-stole-democracy-from-the-arabs About the speaker: Elizabeth F. Thompson is Professor of history and the Mohamed Said Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at the American University in Washington, DC. Her new book is titled How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance. The book offer a new argument for the importance of the Syrian Arab Kingdom in the history of democracy and the rise of anti-liberal Islamism in the Arab world. Dr Thompson is also author of Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East and the prize-winning Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon. She has received fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is former co-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on the World War I in the Middle East. About the chair Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University, where he has taught since 1991, a Fellow of St Antony’s College and Director of the Middle East Centre. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is author of The Arabs: A History (2009, 2017), named a best book of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His new book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (2015), was named a best book of 2015 by The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. His earlier works include Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1999), for which he received the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Fuad Köprülü Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; and The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, second edition 2007, with Avi Shlaim). His works are translated into 18 languages.
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well. 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 academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (stareen@fandm.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well. 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 academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (stareen@fandm.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well. 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 academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (stareen@fandm.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well. 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 academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (stareen@fandm.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well. 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 academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (stareen@fandm.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well. 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 academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (stareen@fandm.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association...
Devastated Lands: Lebanon at the End of the Great War, 1918 The First World War had brought an unprecedented degree of loss and suffering to the people of Lebanon. This lecture examines through works of literature and eyewitness accounts how the people of Lebanon looked back on the Ottoman experience and their different expectations of the post-Ottoman world. Professor Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. He taught at Boston College and Sarah Lawrence College before taking up his post in Oxford in 1991, where he teaches the modern history of the Middle East. He is author of The Arabs: A History (Penguin, 2009), which has been translated in ten languages and was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. His earlier works include Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1999), for which he received the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the Fuad Köprülü Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, second edition 2007, with Avi Shlaim), which has been published in Arabic, French, Turkish and Italian editions; and Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2002). His latest book, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914 - 1920, was published in February 2015. CBRL hosted this lecture in partnership with the London Middle East Institute at SOAS and the British Lebanese Association as their Sir David Robert’s memorial Lecture.