Middle East Monitor Conversations

Join us in our discussion with Professor Philip Wood on medieval Arab Christian political thought and his book the Imam of the Christians. Philip Wood is Tejpar Professor of Inter-religious studies at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. He is also Head of Education for the MA programme in Muslim cultures.He is a historian of the Middle East, and focuses on the experience of Christians in the early Middle ages (roughly 500-900). His most recent monograph, The Imam of the Christians. The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre (750-850) (Princeton, 2021) considers the experience of Christians under the Abbasid caliphate. He is also interested in contemporary discussions of social integration and religious education, and he has recently published an edited volume on theory and method with Leif Stenberg, entitled What is Islamic Studies?: European and North American Approaches to a Contested Field (Edinburgh, 2022).

Join us for a conversation with Justin Stearns as he tells us about his work on 17th century Morocco, the history of the natural sciences and medicine before colonisation and the state of archives in the Arab World. Justin Stearns received his BA in English and History from Dartmouth College in 1998, and his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2007. He is Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi.  His research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. His first book was a comparative intellectual history of Muslim and Christian understanding of contagion, especially in the context of the plague, entitled Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). His book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco entitled Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Early Modern Morocco (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2021, and the first volume of his edition and translation of al-Yusi’s (d. 1102/1691) Discourses appeared with the Library of Arabic Literature in 2020. He is currently working on the second volume of The Discourses and together with a group of students is engaged in a long-term project to establish a searchable database of all catalogued Moroccan manuscripts. 

MEMO spoke to the Executive Director of Muslim Aid Sweden, Mehmet Kaplan, about the relief efforts on the ground in Turkiye following the deadly earthquakes that rocked the country and neighbouring Syria on 6 February 2023

Join us for a conversation with Hassan Al Kontar, a Syrian refugee who became a Canadian citizen after making headlines around the world in 2018 when he was stranded in Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur International Airport for seven months. Hassan will discuss his experiences in navigating his unique challenges and provide an insight into the common Syrian refugee experience over a decade on from the start of the Syria war. Hasan is the author of 'Man@the_Airport: How Social Media Saved My Life—One Syrian's Story'.

MEMO speaks to Ross Caputi about the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the siege of Fallujah and building an oral history archive made up of Iraqi voices and stories. Caputi served in the US marine corps and was stationed in Iraq, but grew disillusioned with the war and became an anti-war activist. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Department of History in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is also helping to build an archive made up of Iraqi testimonies and memories and is the author of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History.  

Sufi movements in Iran: MEMO speaks to Seema Golestaneh who is an assistant professor at Cornell University in the department of Near East Studies. We discuss Dr Golestaneh's new book 'Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran' which looks at the social and material life of gnosis (ma'arifat) for disparate Sufi communities in Iran. We also discuss the situation of Sufis in Iran today and the politics around different movements. 

In December 2022, the United Nations' general assembly passed a resolution asking the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the legality of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.  MEMO speaks to Hugh Lovatt about whether this is a major milestone and what we can expect from this. Hugh Lovatt is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Lovatt has focussed extensively on regional geopolitics and advised European policymakers on the conflicts in Israel-Palestine and Western Sahara. He is regularly interviewed and quoted in international media, including by the New York Times, BBC, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, AFP, Le Monde, France24, and Al Jazeera. 

MEMO talks to Al Jazeera's correspondent in the West Bank Nida Ibrahim about her journey into journalism, covering Palestine and the killing of her colleague Shireen Abu Akleh.   

MEMO caught up with Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi to discuss the new Israeli government, doing comedy in Arabic, English and Hebrew and going viral on Arabic-language social media. Born to an Iranian-Jewish mother and Romanian Jewish father and raised in Neve Shalom/Wahat As-Salam or the 'Oasis of Peace', a community in Jerusalem where Jews and Palestinians live together by choice, Noam grew up speaking Arabic.  She attended the New York Film Academy,  Brandies and Harvard School of Divinity.  An activist who has worked in Rwanda and Palestine, Noam was the co-founder of Interpeace. She toured the United States with her own 1-woman comedy show and was the subject of an Al Jazeera documentary. 

MEMO met up with Dr Suja Sawafta to discuss granting Palestinians permission to narrate their history through popular culture and Nexflix's recent offering Farha.Sawafta is an Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. She is currently working on her first book project which examines the impact of exile, intellectual commitment and political dissent in the works of the formative Saudi-Iraqi novelist Abdulrahman Munif. She teaches interdisciplinary content courses on literature and cinema as well as Arabic and French language.