New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

In The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966 (Syracuse University Press, 2015), Bryan K. Roby, fellow at the Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, traces the early history of Mizrahi struggle for equality and civil rights in Israel. Roby reexamines and destabilises our understandings of this period of Israeli history. This book is a highly original and compelling contribution that tells an unknown story of Mizrahi politicisation and rebellion that has ongoing consequences for contemporary political struggles in Israel/Palestine. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how did the Iranian revolution impact and shape Foucault’s thought? These are among the questions addressed by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in his exciting new book Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). This book presents an intimate portrait of the events and conditions that led to the revolution, coupled with a fascinating account of Foucault’s engagement with that moment. Historically rich and theoretically nuanced, Foucault in Iran advances a scathing critique of previous works on this subject that charged Foucault with having endorsed Islamist violence by supporting the revolution. This book offers a more complicated reading of Foucault’s views on the revolution that disrupts binaries like secular/Islamist while also providing a riveting analysis on questions of time, history, and revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Green, Professor of South Asian and Islamic history at UCLA, examines how these terrains of exchange transformed Islam during the modern period from roughly 1800-1940 in his book, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015). Green sees religion as a tool for social power and explores various religious economies to determine how interpretations of Islam are negotiated and deployed. What he shows is that modern iterations of the tradition are often shaped not only by Muslims, but also Christians and Hindus. In these sites of exchange religious actors and institutions can be analyzed as entrepreneurs and firms, which effectively compete for their clientele. Religious entrepreneurial competition and innovation fostered by Muslim/Christian interactions in imperial contexts contributed to the Muslims’ adaptation of Christian missionary methods for their own proselytization purposes. Overall, Green presents a world history of Islam that disrupts assertions of the unifying power of globalization on Muslims and illustrates the generative process within these terrains of exchange. In our conversation we discussed evangelical orientalism at England’s universities, Bibles and printing in Muslim societies, language-exchange, religious entrepreneurs in Hyderabad, traditions of Hindu-Sufism, and the construction of the first mosques in Detroit and Japan. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In his shining new book The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ahmed Ragab, Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Harvard Divinity School, charts the institutional and intellectual history of hospitals or bimaristans in medieval Egypt and the Levant. A central argument of this book is that hospitals in Islamdom were more than just institutions where the sick were treated; hospitals also served as important sites of communal services and congregation, as urban architectural monuments, and as symbols and expressions of a rulers political authority. By exploring an astonishing variety and number of sources, Ragab provides an unparalleled window into the aspirations and operations that defined the medieval Islamic hospital. This splendid new book will be of great interest to students of medieval Islamic history, religion and science, medical history, and the study of Islam and religion more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Sephardi Jews with roots in the Ottoman Empire who sought citizenship within European nations for a variety of reasons, including socio-economic mobility and political refuge. While analyzing complex legal systems and the ways in which different nations viewed their extraterritorial subjects, Abrevaya Stein never loses site of the individual experiences of Jewish men and women. Indeed, by offering a series of case studies that range from Salonica during the Balkans War to 1930s Shanghai and Baghdad, she demonstrates how questions over citizenship and status were often determined by local politics and personalities and could lead to vastly different fates for these Jewish “proteges.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, an internationally recognized award given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to a photographer who has demonstrated great originality working in the documentary vein. Through images created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observers gaze under conditions of occupation. These photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state– and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a “suspect.” The work is both transgressive and banal, crossing boundaries between Israel and Palestine, wanted and innocent, street photography and surveillance imagery. Kratsman has also provoked vital, long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their “fate.” His complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer as we follow the gaze of both occupier and occupied within a complex web of power relations around issues of life and death. Supported with thought-provoking text by Ariella Azoulay, she looks at various models of historical and civil construction of the gaze and explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman’s photographed persons and frames both individuals and the borrowed time within which they exist. Miki Kratsman was born in Argentina and emigrated to Israel in 1971. He worked as a photojournalist for Hadashot and Ha’aretz until 2012. A photo educator for a number of years, Mr. Kratsman has taught at the Camera Obscura College of Photography and the School for Geographic Photography of Tel Aviv as well as in the Department of Art in Haifa University, he was also the head of the photography department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design until 2014, when he retired. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points out in his excellent new book Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015) they often got it right, despite their “Orientalist” prejudices. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and most readable account of the Crusades relying on Islamic sources. Cobb expands the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Crusades by placing traditional conflicts within Muslim accounts of Frankish aggression. In general, medieval Muslims were not overly concerned with Europe and ongoing relationships between Christians and Muslims only really existed in the Mediterranean context. European expansion into Muslim lands throughout the Middle Ages marked a different phase of encounter,but these incursions were not always clearly demarcated by religious boundaries. Cobb illustrates the often competing logic behind political alliances, military aggression and intervention, or discursive justification. The Race for Paradise does a wonderful job of presenting the narrative in a new light and dissolving many of the assumptions about pre-modern conflicts that have been produced by one-sided accounts of the Crusades. In our conversation we discussed the Frankish conquests, the significance of Jerusalem, Mediterranean Muslims communities, Arabic sources, notions of jihad, Frankish rule in the Levant, Saladin and his political heirs, thinking about the Crusades today, and making an audio book. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism, Beirut’s plurality of time was less an exception than it was a quandary to later advocates who aimed to organize time along geographical lines. In The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), Vanessa Ogle excavates 19th century movements to reform and standardize time: summer time, calendar time, time zones, religious time, and national time among others. Ogle questions the inevitability of 21st century time, demonstrating that it was the object of active creation for nearly two centuries prior. The rise of nationalism, the consolidation of colonial practice, along with autonomous religious reform movements simultaneously gave rise to, and were in turn, molded by advocacy focused on time. New communications technologies, such as the telegraph, and time-keeping devices, such as city clock towers, similarly served as the infrastructure around which time-keeping debates became organized. Written as a historical account, time becomes a central character in this book: casting a common lens over otherwise disconnected places and people, raising controversy, and shifting between the center and the periphery of a broader story of 19th century transformation. Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science and technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

From his modest beginnings in southern Iran, the Persian king Cyrus II went on to conquer three of the dominant kingdoms of the ancient Near East those of the Medians, the Lydians, and the Babylonians and establish the first world empire. In Discovering Cyrus: The Persian Conqueror Astride the Ancient World (Mage Pub, 2013), Reza Zarghamee draws upon the available written sources and archaeological record to provide the first comprehensive biography of Cyrus written since the middle of the 19th century. In it he describes Cyrus’s background, the context for his rise to power, and the empire he built. By detailing the forces he used, the organization of his empire, and his relationship with various groups, Zarghamee provides us with a portrait of a bold conqueror and shrewd ruler who understood the effectiveness of cooperating with the local elites in conquered lands and who established a multicultural realm that would endure for the next two centuries and serve as a model for future empires. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies