New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities otherwise deemed marginal in historical scholarship: the Jazira region, the borderlands of today’s Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; the mobile peoples within this region, from nomadic pastoralists to deportees and refugees; and locusts. Sam Dolbee’s research traces the movements of people and insects within this region, and how the social “problem” of mobile peoples and the environmental problem of pests were conflated in the eyes of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman states. Following the path of the locust across this region reveals how the desert of the Jazira and its inhabitants were bordered, transformed by, and participated in both environmental and political projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth by documenting how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. In Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024) shows, Wind argues that Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful exposé of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Rachel Z. Feldman discusses the rise of the messianic Third Temple movement and its global impact, especially through technology. They delve into the complexities of religious nationalism, the fusion of secular and religious Zionism, and the influence of messianic visions on Israeli society. The podcast also explores the connection between the Third Temple movement and Israeli state interests, as well as its influence on Christian communities and the emergence of a new Judaic faith known as Noahides.

The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. In Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition (Brill, 2023), Robert Jones analyzes how Israel's priestly institutions are represented in these writings, and he demonstrates that they are essential for understanding the Jewish priesthood at this crucial stage in its history. 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 this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023).In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions. 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 Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba?Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical postwar period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia UP, 2024) unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice.Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Reading Across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (2012), as well as coeditor of The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (2021), Rafa Nasiri: Artist Books (2016), and Archives, Museums, and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Today I talked to James Montgomery, one of the translators of The Philosopher Responds: An Intellectual Correspondence from the Tenth Century, two volumes (NYU Press, 2019 and 2022). About the book: Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī to the philosopher and historian Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century.The correspondence between al-Tawḥīdī and Miskawayh holds a mirror to many of the debates of the time and reflects the spirit of rationalistic inquiry that animated their era. It also provides insight into the intellectual outlooks of two thinkers who were divided as much by their distinctive temperaments as by the very different trajectories of their professional careers. Alternately whimsical and tragic, trivial and profound, al-Tawḥīdī's questions provoke an interaction as interesting in its spiritedness as in its content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Today I talked to Peter Hill about his new book Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (Oneworld Academic, 2024).In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together.By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.Peter Hill is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. His research focusses on political thought and practice, the politics of religion, and translation and intercultural exchanges. He also has a strong interest in comparative and global history.Before joining Northumbria University in 2019, Peter was Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has taught and designed modules in the history of the Middle East and global history, and the history of capitalism. In 2023 he was the winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.Peter's first book, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He has published several articles on translation, political thought and popular politics in the Middle East, in journals such as Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2024) is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi as well as those who want to incorporate Indian Ocean histories into their world history courses. Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow offer course design principles that will help students navigate topics ranging from empire, geography, slavery, and trade to mobility, disease, and the environment. In addition to exploring non-European sources and diverse historical methodologies, they discuss classroom pedagogy and provide curriculum possibilities that will help instructors at any level enrich and deepen standard approaches to world history. Alpers and McDow draw readers into strategically designing courses that will challenge students to think critically about a vast area with which many of them are almost entirely unfamiliar. Edward A. Alpers is an Emeritus Research Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014). Thomas F. McDow is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University and the author of Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2018). Scott Thomas Erich is the Howell Postdoctoral Research Associate in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. His current book project is Taming the Sea: Southeastern Arabia's Extractive Seascape c. 1820-present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies