New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

The Indian state of Kerala is one of the largest blocs of migrants in the oil economies of the Arab Gulf. Looking closely at the cultural archives produced by and on the Gulf migrants in Malayalam -- the predominant language of Kerala -- The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford UP, 2024) takes stock of circular migration beyond its economics. It combines formal and thematic analyses of photographs, films, and literature with anthropological and historical details to offer a nuanced understanding of the construction of the Gulf and its translation to the cultural imaginary of Kerala. It explores the dissonance between the private and public discourses on the Gulf among migrants and non-migrants, and demonstrates the role of this disjuncture in the continued fascination for Gulf migrant lives. An enquiry into the various dimensions of the Gulf in Kerala, as an acknowledged means of living, as a rumour, an object of gossip, a public secret, or even a private thrill, this book debunks the idea of language as a common entity and studies the tentative borders built within. Finally, it explores the resources, possibilities, and perils of affiliative communities constructed along and across those borders.Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is Associate Professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities, a constituent unit of Manipal Academy of Higher Education. His PhD was in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. He has numerous publications in academic and popular publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

This week, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Among other rhetorical aspects of the conflict, Goldberg reflects on the meaning of such slogans as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They also discuss the question whether Israel is committing genocide and what that means. Finally, the conversation addresses how the conflict might end, an especially appropriate question as the parties seem to be returning to the bargaining table in a serious way. 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 Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda (Syracuse UP, 2024), Maha AbdelMegeed offers a compelling and far-reaching alternative to the traditional mode of analyzing Arabic literature through an encounter between Arabic narrative forms and European ones. Drawing upon close engagements with the works of canonical authors from the period, including Hassan Husni al-Tuwayrani, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Ali Mubarak, Francis Marrash, and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, AbdelMegeed addresses not where these works emanate from but rather how and why they were drawn together to form a canon. In doing so, she rejects the expectation that these texts, through the trope of encounter, hold the explanatory key to modern Arabic literature.In this reformulation of Arabic literary history, AbdelMegeed argues that the canon is forged through an urgency to define a new form of political sovereignty and to make history visible. In doing so, she explores three pivotal concepts: the spectral (khayal), the trace (athar) and the collective (alnās). By examining the texts through these concepts, Literary Optics provides a remarkable intellectual history that delves into the aesthetic, philosophical, and political stakes of nineteenth-century Arabic literature.Maha AbdelMegeed is assistant professor of modern Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut. 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 evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire. Water on Fire: A Memoir of War (Other Press, 2024) tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence. Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College and was a Guggenheim Fellow (2021–22). Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies at the American University of Beirut, the University of Rochester, and Cornell University, he is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story.The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 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 their landmark new translation of the Qur’an, The Qur’an: A Verse Translation (LIveright, 2024), M. A. R. Habib and Bruce B. Lawrence translate the entirety of the Qur’an in a fashion that beautifully and majestically captures the poetic sensibility of the Qur’an for contemporary English speakers and readers. The distinctive feature of this Qur’an translation is its close attentiveness to the literary possibilities opened by the versification of the text and to the oral and aural capacities of the Qur’an, punctuated by its rhythmic qualities. This book also includes a very helpful glossary and appendix, as well as a deeply erudite account of the translation theory and thought process that went into the composition of this Qur’an translation. This powerful, mellifluous, and often dazzling translation is sure to alternatively jolt and energize the reader; it will also work as a great Qur’an translation in courses on various topics concerning Islam and Muslim societies.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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Palestinian writing imagines the nation, not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into a distinct set of formations. Novel Palestine examines these imaginative structures so that we might move beyond the idea of an incomplete or fragmented reality and speak frankly about the nation that exists and the freedom it seeks. In Novel Palestine: Nation Through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah (U California Press, 2023), Nora E. H. Parr traces a vocabulary through which Palestine can be discussed as a changing and flexible national network linking people across and within space, time, and community. Through an exploration of the Palestinian literary scene subsequent to its canonical writers, Parr makes the life and work of Nasrallah available to an English-language audience for the first time, offering an intervention in geography while bringing literary theory into conversation with politics and history.A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program, here.Nora E. H. Parr is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and at the Center for Lebanese Studies. She coedits Middle Eastern Literatures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Professor Arie Dubnov discusses the history and evolution of Zionism, highlighting its ideological currents, ties with British imperial thinkers, and the complexities of defining a Jewish state. The conversation explores cultural and political Zionism, utopian visions in 'Old New Land', post-1967 war evolution, and internal divisions in Israeli society.

The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2021), by Huda Fakhreddine, examines one of the most controversial poetic forms in Arabic: the Arabic prose poem. When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring, often described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle and even a conspiracy. This ‘new genre’ is here explored as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about the definition of an Arabic poem, its limits, and its relation to its readers. Huda Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated.Miguel Monteiro is a PhD Student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. miguel.monteiro@yale.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

Ahmed M. Abozaid’s Undesired Revolution: The Arab Uprising in Egypt--A Three Level Analysis (Brill, 2023) introduces new non-Western perspectives on the Arab Uprisings, decentering and decolonizing International Relations, and Middle Eastern Studies. Drawing on over ten years of fieldwork, ethnography, over 250 interviews, and empirical research, it is one of the first books to evaluate the position of International Relations theorists towards studying the Arab Uprisings. It relies on local IR scholarship from the region, which is rarely considered. It provides a critical account of why democratic revolutions have failed, how counterrevolutions and authoritarianism have fortified, and why revolutions will once again experience a resurgence in this part of the world.Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies