New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

Jonathan Lee’s comprehensive study of Afghanistan’s political history in Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present (Reaktion Books) tells the story of the emergence and sometimes surprising longevity of the Afghan state in the face of serious external and internal challenges over the last three centuries.Readers will find a compelling narrative and an important reference for different periods in Afghan history, not to mention a larger thread which looks at the definition (by others) and the introspective self-definition by Afghan rulers as the state developed over time.Finally, the book makes use of new insights from memoirs of Afghan officials, British and Indian office archives, and more recently released CIA reports and Wikileaks documents to understand the connections between past and present in contemporary Afghanistan. This book will be useful to diplomats, scholars, students, and anyone else interested in the history of Afghanistan.Jonathan L. Lee is a social and cultural historian and a leading authority on the history of Afghanistan.Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State 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

Jacob Mundy is associate professor of PCON at Colgate University He’s written a great book titled Libya, published in 2018 in Polity Presses' "Hot Spots in Global Politics" series. Jacob’s book is part-history, part-political science to guide readers through the intricate maze of foreign and Libyan actors and institutions that define modern day Libya.Mundy’s book is an accessible account of the complex political, security, and humanitarian crises that have engulfed Libya – Africa’s largest oil-exporting country – since the Arab Spring of 2011. His analysis centers on the roots of the anti-Gaddafi revolution. Mundy identifies new centers of power that coalesced in the wake of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. The more these rival coalitions vied for political authority and control over Libya’s vast oil wealth, the more they reached out to external actors who were playing their own “great game” in Libya and across the region. In the face of such a multifaceted crisis, Libya’s conflict-free future is uncertain as the international community seems unable to bring peace to this divided and conflict-ridden nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

James Zogby’s The Tumultuous Decade: Arab Public Opinion and the Upheavals of 2010–2019 (Steuben Press, 2020) takes the reader on a decade-long tour of the Middle East as the region reverberates from popular revolts that toppled long-standing dictators, civil and proxy wars that sparked some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, foreign interventions and seemingly intractable power struggles.It does so through the eyes of ordinary Arabs, Iranians, and Turks rather than the region’s political elites. Zogby’s ability to tease out a sense of public opinion in a part of the world in which freedom of expression and freedom of the media are rare quantities constitutes an important contribution to the literature and understanding of a region that often seems too complex and intricate to easily wrap one’s head around.In a world of autocracy, repression and conflict, polls often offer ordinary citizens a rare opportunity to express an opinion. Zogby demonstrates that autocratic and authoritarian leaders frequently ignore public opinion but track it closely and at times are swayed by what the public thinks and wants. Years of polling also demonstrates that failure to understand public sentiment and/or take it into account produces misinformed and misguided policies not only by rulers in the region but also governments like that of the United States.Zogby’s discussion of Iraq since the 2003 US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein illustrates the point. So does his analysis of polling of attitudes over several years in countries that overthrew their leaders during the 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as of perceptions of Iran and Palestinians incapable of wresting themselves from Israeli occupation. Zogby’s book offers a different look at the Middle East, one that offers fresh insights on the basis of citizens’ aspirations rather than what authoritarian and often corrupt elites would like the world to believe.James Zogby is director of Zogby Research Services, a firm that has conducted groundbreaking surveys across the Middle East, and the founder and president of the Washington, DC-based Arab American Institute.James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Behnaz A. Mirzai’s book A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929 (University of Texas Press, 2017) contributes to the growing field of slavery in the Middle East is a growing field of study, but the history of slavery in a key country, Iran, has never before been written. This history extends to Africa in the west and India in the east, to Russia and Turkmenistan in the north, and to the Arab states in the south. As the slave trade between Iran and these regions shifted over time, it transformed the nation and helped forge its unique culture and identity. Thus, a history of Iranian slavery is crucial to understanding the character of the modern nation.Drawing on extensive archival research in Iran, Tanzania, England, and France, as well as fieldwork and interviews in Iran, Mirzai offers the first history of slavery in modern Iran from the early nineteenth century to emancipation in the mid-twentieth century. She investigates how foreign military incursion, frontier insecurity, political instability, and economic crisis altered the patterns of enslavement, as well as the ethnicity of the slaves themselves. Mirzai’s interdisciplinary analysis illuminates the complex issues surrounding the history of the slave trade and the process of emancipation in Iran, while also giving voice to social groups that have never been studied—enslaved Africans and Iranians. Her research builds a clear case that the trade in slaves was inexorably linked to the authority of the state. During periods of greater decentralization, slave trading increased, while periods of greater governmental autonomy saw more freedom and peace.Behnaz Mirzai is an professor of Middle Eastern history at Brock University in Canada. She is a co-coordinator and member of the preparatory committee for the Slave Trade Route project, UNESCO, and the founder of the website Brock/UNESCO Project for the Study of the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Indian Ocean.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub.Robyn Morse is a History PhD student at the University of Virginia (UVA). Within her focus on the Indian Ocean World and the Middle East, her research interests broadly include archival memory, slavery, and socio-economic history. She can be reached at rmm9hf@virginia.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

When most Westerners think of the Gulf, the first thing that comes to mind is often oil. However, as Adam Hanieh demonstrates in Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2018), the economies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait are about more than just the “black gold.” Conglomerates and state-owned firms from this region have become major players throughout the Middle East and the broader global economies in sectors like agribusiness, finance, real estate, and logistics. In the process, processes of class and state formation in the Gulf have become inextricably tied up with political and economic developments in the broader Middle East, as the valorization of Gulf oil surpluses has come to depend on access to markets for land (both urban and rural) throughout the region. Hanieh analyzes how the Gulf states’ quest for food security in the wake of the food price increases of the late 2000s has affected agrarian class relations in Egypt and other countries, how Gulf capital has contributed to market-led remaking of cities throughout the region, and how Gulf control of Arab state financial reserves has given GCC countries tremendous geopolitical and economic leverage over their neighbors.Furthermore, Hanieh shows that the boundary between public and private interests in the Gulf states is blurred by the close relationships between wealthy private businesses and patrimonial monarchies, and capital accumulation in the region depends on the hyper-exploitation of foreign guest workers, who can easily be deported if they demand higher wages or go on strike. Money, Markets, and Monarchies dispels widespread myths about the political economies of the Gulf while providing a distinct vantage point for exploring the complex geographies of global capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language.Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford University Press) shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state.Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution.Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.Nathalie Peutz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

In the impressive volume of The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Brill), Richard van Leeuwen thoroughly examines an array of intricate ways in which the Thousand and One Nights shaped the developments of literatures across the world.This is a pioneering work in terms of approaching the ancient text not only as a source of inspiration for literary discoveries, but also as a carrier of literary memories and cultural experiences that are collected from a number of geographical locations. Cultural explorations intertwine with political implications which are coded in the texts that are shaped and inherently modified by delicate influences of the Thousand and One Nights.Van Leeuwen gathers references to the Thousand and One Nights from the diversity of literary texts and arranges them to demonstrate the vitality and the fluidity of the text that travels from culture to culture, from text to text, and from one time space to another, from imagination to imagination. In this respect, van Leeuwen’s book, which includes more than 800 pages, replicates to some extent the very nature of the Thousand and One Nights: an on-going journey that takes readers to one destination and invites her/him to push the borderlines and to further explore inexhaustible texts.Van Leeuwen’s book takes the readers to the world of incessant cultural overlaps and dialogues, which are carried forward by the literary text that travels through time and space. This creates a mysterious sense of something that is very familiar, and yet unfathomable. The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction invites the readers to explore the fluidity of literary texts and to delve into palimpsestic stories which emerge out of literary memories, converging and intertwining.Richard van Leeuwen, Ph.D. (1992) University of Amsterdam, is senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at that 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

Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published A Brief History of the Mediterranean (Little Brown, 2020), to offer readers an overview of this sphere from pre-history to the present day. Taking in the importance of geography, civilizational change and cultural representations, Black moves between disciplines to offer readers a compelling handbook to a region rich in historical significance.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Despite the competition it posed to the Romans’ eastern empire and the longevity it enjoyed compared to its Iranian predecessors, English-language histories of the Sassanian Empire are few and far between. In The Last Empire of Iran (Gorgias Press, 2020), Michael R. Jackson Bonner fills this gap with a work that surveys the empire’s history from its rise in the 3rd century CE to its conquest by Muslim invaders in the 650s. To Bonner, a key reason for the empire’s longevity was the degree of centralization of its government, which was far greater than that of its Parthian predecessors. Thanks to that centralized control and the access to resources that it afforded them, the Sassanians were able to deal with the various challenges their empire faced on its many frontiers, from Roman legions to assaults from Central Asian nomads. Thanks to their effective administration and their military effectiveness, the Sassanians not only persevered against these threats but they succeeded in driving the Roman frontier back westward in the early 7th century, though the extended struggle and the civil war that followed left the Sassanians too weak to face the challenge that arose from the Arabian peninsula just a few years later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Anwar al-Awlaki was, according to one of his followers, “the main man who translated jihad into English.” By the time he was killed by an American drone strike in 2011, he had become a spiritual leader for thousands of extremists, especially in the United States and Britain, where he aimed to make violent Islamism “as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.”In Incitement: Anwar al-Awlaki’s Western Jihad (Harvard UP, 2020), Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens draws on extensive research among al-Awlaki’s former colleagues, friends, and followers, including interviews with convicted terrorists, to explain how he established his network and why his message resonated with disaffected Muslims in the West.A native of New Mexico, al-Awlaki rose to prominence in 2001 as the imam of a Virginia mosque attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers. After leaving for Britain in 2002, he began delivering popular lectures and sermons that were increasingly radical and anti-Western. In 2004 he moved to Yemen, where he eventually joined al-Qaeda and oversaw numerous major international terrorist plots. Through live video broadcasts to Western mosques and universities, YouTube, magazines, and other media, he soon became the world’s foremost English-speaking recruiter for violent Islamism. One measure of his success is that he has been linked to about a quarter of Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in the United States since 2007.Despite the extreme nature of these activities, Meleagrou-Hitchens argues that al-Awlaki’s strategy and tactics are best understood through traditional social-movement theory. With clarity and verve, he shows how violent fundamentalists are born.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies