New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

In his new book, The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh, 2020), Scott Levi brings new perspectives into the historiography of early Modern Central Asia. Levi reflects on recent scholarship to identify multiple causal factors that contributed to the Bukharan crisis of the 18th century. These include climate change, the global silver trade, the innovation of new gunpowder and weapon technologies, and a number of political transformations in surrounding states. In identifying these multiple factors, Levi challenges dominant narratives in Central Asian history which themselves are holdovers from Orientalist historiography that have primarily characterized early modern Central Asia as an isolated region facing multiple decades of economic, political, and social decline. This book is commendable both for its sophisticated arguments and its accessibility to specialists and non-specialists alike. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and casual readers interested in Central Asian, economic, and global history during the period in question.Nicholas Seay is a PhD student 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

Nasser Rahmaninejad’s A Man of the Theatre: Survival as an Artist in Iran (New Village Press) provides a fascinating glimpse into the political and artistic life of Iran.This memoir discusses the difficulties of creating progressive theatre under the murderous and repressive regime of the Shah (supported by the United States), the “prison commune” created by an ad hoc body of Marxist and Islamist political prisoners, the exhilaration of the Shah’s ouster in 1979, and the tragic defeat of the Left by the new religious Right after the revolution.Throughout the book, Rahmaninejad’s storytelling voice is clear: impassioned, ironic, learned, elegant, and subtle. This is a story of resistance under conditions of intense repression, and of the power of art to change society.Nasser Rahmaninejad started his theater career in 1959 in Iran. In response to the authoritarian cultural policies and censorship of the Shah’s regime, he founded the independent MEHR theatre group in 1966, which later became the Iran Theatre Association, until it was closed down by the Shah’s secret police in 1974. Sentenced to twelve years in prison and ultimately freed by the 1979 revolution, he resumed his theater work, but was soon forced into exile. He has since continued to teach and write; his plays in exile include My Heart, My Homeland (1995), and One Page of Exile (1996). His latest play is Between the Grave and the Moon, produced by the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University in 2016.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. 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 with Pernilla Myrne about her exciting and excellently researched book Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature, published with IB Taurus in 2020. Pernilla Myrne is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and History at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where she also earned her PhD in 2008. Her research interests include the representation of women in pre-modern Arabic literature, attitudes to sexuality in medieval Islam, and women as creative subjects.In today’s discussion, Myrne shares with us the origins of her book, some of its findings, and the process of collecting the many, many sources she used to make this book an essential resource of many a thing female sexuality, including pleasure, sexual comedy, and women’s bodies. Among Myrne’s impressive range of sources are medical, Islamic legal, literary, and entertainment sources. Contrary to popular and even scholarly expectations, medieval erotic literature emphasized female sexual satisfaction, including via teaching male readers how precisely to ensure that their female partner reaches an orgasm. Other specific themes we discuss in today’s interview include the Greek influences on Islamic writers writing about sex and sexuality, female desire, the two-seed theory, female orgasm, and lesbian love. The book would be welcome by anyone interested in gender and sexuality, medieval literature, and female representation in various genres, such as medical, erotic, and religio-legal literature.Shehnaz Haqqani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and questions of change and tradition in Islam. She also vlogs on YouTube; her videos focus on dismantling the patriarchy and are available at here.  She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.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

Modest fashion is a growing, global multi-billion-dollar market. As a fashion trend, it has increasingly made its way into high-profile runways, has been endorsed by celebrities, and profiled in major fashion publications and news outlets.  Hafsa Lodi’s Modesty: A Fashion Paradox (Neem Tree Press, 2020) investigates how and why modest fashion became a mainstream global retail trend. It looks at the causes and key players behind the global modest fashion trend, while also exploring the controversies that surround the concept.Lodi interviewed over 40 important actors in the modest fashion movement, including designers, models, influencers, and entrepreneurs but also drew on personal experiences from her childhood in the United States and career as a fashion journalist in the Middle East to understand its history, evolution, and contradictions. Hafsa Lodi is an American journalist who has been covering fashion for a decade. She has a BA from the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto and an MA in Islamic Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. While living in Dubai, Hafsa has written for The National newspaper, Luxury Magazine, Mojeh Magazine, Velvet Magazine, Savoir Flair, and Vogue India, in addition to working as an online fashion editor for one of the Middle East’s largest luxury retailers, Boutique 1. @HafsaLodi (Twitter) @hafsalodi (Instagram) Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, 2019) argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid.Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present.He analyzes the films of prominent directors Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) to investigate the emergence and formation of Palestinian identity. Looking at Mais Darwazah’s documentary My Love Awaits Me By the Sea, Burris considers the counterhistories that make up the Palestinian experience— stories and memories that have otherwise been obscured or denied.He also examines Palestinian (in)visibility in the global media landscape, and how issues of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity are illustrated through social media, staged news spectacles, and hip hop music.Greg Burris is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. 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 El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social history of the modern publishing industry on what we today consider canonical books of Islamic thought. “Painstakingly researched” would be a description too mild for the depth and breadth of sources and analysis that El-Shamsy mobilizes in this book. Over the course of its 8 delightfully written chapters, readers meet some known and many less known book collectors, editors, Muslim reformers, early Salafis, and European Orientalists whose thought, outlook, normative agendas, and wide-ranging efforts produced a distinct corpus of classical Islamic texts.The canonization of what counted as “classical” was itself a markedly modern move and gesture, El-Shamsy argues. Populated with fascinating narratives of manuscript hunting, editorial discoveries and frustrations, and collaborations between Arab scholars and European Orientalists, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics combines the literary flair of a sumptuous novel with the textual density of a philological masterpiece. This carefully crafted and argued book represents both a profound tribute to a mesmerizingly layered archive of tradition and its actors, and a tremendous service to the field of Islamic Studies in particular and Religious Studies more broadly. It will also make a great text to teach in courses on intellectual history, manuscript studies, modern Islam, Muslim reform, and Islamic Law.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 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

Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and aesthetics in medieval Arabic literature. The central theme of this splendid book centers on the emergence of the evocation of wonder as a key aesthetic experience and criterion connected to the beauty and eloquence of speech in medieval Muslim intellectual thought. With breathtaking clarity and painstaking elaboration, Harb charts the key literary tropes, categories, and strategies, as well as the broader intellectual and theological stakes, such as the question of the Qur’an’s inimitability, invested in how poetry was imagined, experienced, and evaluated in this context. The strength of this book lies in the meticulous care with which it walks readers through a complex yet deeply fascinating discursive arcade of thinkers, texts, and poetic registers. While focused on the thought of the preeminent eleventh century scholar ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Arabic Poetics presents and explores a panoply of scholars and texts situated at the intersection of religion, and literature. Written with sparkling clarity, this book will also make an excellent text to teach in various undergraduate and graduate courses on the Muslim Humanities, Arabic, Religion and Literature, and Religious Studies more broadly.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. 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

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx famously claimed that philosophers had previously only attempted to interpret the world; the point, however, was to change it. In the 20th century, no philosopher had as great an effect on the world than Marx, with various intellectual and political movements across the world claiming various parts of his thought and using them to develop and change their own parts of the world.One of these movements, Socialist Lebanon, took root in the 1960s, and much Arab political thought has developed in its shadow ever since. Composed of a variety of activists and intellectuals, their attempts to adapt and develop Marxist thought for their own particular context remains important both for understanding Middle East history, as well as current political possibilities for the Arab world today. This is the set of animating ideas that drive Fadi A. Bardawil in his new book, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2020)Fadi Bardawil received his PhD from Columbia University and is an assistant professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke 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

During the opening decades of the Cold War, US policymakers and academics used modernization theory to provide an alternative model to communism for improving living standards. As Begüm Adalet demonstrates, Turkey was both a model case of elite-led modernization and a laboratory for development projects that could then be exported to other societies. Through her analysis of the flow of aid money and expertise between the US and Turkey, the planning of the American-funded Turkish highway network, and the development of the Turkish tourism industry, Adalet highlights how the production of social scientific knowledge is fundamentally entwined with the problems of political order: social scientific theories are produced in material space, through uncertain encounters between transnational actors and policy networks. Furthermore, her examinations of the works and career trajectories of figures like political scientist Dankwart Rustow and sociologist Daniel Lerner show how the political and ideological imperatives of US foreign policy shape social scientific knowledge production, even as the figures involved may express doubts about the feasibility of political projects and initiatives.Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2018) invites political scientists, development economists, and other social scientists involved in the study of the Global South to reflect on how geopolitical power imbalances and hegemonic projects affect the production of social scientific knowledge. 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 Allah: God in the Qur’an (Yale University Press, 2020), Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that contrary to many scholarly and popular claims about the God of the Qur’an as either merciful or vengeful, God is in fact both. He suggests that God’s nature is a mystery and the descriptions of God, as both merciful and vengeful, are intended to have an impact on the audience of the Qur’an. Through productive comparisons between the Qur’an and the Bible, Reynolds also discusses the common themes and descriptions of God shared by these scriptures, such as the – of course, vengeance and mercy of God, but also divine scheming, God’s derision of unbelievers, and ideas of God as the Father, the Ruler, the Judge, and/or similar characteristics. Other themes covered in the book include heaven and hell, and the fate of sinners and unbelievers in the Qur’an and the exegetical tradition, the idea of humans as having been created in God’s image, and the idea of the Qur’an as a literary truth versus a historical truth, the latter point helping explain any inconsistencies in the stories that the Qur’an tells.The book would be of interest to folks teaching theology and comparative religions courses, particularly Abrahamic religions. Its accessible writing style makes it especially useful for undergraduates and for non-specialists looking to better understand God in either just the Qur’an or in the Qur’an and the Bible.Shehnaz Haqqani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and questions of change and tradition in Islam. She also vlogs on YouTube, her videos focused on dismantling the patriarchy and available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClvnmSeZ5t_YSIfGnB-bGNw She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.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