Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing. In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and a...
Bordering the Middle East
This volume focuses on the influence that borders in the Middle East can have on actors’ identity building, as well as how local, national, or transnational actors re/ define borders and boundaries. The Middle East is facing a political crisis, revealed by the Arab uprisings, that is affecting states’ borders in a paradoxical way: while local, communal, or tribal dissent tends to contest international borders, states are trying to affirm their control over national territory in building border...
Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey
by Burcu Yasemin Seyben
After the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2002, the AKP grew into an authoritarian government as it politically and culturally oppressed citizens and institutions. In Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat, Burcu Yasemin Seyben argues that theatre was deliberately targeted because theatre institutions and companies embodied the cultural program of the statist and Kemalist cultural policy that has continually excluded Muslims an...
God, Science, and Self (McGill-Queen's Studies in Modern Islamic Thought)
by Nauman Faizi
Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) was one of the most influential modernist Islamic thinkers of the early twentieth century. His work as a poet, politician, philosopher, and public intellectual was widely recognized in his lifetime and plays a major role in contemporary conversations about Islam, modernity, and tradition.God, Science, and Self examines the patterns of reasoning at work in Iqbal's philosophic magnum opus, arguably the most significant text of modernist Islamic philosophy, The Reconstructi...
Politico-ideological Mobilisation and Violence in the Arab World (Routledge Studies in Criminal Behaviour)
by Ahmed Ajil
This book presents a study of politico-ideological mobilisation and violence by focusing on the life stories, trajectories and narratives of individuals who mobilised for causes and conflicts in the Arab World. It provides a greater understanding of the biographical, sociological, political and historic factors pertinent for their radicalisation processes. What makes individuals identify with suffering and injustice, often of others and elsewhere? Why do individuals feel the need to stand up in...
Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict
Postcolonial theory is one of the main frameworks for thinking about the world and acting to change the world. Arising in academia and reshaping humanities and social sciences disciplines, postcolonial theory argues that our ideas about foreigners, ‘the other,’ particularly our negative ideas about them, are determined not by a true will to understand, but rather by our desire to conquer, dominate, and exploit them. According to postcolonial theory, the cause of poverty, tyranny, and misery in t...
Drawing on ethnographic encounters with self-identified gay men in Iran, this book explores the construction, enactment, and veiling and unveiling of gay identity and same-sex desire in the capital city of Tehran. The research draws on diverse interpretive, historical, online and empirical sources in order to present critical and nuanced insights into the politics of recognition and representation and the constitution of same-sex desire under the specific conditions of Iranian modernity. As it e...
During the 2010s in Turkey, LGBTQ activists, groups, and individuals persisted against social, political, and legal adversity. Erasure during the Gezi Park Protests in 2013, a Pride parade ban in Istanbul in 2016, and indefinite ban on all LGBTQ events in Ankara in 2017 directly aimed at ending the activities, visibility, and existence of LGBTQ organization in the two biggest cities in Turkey. This work examines the ways in which LGBTQ activists engaged in talkback against these restrictions...
Political and Socio-Economic Change in the Middle East and North Africa
Political and Socio-Economic Change in the Middle East and North Africa examines the shortcomings of the economic development policies in the region before and after the Arab uprisings. Many MENA countries tried to pursue neoliberal policies to boost economic growth. However, the outcome was associated with rising and disproportionate unemployment among the youth and women. The focal point of the book is the role of gender and the ways in which policies translate into economic outcomes. Particul...
This book considers the ways in which Muslims view the way they are being viewed, not viewed, or incorrectly viewed, by the West. The book underscores a certain “will-to-visibility” whereby Muslims/ Arabs wish just to be “seen” and to be marked as fellow human beings. The author relates the failure to achieve this visibility to a state of desperation that inextricably and symmetrically ties visibility to violence. When Syrian and Palestinian refugees recently started refusing to be photo...
’Honour'-based violence is a form of intimate violence committed against women (and some men) by husbands, fathers, brothers and male relatives. A very common social phenomenon, it has existed throughout history and in a wide variety of societies across the world, from white European to African cultures, from South and East Asia to Latin America. The most extreme form of Honour-based violence - 'honour' killing - tragically remains widespread. Over the last decade, national and international ef...
In the 1990s, thousands of non-Jewish Latinos arrived in Israel as undocumented immigrants. Based on his fieldwork in South America and Israel, Barak Kalir follows these workers from their decision to migrate to their experiences finding work, establishing social clubs and evangelical Christian churches, and putting down roots in Israeli society. While the State of Israel rejected the presence of non-Jewish migrants, many citizens accepted them. Latinos grew to favor cultural assimilation to Isr...
Chinese Politics and Foreign Policy under Xi Jinping (Routledge Studies on Think Asia)
This book focuses on China's future under Xi Jinping's authoritarian leadership by examining various facets of the political, economic, social and foreign policy trajectories of contemporary China. It assesses Xi Jinping's power dynamic as the 'core' leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and analyses the impact of Xi's signature domestic policies which demonstrate his political authority within the domestic sphere. Moreover, the book presents Xi's pro-active, assertive and action-orient...
Beyond the Exotic (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East)
by Amira Sonbol
This volume introduces new sources for the study of the past and present life of Muslim women that challenge paradigms about the ways in which ""they"" have been studied in the past. Most research has treated stereotypical images of Muslim women's outward manifestations, such as veiling, as passive and oppressive - women were depicted as different. Exoticizing (orientalizing) Muslim women - or Islamic society in general - has meant that ""they"" are dealt with outside of general women's history...
Voices From Iran (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East)
by Mahnaz Kousha
In the late 1990s, Mahnaz Kousha interviewed 15 Iranian women in Tehran who originally came from cities and towns throughout Iran. The youngest was 38, the eldest in her 50s. Extensive excerpts from their dialogues comprise the heart of this volume. The women explore their relationships with their mothers, fathers, husbands and children. They reflect upon the institutions of courtship and marriage and address issues of childcare, housework and women's employment. They talk openly about their con...
Illuminating the Performance is a traditional guide for the modern male on womanising and erotology (the art of sexual love and lovemaking). The book draws upon classic Afro-Arab love treatises dating back to the ninth century. Based upon traditional African and Arab values of manliness, the book provides opinions on what qualities a man should have to attract women, gives advice on lovemaking techniques, warnings about womanising, and practical tips on how to satisfy a woman's emotional and phy...
Fighting for the River portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontological perspective. In this way, the book pushes beyond the "natural resources" frame t...
Post/Revolutionary Conditions (Critical Insurgencies)
by Alborz Ghandehari
An exploration of how the Iranian people have renewed their longtime struggle for freedom The Woman, Life, Freedom uprising is only the latest manifestation of a century-long struggle for liberation in Iran. This ongoing movement for justice has encompassed two revolutions against domestic dictatorship and foreign imperialism, as well as a series of uprisings since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which was followed by a new era of repression. Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Ir...
A Global Idea outlines how youth—as shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responses—became a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a "global youth development complex," a diverse transnational network of state, private sect...
Bedouins, who refer to themselves simply as Arabs (originally, “Arab” was synonymous with “Bedouin”), are nomads who live in the desert, mainly on the Arabian Peninsula, raising sheep, camels and goats. Unencumbered by excessive possessions, and without most amenities, including electricity and running water, they pursue their lives in peace, practicing an ethic of mutual assistance, devotion to family, respect for the elderly and self-discipline. What they may lack in material goods is compensa...
Is anti-semitism on the rise in Europe? Where is it worst? Germany? Or France? Should we be worried? And is the new anti-semitism different from other forms of racism? Since 9/11, a new and surprising coalition of political interest has grown up in Europe. Elements of the new left, the far right, radical Islamists, anti-globalists and human rights campaigners and activists are united, despite their disparate ideologies, by one shared passion - their hatred of Israel and the USA. For these strang...