The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73) is a popular spiritual icon. His legacy is sustained within the mystical and religious practice of Sufism, particularly through renditions of his poetry, music, and the meditation practice of whirling. In Canada, practices associated with Rumi have become ubiquitous in public spaces, such as museums, art galleries, and theatre halls, just as they continue to inform sacred ritual amongst Sufi communities. The Dervishes of...
In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic workers are often described as being subject to...
Media do not reflect: media refract. In the United States, established and enduring prisms of prejudice about the projected "Middle East" are mediated through popular culture, broadcast news, government mission statements and official maps. This mediation serves to assert political boundaries and construct the United States as heroic against a villainous or victimized Middle East. These problematic maps and narratives are persistent over time and prevalent across genre, with clear consequences e...
Displacing Territory explores the core concepts of territory and belonging—and humanizes refugees in the process. Based on fieldwork with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Jordan, Displacing Territory explores how the lived realities of refugees are deeply affected by their imaginings of what constitutes territory and their sense of belonging to different places and territories. Karen Culcasi shows how these individual conceptualizations about territory don’t always fit the Western-centric...
Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, comprising not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fiction films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, who include scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for m...
The Scandal of Continuity in Middle East Anthropology (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)
Despite a rich history of ethnographic research in Middle Eastern societies, the region is frequently portrayed as marginal to anthropology. The contributors to this volume reject this view and show how the Middle East is in fact vital to the discipline and how Middle Eastern anthropologists have developed theoretical and methodological tools that address and challenge the region's political, ethical, and intellectual concerns. The contributors to this volume are students of Paul Dresch, an an...
Living in a World Heritage Site (Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology)
by Manon Istasse
Through a thick ethnography of the Fez medina in Morocco, a World Heritage site since 1981, Manon Istasse interrogates how human beings come to define houses as heritage. Istasse interrogates how heritage appears (or not) when inhabitants undertake construction and restoration projects in their homes, furnish and decorate their spaces, talk about their affective and sensual relations with houses, face conflicts in and about their houses, and more. Shedding light on the continuum between houses-a...
Arab-Jewish Coexistence Programs (Journal of Social Issues)
Israeli Jewish and Arab intergroup relations experts within Israel have developed innovative coexistence programs. These programs consist of educational efforts designed to improve relations between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. This issue presents theory, methods, and data from these coexistence programs. Studies the diverse Israeli coexistence programs, which attempt to improve relations between Israeli Jews and ArabsAddresses conceptual and theoretical issues involved in establishing condit...
This critical anthology consists of thirty of Meridians’s most frequently cited, downloaded, and anthologized scholarly essays, activists reports, memoirs, and poems since its first issue was published in fall 2000. The forty authors featured are a virtual who’s who of internationally renowned feminist women-of-color scholar-activists (such as Sara Ahmed, Angela Davis, Sonia Alvarez, Paula Giddings, and Sunera Thobani) and award-winning poets (such as Nikky Finney, Laurie Ann Guerrero, and Suhei...
Hidden Light (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media)
by Dan Chyutin
Over the past several decades, the prevailing attitude toward Judaism in Israeli society has undergone a meaningful shift; where the national ethos had once deemed Judaic traditions a vestige of an arcane past incompatible with the culture of a modern state, there is now greater acceptance of these traditions by a sizeable part of Israeli society. Author Dan Chyutin reveals this trend through a parallel shift toward acceptance and celebration of Judaic identity and lifestyle in modern Israeli ci...
The polyethnic contexts of societies provide a particular situation in which people with various languages, religion, and cultures live within the same geographical space. In Iran, a highlevel ethno-lingual diversity is present, for example Lor, Kurd, Gilak, Arab, Balouch, Turk, Turkmen and religious groups such as Assyrians, Armenians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. Therefore, as a polyethnic society, this country is not an exception in ethnic debates. On the other hand, Iran as an old, polyethnic, an...
Responsible Management in Theory and Practice in Muslim Societies (Emerald Points)
by Yusuf M. Sidani
Responsible Management in Theory and Practice in Muslim Societies delineates principles of responsible management from an Islamic perspective, exploring the concept of responsibility in Islamic religious texts, and how the understanding of responsibility evolved in Islamic jurisprudence. He explains aspects of individual and group responsibility in Islam and the dissonance between theoretical discourse and practical application. Yusuf M. Sidani focuses on the factors that have both facilitated a...
This book analyzes the rise of socially and politically engaged Algerian documentaries, created in the period immediately following the end of the Algerian civil war (1991-1999). It uses case studies to highlight the works of four Algerian filmmakers, and devotes a chapter to each: Malek Bensmaïl, Hassen Ferhani, Djamel Kerkar, and Karim Sayad. The book makes visible productions that have been overlooked not only in distribution circuits but also within academia, and examines the political signi...
Quest for Love in Central Morocco (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East)
by Laura Menin
Following the 2011 wave of revolutions and protest in North Africa and the Middle East, new discussions of individual freedoms have emerged in the Moroccan public sphere and human rights discourses. Public opinion rallied around the removal of an article in the Moroccan penal code that punished sexual relationships outside of marriage. As debates about personal and sexual freedom move to the forefront of society, love and intimacy remain complex issues. Moving between public and clandestine inte...
This book brings to light a lesser-explored facet of cultural globalization by unearthing Bollywood films circulations in the Middle East. Delving into the intricacies of South-South cinematic circuits, it unveils the networks linking the Bombay film industry with the Arab world. Through a blend of historical analysis and ethnographic insights, the book offers an exploration of how film circulations have evolved amidst geopolitical shifts and technological advancements. By reframing our perspect...
Living Together Separately (Princeton Legacy Library) (Princeton Studies on the Near East)
by Michael Romann and Alex Weingrod
Much has been written about the religious and political conflicts of contemporary Jerusalem--and about the harsh realities of the intifada. But while analysts probe the violence in the "reunited city," its residents must go about their daily affairs. Focusing on the conduct of everyday life, rather than on ideology, Living Together Separately provides a rare look at the complex networks of practical relations developed by Jews and Arabs in over two decades of Israeli control of the city. The wor...
Camera Palaestina (New Directions in Palestinian Studies, #5)
by Salim Tamari, Issam Nassar, and Stephen Sheehi
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Camera Palaestina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab worl...
Sajjilu Arab American (Critical Arab American Studies)
Both a summative description of the field and an exploration of new directions, this multidisciplinary reader addresses issues central to the fields of Arab American, US Muslim, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA)-American studies. Taking a broad conception of the Americas, this collection simultaneously registers and critically reflects upon major themes in the field, including diaspora, migration, empire, race and racialization, securitization, and global South solidarity. The collec...
As any other modern militaries of the world, Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) is a complex organization relying on human force and other resources provided by society, being strictly founded on both an institutional setting and a framework of values, norms and rituals, and producing security with means and ways available to achieve the strategic objectives of Turkey. This inherent complexity reflecting the structure-culture-action nexus often means that scholars study modern militaries of the world wi...
This book focuses on the Kurdish women of Turkey and the ongoing evolution of their role in defining and mobilizing the Kurdish quest for recognition as a people within and against the Republic of Turkey.
Mass Communication in the Modern Arab World (Mass Communication in the Modern Arab World)
Established in 1977, the Middle East Contemporary Survey (MECS), a unique annual record of political developments in the Middle East, is acknowledged as the standard reference work on events and trends in the region. Designed to be a continuing, up-to-date reference for scholars, researchers and analysts, policymakers, students and journalists, it examines in considerable detail the rapidly changing Middle Eastern scene in all its complexity. In each volume, the material is arranged in two parts...