In this provocative book Joumana Haddad uses the format of the political pamphlet to describe the liberating impact of literature on her life. She tells of reading the Marquis de Sade at twelve, of her metamorphosis into an award-winning poet, and reflects upon how this has shaped her as an Arab woman, as a writer and as a magazine editor. Joumana challenges prevalent notions of identity and womanhood in the Middle East and speaks of how she came to create the Arab world's first erotic literary...
In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authori...
“The recipes in Zaatari are glorious. Passed down the generations from mother to daughter, cooking keeps the people of Zaatari camp connected to the towns and villages of the Syria they fled.” — Claudia Roden On the Jordanian-Syrian border lies Zaatari Camp, the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world. Opened in 2012 to provide new arrivals with emergency relief, the camp quickly became a locus of Syrian culture and tradition. In this thriving community of over 80,000 people, the residents of...
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through the Eyes of Saudi Women
by Anita C. Butera
Saudi women are the most powerful symbol of their rapidly-changing country. The Western political and academic debate has presented activists such as Loujain Al Hathloul and Samar Badawi as the heroic voice of all Saudi women. The Saudi government has focused instead on a nationalistic rhetoric that presents Saudi women as willing, obedient, and heroic handmaids of the New Saudi Arabia who speak with the voice of the Enlightened Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Ironically, both approaches have silen...
Redefining Palestinian Women Organizations’ Activism under Jewish Democratic State Restrictions
by Shadi Bayadsy
Palestinian women living in Israel are discriminated against in many aspects of their daily lives. In this book, Shadi Bayadsy examines how this situation motivated Palestinian women to organize and advocate for emancipation and equality through the professional Palestinian women organizations established in Israel. The author demonstrates the different strategies each organization employs to navigate challenging restrictions and to avoid being shut down by state apparatuses or by societal insti...
This book is an account of the creation of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) and the stories of its founding members, from the initial development of a photography department in the early years of the Palestinian revolution (1967-1968) to its evolution in the mid-1970s into the Palestinian Cinema Institution. Author Khadijeh Habashneh weaves her own memories into excerpts from letters and other communications of survivors, friends and PFU members, accompanied by scholarly analysis of the work and c...
A surprising look at the meaningful social changes in Jordan as lived and navigated by educated women. Jordan has witnessed tremendous societal transformation in its relatively short history. Today it has one of the most highly educated populations in the region, and women have outnumbered and outperformed their male counterparts for more than a decade. Yet, despite their education and professional status, many women still struggle to build a secure future and a life befitting of their aspir...
Political & Government Terms & Expressions Explained (Mind Shaping, #3)
by Aristotle Pineda
Anti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker, published the first in-depth investigation of anti-black racism in the Arab world in 2004. This translation of the new and revised edition of Kadhem’s influential text brings the conversation to the English-speaking world. Al-Istifraq or Africanism, a term that is analogous to Orientalism, refers to the discursive elements of perceiving, imaginin...
Winner—The Arab American National Museum 2024 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Academic Award An examination of Arab asylum seekers who feel compelled to package their tales of disenfranchisement and suffering to satisfy a deeply reluctant immigration system. From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right” kind of victim, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results i...
Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Medieval Islam
by Said Amir Arjomand
This study of messianism and revolution examines an extremely rich though unexplored historical record on the rise of Islam and its sociopolitical revolutions from Muhammad’s constitutive revolution in Arabia to the Abbasid revolution in the East and the Fatimid and Almohad revolutions in North Africa and the Maghreb. Bringing the revolutions together in a comprehensive framework, Saïd Amir Arjomand uses sociological theory as well as the critical tools of modern historiography to argue that a v...
Imperial Resilience tells the story of the enduring Ottoman landscape of the modern Middle East's formative years from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the conclusion of the peace settlement for the empire in 1923. Hasan Kayali moves beyond both the well-known role that the First World War's victors played in reshaping the region's map and institutions and the strains of ethnonationalism in the empire's "Long War." Instead Kayali crucially uncovers local actors' searches for geopolitica...
Kurdistan's Moment in the Middle East
This compilation of essays on Kurdish history, society, identity, and politics covering developments over the last four decades reflects the sea changes that have taken place in Greater Kurdistan and the sociopolitical processes it has undergone during this crucial time span. Challenging conventional wisdom, Ofra Bengio argues that the harsh treatment of the Kurds at the hands of central governments caused instability in the Middle East rather than the Kurds who have been blamed for it. Another...
Imagining Afghanistan (Comparative Cultural Studies)
by Alla Ivanchikova
Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistanhas been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion-the era that propelledAfghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis offiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates thatwriting and screening "Afghanistan" has become a conduit for understanding ourshared post-9/11 condition. "Afghanistan" serves as a lens through whichc...
Readings in Syrian Prison Literature (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East)
by R. Shareah Taleghani
The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s-a cultur...
The Palestinian National Revival (Perspectives on Israel Studies)
by Moshe Shemesh
Former Israeli intelligence officer Moshe Shemesh offers a fresh understanding of the complex history and politics of the Middle East in this new analysis of the Palestinian national movement. Shemesh looks at the formative years of the movement that emerged following the 1948 War and traces the leaders, their objectives, and their weaknesses, fragmentation, and conflicts with their neighbors. He follows the formation of the Sons of Nakba, the establishment of Fatah, the reframing of Jordan as...
First Published in 1985. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
What if there was a story that had never been told, a story that spanned almost five decades, a story that involved the great conflict between the superpowers, a story that would enchant the reader with great drama, pain, suffering, and resilience, and was literally a story that could change the world? And what if it was all completely true? The People's Mujahadeen of Iran, or Mujuhadeen e Khalk, (PMOI/MEK) are the least understood resistance force in the world, they are also the most-maligned,...
Banking and Financial Systems in the Arab World (Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions)
by P. Molyneux and M. Iqbal
This book provides state-of-the art analysis of banking and financial systems in the Arab world. The early chapters of the text present an overview of Arab economies linking banking and financial sector trends in the Arab world over the last twenty years. The rest of the text examines in detail the financial systems of the major Arab countries, focusing on banking sector and capital market developments. This text will be the first to provide a rigorous analytical evaluation of banking sector dev...
Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion)
by Gabriele Vom Bruck
Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen tells a story of a Yemeni hereditary elite which was overthrown in the 1962 revolution in North Yemen. For over a millennium, they had enjoyed exclusive rights to the leadership of the Imamate, the religiously sanctioned state. Following the violent removal from power of King Faysal of Iraq in 1958, the overthrow of the Yemeni Imamate - the longest lasting Hashimite rule in the Middle East - confirmed the decline of Hashimite power (held by ruling generations...