This highly original historical and political analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict combines the unique perspectives of two prominent segments of the Middle Eastern puzzle: Israeli Jews and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Written jointly by an Israeli anthropologist and a Palestinian family therapist born weeks apart to two families from Haifa, "Coffins on Our Shoulders" merges the personal and the political as it explores the various stages of the conflict, from the 1920s to the present. Th...
First published in 2005. This fascinating account, written by a British Army officer serving in Iraq, describes a little-known ethnic minority in that country. The Assyrians, like other minorities in the area, lived across many modern national boundaries. Unlike other ethnic groups, they were distinct and usually well-off. Their land became Christianized, and after the end of the British mandate in Iraq in 1932, it was revealed that the Assyrians were being persecuted by the Moslems. The survivo...
Études mithriaques (Acta Iranica, #17)
Islamic Finance and Economic Development
Over the last thirty years, Islamic banking has emerged as a viable and efficient model of financial intermediation. In conventional economic systems, the interest rate mechanism is at the heart of that process, however the Islamic financial system cannot rely on that mechanism. With this fact considered, this volume explores the role of Islamic finance in promoting growth and development. It highlights the benefits that Islamic banking can bring to society as an alternative model of financial i...
Family Businesses in the Arab World (Contributions to Management Science)
This book focuses on topics such as the cultural specificity of Arab family businesses with regard to shaping their governance and management; the influence that specific values in the Arab world could exert on the management of family businesses; how spiritual and religious values influence business in Arab family firms; and the role of emotions in the management of family firms in the Arab World. Presenting a collection of contributions addressing management, finance, strategy and succession i...
An anthropologist's groundbreaking account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building on the island of JavaThis compelling book draws on Ismail Fajrie Alatas's unique insights as an anthropologist to provide a new understanding of Islamic religious authority, showing how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities.Taking readers from the eighteenth century...
In this book, Shimon Shapira explores the evolution of Hizballah, addressing key questions about the organization's mission and influence: How did it take control of Lebanon's Shi'ite community and, indirectly, of the Lebanese political system and state? How does Iran control and use the organization? Is it still a pure instrument of Iranian policy or is it also a self-standing Lebanese movement and party? What explains Hassan Nasrallah's unique style of leadership? Those who thought that the st...
How is the struggle for Palestinian freedom bound up in other freedom struggles, and how are activists coming together globally to achieve justice and liberation for all? In this bold book, Palestinian activist Nada Elia unpacks Zionism, from its hypermilitarism to incarceration, its environmental devastation and gendered violence. She insists that Palestine’s fate is linked through bonds of solidarity to other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist und...
While many previous books have probed the causes of Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979, few have focused on the power of religion in shaping a national identity over the decades leading up to it. Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran, from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s through twenty-first-century struggles between those seeking to reform Islam's role and those who take a hardline defensive stance. Capturing the views...
Practicing Sectarianism
Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemologica...
Migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, over a third of the population of the Mashriq, i.e. the Levant, had made the transatlantic journey. This intense mobility was interrupted by World War I but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s under the French Mandate. Many migrants returned to their homelands, but the rest co...
Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement (Environment and Society)
Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement examines the ideas about social ecology and communalism behind the evolving political structures in the Kurdish region. The collection evaluates practical green projects, including the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement, Jinwar women’s eco-village, food sovereignty in a solidarity economy, environmental defenders in Iranian Kurdistan, and Make Rojava Green Again. Contributors also critically reflect on such contested themes as Alevi nature belief...
This volume offers insights into the role of private supplementary tutoring in the Middle East, and its far-reaching implications for social structures and mainstream education. Around the world, increasing numbers of children receive private tutoring to supplement their schooling. In much of the academic literature this is called shadow education because the content of tutoring commonly mimics that of schooling: as the curriculum changes in the schools, so it changes in the shadow. While much...
Inconceivable Iran (Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives)
by Soraya Tremayne
Celebrating the 50th volume of the landmark Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality series, this book offers a much-needed analysis of shifting reproductive policies and practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a society that is usually represented as either “revolutionary” or “oppressive.” Instead, Tremayne reflects on more than four decades of research arguing that changing reproductive behaviors on the part of ordinary Iranians must always be viewed against the backdrop of core cultural va...
What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of des...
In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the e...
Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citi...
How the political violence of modern jihad echoes the crises of western liberalism In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today’s jihad is not the residue from a less enlightened time, nor does it have much in common with its classical or medieval form, but it does bear a striking resemblance to the reactionary political formations and acts of spectacular violenc...
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...