Until the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the resilience of authoritarian regimes seemed a fundamental feature of regional politics.
Iranian Diaspora Identities: Stories and Songs combines oral history, storytelling, theories of communication, and performance studies into a unique study of an immigrant community.
As the first Gulf city to experience oil urbanization, Kuwait City's transformation in the mid-twentieth century inaugurated a now-familiar regional narrative: a small traditional town of mudbrick courtyard houses and plentiful foot traffic transformed into a modern city with marble-fronted buildings, vast suburbs, and wide highways.
In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy.
In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula.
Maajid Nawaz spent his teenage years listening to American hip-hop and learning about the radical Islamist movement spreading throughout Europe and Asia in the 1980s and 90s.
"e;Laura Bier unpacks the complicated dynamics and legacy of an historical moment in which women were understood to be crucial to modern nation-building.
This book is about a barber, Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, who shaved and coiffed, and probably circumcised and healed, in Damascus in the 18th century.
The rise of political Islam has provoked considerable debate about the compatibility of democracy, tolerance, and pluralism with the Islamist position.
A History of the Modern Middle East offers a comprehensive assessment of the region, stretching from the fourteenth century and the founding of the Ottoman and Safavid empires through to the present-day protests and upheavals.
One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "e;deviant"e; male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years.
Partitioning Palestine is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition-that is, a division of territory and sovereignty-in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.
The story of the succession to the Prophet Muhammad and the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661) is familiar to historians from the political histories of medieval Islam, which treat it as a factual account.
Attitudes toward homosexuality in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as schizophrenic-visible and tolerated on one hand, prohibited by Islam on the other.
In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent.
From the beginning of the colonial period to the recent conflicts in the Middle East, encounters with the Muslim world have helped Americans define national identity and purpose.
The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine.
A chapter-by-chapter explanation of the Book of Exodus, revealing its wisdom about nation building and people formation"e;Kass draws from Exodus' record of the founding of Judaism timely even urgent universal lessons about twenty-first-century preconditions for human flourishing in any community.
A controversial examination of the internal Israeli debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a best-selling Israeli author Since the Six-Day War, Israelis have been entrenched in a national debate over whether to keep the land they conquered or to return some, if not all, of the territories to Palestinians.
A feminist reinterpretation of the myths surrounding Cleopatra casts new light on the Egyptian queen and her legacy "e;A lucid and persuasive reinterpretation.
The first full-scale biography of one of the most important—and enigmatic—leaders in Israeli history Menachem Begin, father of Israel's right wing and sixth prime minister of the nation, was known for his unflinchingly hawkish ideology.
In this eagerly awaited book, political theorist Michael Walzer reports his findings after decades of reading and thinking about the politics of the Hebrew Bible.
A knowledgeable insider provides the first clear view of what has happened in the Arab world and why This important book is not about immediate events or policies or responses to the Arab Spring.
A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities.
A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theoryMigrants in the Profane takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W.
How American conflicts about religion have always symbolized our foundational political values When Americans fight about “religion,” we are also fighting about our conflicting identities, interests, and commitments.
