Middle Eastern history Books
New York University Press A Treasury of Virtues
Book SynopsisInsights into a life of integrity by a master of Arabic eloquenceA Treasury of Virtues is a collection of sayings, sermons, and teachings attributed to 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661), the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, the first Shia Imam and the fourth Sunni Caliph. An acknowledged master of Arabic eloquence and a sage of Islamic wisdom, 'Ali was renowned for his eloquence: his words were collected, quoted, and studied over the centuries, and extensively anthologized, excerpted, and interpreted. Of the many compilations of 'Ali's words, A Treasury of Virtues, compiled by the Fatimid Shafi'i judge al-Quda'i (d. 454/1062), arguably possesses the broadest compass of genres and the largest variety of themes. Included are aphorisms, proverbs, sermons, speeches, homilies, prayers, letters, dialogues, and verse, all of which provide instruction on how to be a morally upstanding human being. The shorter compilation included here, One Hundred Proverbs, is attributed to the emTrade ReviewTahera Qutbuddins edition proves to be definitive A smooth presentation of the Arabic texts and a first-rate English translation. * Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *
£11.99
New York University Press Contemporary Israel
Book SynopsisFor a country smaller than Vermont, with roughly the same population as Honduras, modern Israel receives a remarkable amount of attention. For supporters, it is a unique bastion of democracy in the Middle East, while detractors view it as a racist outpost of Western colonialism. The romanticization of Israel became particularly prominent in 1967, when its military prowess shocked a Jewish world still reeling from the sense of powerlessness dramatized by the Holocaust. That imagery has grown ever more visible, with Israel's supporters idealizing its technological achievements and its opponents attributing almost every problem in the region, if not beyond, to its imperialistic aspirations.The contradictions and competing views of modern Israel are the subject of this book. There is much to consider about modern Israel besides the Middle East conflict. Over the past generation, a substantial body of scholarship has explored numerous aspects of the country, including its approacheTrade ReviewLike any complicated country, Israel is a land of myths and realities. In this volume, Frederick Greenspahn has assembled an outstanding collection of essays that will help readers to distinguish between the two. Israel has changed enormously over its sixty-some years of statehood. As the chapters demonstrate, many images inherited from the past, frozen into the memories of people who pay attention to the country, no longer conform to everyday reality. This volume is a good place to start in making sense of Israel as it is, not as an idealized or mythical entity but as a country coping with an astonishing array of social challenges. -- Kenneth D. Wald,Samuel R. "Bud" Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture & Society, University of FloridaOne of the best new anthologies in the burgeoning field of Israel Studies. For both those unfamiliar with the interdisciplinary study of modern Israel, and those more versed in this scholarship, the books authorsall leading researchers in the fieldoffer a wealth of information and insight on Israels diverse population, its contested national and sub-national identities, and its transforming public and private spaces. . . . A refreshing volume that steers clear of the stale partisan polemics that characterizes much of the current discourse on Israel, this work offers a rich, complex, and deep grasp of Israels multifaceted society and its relationship with both state institutions and the Jewish diaspora. -- Miriam Elman,Syracuse University
£66.60
New York University Press The Book of Charlatans
Book SynopsisUncovering the professional secrets of con artists and swindlers in the medieval Middle EastThe Book of Charlatans is a comprehensive guide to trickery and scams as practiced in the thirteenth century in the cities of the Middle East, especially in Syria and Egypt. The author, al-Jawbari, was well versed in the practices he describes and may well have been a reformed charlatan himself. Divided into thirty chapters, his book reveals the secrets of everyone from Those Who Claim to be Prophets to Those Who Claim to Have Leprosy and Those Who Dye Horses. The material is informed in part by the author's own experience with alchemy, astrology, and geomancy, and in part by his extensive research. The work is unique in its systematic, detailed, and inclusive approach to a subject that is by nature arcane and that has relevance not only for social history but also for the history of science. Covering everything from invisible writing to doctoring gemstones and quack medicine, The Book of Charlatans opens a fascinating window into a subculture of beggars' guilds and professional con artists in the medieval Arab world.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.Trade ReviewA mesmerising account of . . . quacks and tricksters. * The Spectator *Provides us with an unusual glimpse into the street life of medieval Islamic societies rarely captured in more elevated Arabic literary sources. * New York Review of Books *As insightful and entertaining in the 21st century as it was when it was first written… Offers a unique window into the lives of everyday and marginalized people in the Middle East, Northern Africa and West Asia. * AramcoWorld *The Library of Arabic Literature’s production of al-Jawbarī’s unique volume and Davies’s brilliant translation boast of a substantial 'behind-the-scenes' meticulousness that results in a most rewarding reading experience, not only in capturing the underworld of Arabic literature and culture but also in introducing us to the 'stray, less common, words and adding to [our] eloquence' as the protagonists of the maqāmāt do in their wanderings. This edition also showcases Davies’s deceptively effortless style that we also observed in the Library of Arabic Literature’s production of al-Shidyāq’s Leg over Leg. * Speculum *
£26.59
New York University Press The Excellence of the Arabs
Book SynopsisA spirited defense of Arab identity from a time of political unrestIn ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad, the social prestige attached to claims of Arab identity had begun to decline. In The Excellence of the Arabs, the celebrated litterateur Ibn Qutaybah locks horns with those members of his society who belittled Arabness and vaunted the glories of Persian heritage and culture. Instead, he upholds the status of Arabs and their heritage in the face of criticism and uncertainty.The Excellence of the Arabs is in two parts. In the first, Arab Preeminence, which takes the form of an extended argument for Arab privilege, Ibn Qutaybah accuses his opponents of blasphemous envy. In the second, The Excellence of Arab Learning, he describes the fields of knowledge in which he believed pre-Islamic Arabians excelled, including knowledge of the stars, divination, horse husbandry, and poetry. By incorporating extensive excerpts from the poetic heritagethe archive of thTrade ReviewIbn Qutayba’s extraordinary erudition and literary skill are now on view in the LAL Arabic edition and translation at hand, The Excellence of the Arabs . . . The English translation is a page-turner. The Arabic is difficult, but the translators’ command is apparent in how they avoid the complex syntax, verbosity, and numerous repetitions that are characteristic of Classical Arabic. The judiciousness of the series’ decision to opt for English felicity over a more literal English rendering of the Arabic provides the reader with a genuine grasp of what Ibn Qutayba is really saying. All involved are to be congratulated! * Journal of the American Oriental Society *Enriches the Library of Arabic Literature and the growing corpus of translations of books from Arabic into English . . . A true delight to read. * Reading Religion *[A] clear and lively translation. * Al-Ahram Weekly *An excellent example of the narrative sources available to historians of West Asian late antiquity and early Islam. * Speculum *
£13.99
Baylor University Press The Politics of Persecution
Book SynopsisMiddle Eastern Christians are often portrayed as a homogeneous, helpless group ever at the mercy of their Muslim enemies, a situation that only Western powers can remedy. The Politics of Persecution revisits this narrative with a critical eye.Table of Contents Introduction 1. Under Ottoman Rule 2. Religious Mobility 3. A Massacre on Mount Lebanon 4. Agents of Renaissance 5. Christian Zionism 6. The Road to Genocide 7. Minorities in Nation-States 8. A Catastrophe 9. Arab and Christian 10. A Turning Point 11. Petrodollars 12. Challenging Times Epilogue
£20.36
University of Toronto Press The Seed of Wisdom
Book SynopsisThe essays in this volume have as their centre the Ancient Near East, the special field of interest of the distinguished scholar of the University of Toronto whom they honour. The authors, specialists in the languages, history, and culture of the Near, Middle, and Far East, are a group of orientalists, classicists, and mediaevalists from among the membership of the Oriental Club of Toronto. T.J. Miik was himself actively concerned with the founding of the Oriental Club, and served as its first president. Theological studies are represented here by W.G. Lambert's discussion of the role of Nebuchadnezzar I in Babylonian religion, by D.K. Andres' inquiry into the origin of the title "Yahweh, the God of the Heavens," and its significance for post-exile Judaism, by J.W. Wevers' evaluation of contributions to Proto-Septuagini studies, by F.W. Beare's description of the concepts of Zeus in the Hellenistic age, by the examination by John M. Rist of the famous literary fraud which led
£21.59
University of Toronto Press History and Chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty
Book SynopsisThis collection of historical studies is the product of the writer's research for his doctoral dissertation entitled "A Study of the Chronology of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty". It addresses both the chronological succession of the Eighteenth Dynasty as well as cultural and linguistic aspects of accession and inheritance.
£21.59
University of Nebraska Press Transimperial Anxieties
Book SynopsisFrom the late 1850s to the 1940s, multiple colonial projects, often in tension with each other, influenced the formation of local, transimperial, and transnational political identities of Arab Ottoman subjects in the eastern Mediterranean and the Western Hemisphere. Arab Ottoman men, women, and their descendants were generally accepted as whites in a racially stratified Brazilian society. Local anxieties about color and race among white Brazilians and European immigrants, however, soon challenged the white racial status the Brazilian state afforded to Arab Ottoman immigrants. In Transimperial Anxieties José D. Najar analyzes how overlapping transimperial processes of migration and return, community conflicts, and social adaption shaped the gendered, racial, and ethnic identity politics surrounding Arab Ottoman subjects and their descendants in Brazil. Upon arrival to the Brazilian Empire, Arab Ottoman subjects were referred to as turcos, an all-encompasTrade Review“Transimperial Anxieties is an important contribution to the field of Middle East mobility studies. The imperial lens proposed to think through Brazil’s early reception of Ottoman subjects is a new and exciting frame for Middle Eastern mobilities in the region. The rich and diverse sources, skillfully set in conversation, highlight important transitions shaping mobile subjects’ horizons and identify novel and relevant intersections between their circulations and Brazilian imperial and republican economic and social formations. The author’s attention to the gendered dimensions of Brazilian and Syrian Lebanese citizenship in Brazil, to the erasure of women’s labor from family narratives of upward mobility, and to the deployment of gendered Islamophobia in repatriation requests are all novel and welcome.”—Camila Pastor, author of The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French MandateTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Ottomans, Turks, and Syrians in the Brazilin Empire 2. Brazilian-Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy 3. Black Dangerousness and Cannibal Peddlers 4. From Subjects of The Sultan to White Brazilian Citizens 5. Citizenship and Negotiating Whiteness 6. Ottoman and Syrian-Lebanese Immigrant Women Who Paved The Way 7. Repatriating Brazilian Women and Children of Muslim Men: The Gendered Politics of Citizenship 8. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
£48.60
University of Nebraska Press Encountering Palestine
Book SynopsisEncountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better underTrade Review“As Encountering Palestine argues and makes clear ‘the question of Palestine is an inherently geographical one.’ In this collective volume we have a comprehensive account of the geographies of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine—its contours of violence, spatial politics, frictions, intimacies, and resistances. Situating contemporary Palestinian colonial geographies in the past, present, and future, the chapters speak to ongoing struggles for liberation in Palestine and beyond, showing in the process how Palestinian life and, with it, resistance are both local and global.”—Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives“Few works have explored the geographies of encounters. Encountering Palestine adds to the expansive scholarly work on the destructive consequences of settler-colonial spatial politics by formulating encounters as a productive site of meaning-making where Palestinian lives interact with various forms, techniques, and apparatuses of settler-colonial power.”—Somdeep Sen, author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial“Encountering Palestine offers a new set of arguments about how to understand and frame colonial power and colonial encounters in Israel/Palestine. While the ongoing violence of Israeli colonialism and what the editors refer to as Palestinian woundedness slips in and out of the mainstream media, many chapters bring to the fore why this situation remains urgent even as so much of the violence described is slow or quiet. This collection makes a clear contribution to studies of Palestine/Israel and colonial studies more broadly.”—Christopher Harker, author of Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine
£69.70
University of Nebraska Press Encountering Palestine
Book SynopsisEncountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better underTrade Review“As Encountering Palestine argues and makes clear ‘the question of Palestine is an inherently geographical one.’ In this collective volume we have a comprehensive account of the geographies of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine—its contours of violence, spatial politics, frictions, intimacies, and resistances. Situating contemporary Palestinian colonial geographies in the past, present, and future, the chapters speak to ongoing struggles for liberation in Palestine and beyond, showing in the process how Palestinian life and, with it, resistance are both local and global.”—Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives“Few works have explored the geographies of encounters. Encountering Palestine adds to the expansive scholarly work on the destructive consequences of settler-colonial spatial politics by formulating encounters as a productive site of meaning-making where Palestinian lives interact with various forms, techniques, and apparatuses of settler-colonial power.”—Somdeep Sen, author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial“Encountering Palestine offers a new set of arguments about how to understand and frame colonial power and colonial encounters in Israel/Palestine. While the ongoing violence of Israeli colonialism and what the editors refer to as Palestinian woundedness slips in and out of the mainstream media, many chapters bring to the fore why this situation remains urgent even as so much of the violence described is slow or quiet. This collection makes a clear contribution to studies of Palestine/Israel and colonial studies more broadly.”—Christopher Harker, author of Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, PalestineTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Encountering Palestine, Un/doing Power Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen 1. An Intimate Occupation: Governing Love in Occupied Palestine Kathryn Medien 2. Settler Capitalism and Its Witches: Palestinian Bedouin Women Struggling for Space and the Commons in the Naqab Sophie Richter-Devroe 3. Encountering the Israeli War Machine: Imminent (In)security, Vortical Violence, Rhizomatic Sumud Wassim Ghantous 4. The Regavim Show: Settler Colonialism, Simulacra, and Mirroring Mark Griffiths 5. Staying with the Failures: Iron Dome and Zionist Security “Innovation” Rhys Machold 6. Neo-Apartheid Jerusalem: Palestine/Israel and the Question of Urban Apartheid Haim Yacobi and Moriel Ram 7. Expectations to Fulfill: Anticipating the Familial Future in Palestinian Refugee Camps Tiina Järvi 8. Surreal Resistance in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention Arun Saldanha 9. Queering Esthesis: Unsettling the Zionist Sensual Regime Walaa Alqaisiya 10. Life of the Wounded: Rethinking Settler Colonial Power in Palestine Mikko Joronen Elegy for Return Zena Agha Contributors Index
£21.59
MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi The Comics of Rutu Modan War Love and Secrets
Book SynopsisProvides a close reading of Rutu Modan's work and examines her role in creating a comics arts scene in Israel. Drawing on archival research, Kevin Haworth traces the history of Israeli comics from its beginning in the 1930s, to the counterculture movement of the 1970s, to the burst of creativity that began in the 1990s and continues today.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Orhan Pamuk
Book SynopsisIn over thirty interviews ranging from 1982 until 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement. This volume presents an alternative literary history that traces the dominant themes of the author's oeuvre.
£77.35
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Orhan Pamuk
Book SynopsisIn over thirty interviews ranging from 1982 until 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement. This volume presents an alternative literary history that traces the dominant themes of the author’s oeuvre.
£19.90
Cornell University Press Everyday Piety
Book SynopsisWorking and living as an authentic Muslimcomporting oneself in an Islamically appropriate wayin the global economy can be very challenging. How do middle-class Muslims living in the Middle East navigate contemporary economic demands in a distinctly Islamic way? What are the impacts of these efforts on their Islamic piety? To what authority does one turn when questions arise? What happens when the answers vary and there is little or no consensus? To answer these questions, Everyday Piety examines the intersection of globalization and Islamic religious life in the city of Amman, Jordan.Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, Sarah A. Tobin demonstrates that Muslims combine their interests in exerting a visible Islam with the opportunities and challenges of advanced capitalism in an urban setting, which ultimately results in the cultivation of a neoliberal Islamic piety. Neoliberal piety, Tobin contends, is created by both Islamizing economic practices and ecTrade ReviewThrough her examination of Islamic banking, Tobin explores the role that piety plays in the commercial interactions of middle-class Muslims in Jordan's capital, Amman.... Her stylish, ambitious, and pragmatic interlocutors undermine any stale conceptions readers might have of contemporary Muslims, and her treatment of the workplace as a space where moral debates are negotiated points to the social significance of work relationships and their related social dynamics. The book's accessible and sensitive treatment of urban Jordanians and the role of morality in their economic choices make it a fine choice for students as well as scholars interested in the topics of work, identity, religion, and global finance. -- Susan MacDougall, Oxford University * Anthropology of Work Review *Provides vivid insight into people's complex engagements with piety across a range of contexts.... Its subject matter, theoretical sophistication, and detailed fieldwork make this book a valuable resource for scholars and students of the Middle East, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of Islam. * Contemporary Islam *Table of Contents1 A Muslim Plays the Slot Machines 2 The History of Amman: "I Don't Recognize It Anymore" 3 Making It Meaningful: Ramadan 4 Love, Sex, and the Market: The Hijab 5 Making It Real: Adequation 6 Uncertainty Inside the Islamic Bank: "Is This the Real Islam?" 7 Consuming Islamic Banking: "They Say They’re Islamic, So They Are." 8 Branding Islam: Jordan’s Arab Spring, Middle Class, and Islam
£81.00
Cornell University Press Everyday Piety
Book SynopsisWorking and living as an authentic Muslimcomporting oneself in an Islamically appropriate wayin the global economy can be very challenging. How do middle-class Muslims living in the Middle East navigate contemporary economic demands in a distinctly Islamic way? What are the impacts of these efforts on their Islamic piety? To what authority does one turn when questions arise? What happens when the answers vary and there is little or no consensus? To answer these questions, Everyday Piety examines the intersection of globalization and Islamic religious life in the city of Amman, Jordan.Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, Sarah A. Tobin demonstrates that Muslims combine their interests in exerting a visible Islam with the opportunities and challenges of advanced capitalism in an urban setting, which ultimately results in the cultivation of a neoliberal Islamic piety. Neoliberal piety, Tobin contends, is created by both Islamizing economic practices and ecTrade ReviewThrough her examination of Islamic banking, Tobin explores the role that piety plays in the commercial interactions of middle-class Muslims in Jordan's capital, Amman.... Her stylish, ambitious, and pragmatic interlocutors undermine any stale conceptions readers might have of contemporary Muslims, and her treatment of the workplace as a space where moral debates are negotiated points to the social significance of work relationships and their related social dynamics. The book's accessible and sensitive treatment of urban Jordanians and the role of morality in their economic choices make it a fine choice for students as well as scholars interested in the topics of work, identity, religion, and global finance. -- Susan MacDougall, Oxford University * Anthropology of Work Review *Provides vivid insight into people's complex engagements with piety across a range of contexts.... Its subject matter, theoretical sophistication, and detailed fieldwork make this book a valuable resource for scholars and students of the Middle East, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of Islam. * Contemporary Islam *Table of Contents1 A Muslim Plays the Slot Machines 2 The History of Amman: "I Don't Recognize It Anymore" 3 Making It Meaningful: Ramadan 4 Love, Sex, and the Market: The Hijab 5 Making It Real: Adequation 6 Uncertainty Inside the Islamic Bank: "Is This the Real Islam?" 7 Consuming Islamic Banking: "They Say They’re Islamic, So They Are." 8 Branding Islam: Jordan’s Arab Spring, Middle Class, and Islam
£21.24
Cornell University Press The Peace Puzzle
Book SynopsisEach phase of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has been inordinately difficult in its own right, and every critical juncture and decision point in the long process has been shaped by U.S. politics and the U.S. leaders of the moment. The Peace Puzzle tracks the American determination to articulate policy, develop strategy and tactics, and see through negotiations to agreements on an issue that has been of singular importance to U.S. interests for more than forty years. In 2006, the authors of The Peace Puzzle formed the Study Group on Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, a project supported by the United States Institute of Peace, to develop a set of best practices for American diplomacy. The Study Group conducted in-depth interviews with more than 120 policymakers, diplomats, academics, and civil society figures and developed performance assessments of the various U.S. administrations of the postCold War period. This book, an objective account of the role of the United States in attempting to aTrade ReviewThe collective Middle East experience of the authors is unsurpassed. Their analysis is terse, and their portrait of U.S. efforts to broker Arab-Israeli peace is bleak.... The authors assert that American policymakers must address the core issues, transform their natural bias toward Israel into a positive factor, recapture bipartisan resolve to tackle the issue, maintain continuity across administrations, and persuade the Israelis and the Palestinians that Washington understands and respects their fundamental interests. * Foreign Affairs *The originality of this new book is to propose a distanced analysis that draws on 120 interviews with the implied decision-makers of American political involvement in the Middle East from 1989-2011...The authors take care to compare the remarks of their interviewees with available official documents, journalist investigations, as well as already-publicized testimonies. The result is a study that draws constantly on its foundational material, citing interviews that support and enrich the argument. * Politique Américaine *A must-read for anyone who desires to truly understand this critical and complex quest for Middle East peace. * Israel Book Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Decline of American Mideast Diplomacy 1. Opportunities Created, Opportunities Lost: Negotiations at Oslo and Madrid 2. Within Reach: Israeli- Syrian Negotiations of the 1990s 3. The Collapse of the Israeli- Palestinian Negotiations 4. George W. Bush Reshapes America's Role 5. The Annapolis Denouement 6. Obama: An Early Assessment Epilogue: Lessons Learned and UnlearnedNotes Index
£23.74
Cornell University Press Order out of Chaos
Book SynopsisOrder out of Chaos explains why Iraqis turned to the mosque after state collapse. In 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq destroyed the Bathist state. Despite this the citizens of Basra established predictable routines of daily life and social order as the familiar and customary structures of state-imposed order collapsed. What enabled individuals in Basra to work together to produce order amid anarchy? The answer: the Friday mosque. A week after the regime fell, Shii imams introduced Friday congregational prayers and associated sermons for the first time in most places since the 1950s. These sermons facilitated the spread of common knowledge and coordination, both locally and nationally, and contributed to the emergence of a relatively cohesive imagined community of Iraqi Shia that came to dominate Iraq''s political order.Combining rational choice approaches, ethnographic understanding, and GIS analysis, David Siddhartha Patel reveals the interconnecTable of Contents1. Order, Authority, and Identity 2. The Sanctions-Era Roots of Postinvasion Developments 3. Collapse 4. The Emergence of Local Orders 5. The Geography of Order 6. Ayatollahs' Networks and National Authority 7. The Limits of Sunni Religious Authority 8. Beyond Basra and Beyond Sermons
£97.20
Cornell University Press Labor in Israel
Book SynopsisUsing a comprehensive analysis of the wave of organizing that swept the country starting in 2007, Labor in Israel investigates the changing political status of organized labor in the context of changes to Israel's political economy, including liberalization, the rise of non-union labor organizations, the influx of migrant labor, and Israel's complex relations with the Palestinians. Through his discussion of organized labor's relationship to the political community and its nationalist political role, Preminger demonstrates that organized labor has lost the powerful status it enjoyed for much of Israel's history. Despite the weakening of trade unions and the Histadrut, however, he shows the ways in which the fragmentation of labor representation has created opportunities for those previously excluded from the labor movement regime.Organized labor is now trying to renegotiate its place in contemporary Israel, a society that no longer accepts labor's longstanding claim to Trade ReviewThe volume informatively covers an immense amount of ground, including disputes involving doctors, cleaners, journalists, social workers, cellphone industry workers, railway workers, and port workers—and the changing roles of Palestinian workers. * Choice *Charting the tensions between the waning corporatism of the 'old guard' and a new wave of worker activism, Jonathan Preminger's accessible book contributes an insightful examination of legitimacy and democracy in Israel's labour movement. * British Journal of Industrial Relations *
£47.70
Cornell University Press Dark Pasts
Book SynopsisOver the past two decades, many states have heard demands that they recognize and apologize for historic wrongs. Such calls have not elicited uniform or predictable responses. While some states have apologized for past crimes, others continue to silence, deny, and relativize dark pasts. What explains the tremendous variation in how states deal...Trade ReviewDixon offers valuable insights into how a country addresses its past horrors. This book offers some reassurance to those who fight for change, demonstrating that their efforts can be effective. * Choice *Dixon has made an extremely valuable contribution to the growing and vibrant literature on the politics of memory and apology. Dark Pasts deserves to be widely read in the scholarly community and is sure to find use in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses. * Perspectives on Politics *The book powerfully demonstrates how Japan and Turkey have walked the tightrope of maintaining "plausibility and legitimacy". Through interviews with diplomats and analysts and the exploration of textbooks, newspapers, and other publications, Dixon distills more than fifty years' worth of official narrative in two states five thousand miles apart into a well-argued, systematic analysis of governments' struggles with uncomfortable truths. * H-Diplo *Jennifer Dixon has written a path-breaking book that is a model of scholarship, one rich in both detail and analysis, and beautifully written. * Genocide Studies International *The official narratives of Turkey and Japan in regard to their respective 'dark pasts,' like Dixon's book cover, are both deceptively aesthetic on the surface while containing many layers. Dixon unpacks them well. * The Armenian Weekly *Jennifer Dixon has made a substantive contribution to the study of state narratives with Dark Pasts.... In this elegant and riveting book, Dixon develops a causal model of narrative change for state denial or apology for atrocities committed against civilians.... Dixon's range of methods...makes her own storytelling in the book emotionally vibrant and thus eminently readable, while also being rigorously supported with empirical evidence. * Political Psychology *Dark Pasts will be a reference for studies of memory politics in all parts of the world with troubled pasts. The book's excellence in collecting and analyzing archival and interview data should guide historically informed social science scholarship. The theoretical framework and the findings give scholars of history, memory, human rights, nationalism, and international relations much to think about and debate. * Nationalities Papers *Dark Pasts represents an important advancement in the study of atrocities, state memory, and international norms. This book will be of value to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in human rights and questions of post-conflict justice more generally, as well as Turkey and Japan more specifically. * Nations and Nationalism *Dark Pasts is not only a fascinating account of Turkish and Japanese narrative change; it also valuably contributes to scholarship on what makes certain forms of politics possible and impossible in varying contexts... helps us understand not only why states struggle with contrition, but also how international legitimacy seeking tempers nationalist glorification of human rights abuses. * Journal of Genocide Research *Table of ContentsList of Acronyms Acknowledgments Introduction: Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts? 1. Changing the State's Story 2. The Armenian Genocide and Its Aftermath 3. From Silencing to Mythmaking (1950–early 1990s) 4. Playing Hardball (1994–2008) 5. The Nanjing Massacre and the Second Sino-Japanese War 6. "History Issues" in the Postwar Period (1952–1989) 7. Unfreezing the Question of History (1990–2008) Conclusion: The Politics of Dark Pasts Appendix 1: Research Conducted Appendix 2: Turkish High School History Textbooks Analyzed Notes References Index
£88.33
Cornell University Press Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands
Book SynopsisEmpire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands engages with the evolving historiography around the concept of belonging in the Russian and Ottoman empires. The contributors to this book argue that the popular notion that empires do not care about belonging is simplistic and wrong.Chapters address numerous and varied dimensions of belonging in multiethnic territories of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. They illustrate both the mutability and the durability of imperial belonging in Eurasian borderlands.Contributors to this volume pay attention to state authorities but also to the voices and experiences of teachers, linguists, humanitarian officials, refugees, deportees, soldiers, nomads, and those left behind. Through those voices the authors interrogate the mutual shaping of empire and nation, noting the persistence and frequency of coercive measures that imposed belonging or denTrade ReviewEmpire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands is an edited volume of thematically and regionally similar papers that resulted from a conference held at the University of Michigan in October 2016. Ronald Suny sums the book up concisely with a brilliant discussion of empire and nation that ties together the book's themes and demonstrates the insight and breadth of vision that he has gained over his re-markable career. Given the geopolitical events of today, the lessons learned from this body of research draw our attention to some of the more insidious things that oft en result for people living in the border-lands of great empires. * Historical Geography *Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands is a very strong collection and a fitting tribute to Suny, its essays steeped in broad historical and theoretical knowledge, and full of surprising and revelatory detail about those spaces, peoples and states in Eurasia's borderlands. * Eurasian Geography and Economics *The book's structure and the clarity of the essays make it a worthy addition to any course for undergraduate and graduate students learning about nationalities and identities in Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union. * Europe-Asia Studies *Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands showcases a vibrant new historical literature that focuses on the entanglements of the Russian/Soviet and Ottoman/Turkish states along their margins. This is an excellent volume with uniformly high-quality contributions. Taken together, the editors and authors of Empire and Belonging make significant contributions to the study of nation and empire in Eurasia.Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands showcases a vibrant new historical literature that focuses on the entanglements of the Russian/Soviet and Ottoman/Turkish states along their margins, where identities and allegiances were continually shifting. This is an excellent volume with uniformly high-quality contributions. [T]he editors and authors [...] make significant contributions to the study of nation and empire in Eurasia[.] * Journal of Modern History *Table of ContentsPreface List of Illustrations Introduction: Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands 1. Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borderlands: A Comparative Perspective from the Russian and Ottoman Empires Part One: Negations of Belonging 2. Bloody Belonging: Writing Transcaspia into the Russian Empire 3. The Armenian Genocide of 1915: Lineaments of a Comparative History 4. "Do you want me to exterminate all of them or just the ones who oppose us?": The 1916 Revolt in Semirech'e 5. "What Are They Doing? After All, We're Not Germans": Expulsion, Belonging, and Postwar Experience Part Two: Belonging via Standardization 6. Developing a Soviet Armenian Nation: Refugees and Resettlement in the Early Soviet South Caucasus 7. Reforming the Language of Our Nation: Dictionaries, Identity, and the Tatar Lexical Revolution, 1900–1970 8. Speaking Soviet with an Armenian Accent: Literacy, Language Ideology, and Belonging in Early Soviet Armenia Part Three: Belonging and Mythmaking 9. Making a Home for the Soviet People: World War II and the Origins of the Sovetskii Narod 10. Dismantling "Georgia's Spiritual Mission": Sacral Ethnocentrism, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, and Primordial Awakenings at the Soviet Collapse 11. New Borders, New Belongings in Central Asia: Competing Visions and the Decoupling of the Soviet Union Conclusion Notes Contributors Index
£45.90
Cornell University Press Recasting Islamic Law
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Constitutions and the Making and Unmaking of Egyptian Nationalism 1. Constitutions, National Culture, and Rethinking Islamism 2. The Sharia as State Law 3. Constitution Making in Egypt Part II: Recasting Islamic Law: Case Studies 4. The Ulama, Religious Authority, and the State 5. The "Divinely Revealed Religions" 6. The Family Is the Basis of Society 7. Judicial Autonomy and Inheritance Conclusion
£17.09
Cornell University Press Cultivating the Past Living the Modern
Book SynopsisCultivating the Past, Living the Modern explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in building the modern nation state of Oman. Amal Sachedina analyses the relations with the past that undergird the shift in Oman from an Ibadi shari''a Imamate (19131958) to a modern nation state from 1970 onwards. Since its inception as a nation state, material forms in the Sultanate of Omansuch as old mosques and shari''a manuscripts, restored forts, national symbols such as the coffee pot or the dagger (khanjar), and archaeological siteshave saturated the landscape, becoming increasingly ubiquitous as part of a standardized public and visual memorialization of the past. Oman''s expanding heritage industry, exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, street montages, and cultural festivals, shapes a distinctly national geography and territorialized narrative. But Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern demonstraTrade ReviewParticularly compelling is the book's attention to the ways the shift from premodern forms of governance premised upon certain kinds of Islamic ethical practice and engagement with the divine are reworked through this transition, with consequences for the social, political, and material worlds premised on these relations. This book offers many important insights, making it an excellent contribution to the anthropologies of Islam and the Middle East, the history of the Arabian Gulf, and critical scholarly perspectives on material heritage practices. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Heritage Discourse and Its Alterities 1. Reform and Revolt through the Pen and the Sword 2. Nizwa Fort and the Dalla during the Imamate 3. Museum Effects 4. Ethics of History Making 5. Nizwa, City of Memories 6. Nizwa's Lasting Legacy of Slavery 7. The al-Lawati as a Historical Category Conclusion: Cultivating the Past
£23.39
Cornell University Press Order out of Chaos
Book SynopsisOrder out of Chaos explains why Iraqis turned to the mosque after state collapse. In 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq destroyed the Bathist state. Despite this the citizens of Basra established predictable routines of daily life and social order as the familiar and customary structures of state-imposed order collapsed. What enabled individuals in Basra to work together to produce order amid anarchy? The answer: the Friday mosque. A week after the regime fell, Shii imams introduced Friday congregational prayers and associated sermons for the first time in most places since the 1950s. These sermons facilitated the spread of common knowledge and coordination, both locally and nationally, and contributed to the emergence of a relatively cohesive imagined community of Iraqi Shia that came to dominate Iraq''s political order.Combining rational choice approaches, ethnographic understanding, and GIS analysis, David Siddhartha Patel reveals the interconnecTable of Contents1. Order, Authority, and Identity 2. The Sanctions-Era Roots of Postinvasion Developments 3. Collapse 4. The Emergence of Local Orders 5. The Geography of Order 6. Ayatollahs' Networks and National Authority 7. The Limits of Sunni Religious Authority 8. Beyond Basra and Beyond Sermons
£24.29
Cornell University Press The One State Reality
Book SynopsisThe One State Reality argues that a one state reality already predominates in the territories controlled by the state of Israel. The editors show that starting with the one state reality rather than hoping for a two state solution reshapes how we regard the conflict, what we consider acceptable and unacceptable solutions, and how we discuss difficult normative questions. The One State Reality forces a reconsideration of foundational concepts such as state, sovereignty, and nation; encourages different readings of history; shifts conversation about solutions from two states to alternatives that borrow from other political contexts; and provides context for confronting uncomfortable questions such as whether Israel/Palestine is an apartheid state.
£97.20
Cornell University Press A Lost Peace
Book SynopsisIn A Lost Peace, Galen Jackson rewrites an important chapter in the history of the middle period of the Cold War, changing how we think about the Arab-Israeli conflict.During the June 1967 Middle East war, Israeli forces seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. This conflict was followed, in October 1973, by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel, which threatened to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation even though the superpowers had seemingly embraced the idea of détente. This conflict contributed significantly to the ensuing deterioration of US-Soviet relations.The standard explanation for why détente failed is that the Soviet Union, driven mainly by its Communist ideology, pursued a highly aggressive foreign policy during the 1970s. In the Middle East specifically, the conventional wisdom is that the Soviets play
£38.25
Cornell University Press Households in Context
Book SynopsisHouseholds in Context shifts the focus from monumental temples, tombs, and elite material and visual culture to households and domestic life to provide a crucial new perspective on everyday dwelling practices and the interactions of families and individuals with larger social and cultural structures. A focus on households reveals the power of the everyday: the critical role of quotidian experiences, objects, and images in creating the worlds of the people who live with them. The contributors to this book share contemporary research on houses and households in both Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt to reshape the ways we think about ancient people''s lived experiences of family, community, and society. Households in Context places the archaeology and history of Greco-Roman Egypt in dialogue with research on dwelling, daily practice, and materiality to reveal how ancient households functioned as laboratories for social, political, economic, and religious chaTable of ContentsIntroduction: Houses, Households, and Homes: Toward an Archaeology ofDwelling Households in Spatial Context: Settlements, Neighborhoods, and Urbanism 1. Egyptian Houses in Their Urban and Environmental Contexts: Some Case Studies of the Roman and Late Roman Periods 2. Neighborhood Networks: The Civic and Social Organization of Accessways in Ancient Karanis 3. The Tower Houses of the Hellenistic Period: A Solution to the Urban Pressure within Egyptian Towns and Villages Households in Social Context: Families, Individuals, and Communities 4. The Papyrus Trail: Houses and Households in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt 5. Habitatio: Transfer of Houses and Rights of Residence in Roman Egypt 6. Unsafe Houses in Greco-Roman Egypt: Forms and Locations of Violence Households in Practice: Production, Consumption, and Discard 7. Modes of Production and Reproduction in Roman-Era Egyptian Villages 8. Domestic Discard: The Making and Unmaking of Romano-Egyptian Houses Households in Cosmic Context: Religion and Ritual 9. Figurines and the Material Culture of Domestic Religion 10. The Supernatural Vulnerabilities of Domestic Space in Late Antique Egypt: Perspectives from the "Magical" Corpus Expanding the Household: Dwelling Practices in Monastic and Military Contexts 11. Three Monks and a House: The Archaeology of Monastic Houses in Byzantine Egypt Domestic Activities in Alternative Settings: The Ptolemaic Fort at Bi'r Samut, Egypt Afterwords: Perspectives from Pharaonic Egypt and the Classical World 1. Greco-Roman Households in Pharaonic Perspective 2. Contextualizing Houses, Households, and Homes in the Classical World and Beyond
£27.54
Cornell University Press The Fragmentary City
Book SynopsisAs Andrew M. Gardner explains in The Fragmentary City, in Qatar and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, nearly nine out of every ten residents are foreign noncitizens. Many of these foreigners reside in the cities that have arisen in Qatar and neighboring states. The book provides an overview of the gulf migration system with its diverse migrant experiences. Gardner focuses on the ways that demography and global mobility have shaped the city of Doha and the urban characteristics of the Arabian Peninsula in general. Building on those migrant experiences, the book turns to the spatial politics of the modern Arabian city, exploring who is placed where in the city and how this social landscape came into historical existence. The author reflects on what we might learn from these cities and the societies that inhabit them. In The Fragmentary City, Andrew M. Gardner frames the contemporary cities of the Arabian Peninsula not as poor imitations of W
£97.20
MB - Cornell University Press The Fragmentary City
Book SynopsisAs Andrew M. Gardner explains in The Fragmentary City, in Qatar and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, nearly nine out of every ten residents are foreign noncitizens. Many of these foreigners reside in the cities that have arisen in Qatar and neighboring states. The book provides an overview of the gulf migration system with its diverse migrant experiences. Gardner focuses on the ways that demography and global mobility have shaped the city of Doha and the urban characteristics of the Arabian Peninsula in general. Building on those migrant experiences, the book turns to the spatial politics of the modern Arabian city, exploring who is placed where in the city and how this social landscape came into historical existence. The author reflects on what we might learn from these cities and the societies that inhabit them. In The Fragmentary City, Andrew M. Gardner frames the contemporary cities of the Arabian Peninsula not as poor imitations of W
£19.79
Cornell University Press Mission Manifest
Book SynopsisIn Mission Manifest, Matthew Shannon argues that American evangelicals were central to American-Iranian relations during the decades leading up to the 1979 revolution. These Presbyterian missionaries and other Americans with ideals worked with US government officials, nongovernmental organizations, and their Iranian counterparts as cultural and political brokersthe living sinews of a binational relationship during the Second World War and early Cold War. As US global hegemony peaked between the 1940s and the 1960s, the religious authority of the Presbyterian Mission merged with the material power of the American state to infuse US foreign relations with the messianic ideals of Christian evangelicalism. In Tehran, the missions of American evangelicals became manifest in the realms of religion, development programs, international education, and cultural associations. Americans who lived in Iran also returned to the United States to inform the growth
£40.50
Stanford University Press Copts and the Security State: Violence, Coercion,
Book SynopsisCopts and the Security State combines political, anthropological, and social history to analyze the practices of the Egyptian state and the political acts of the Egyptian Coptic minority. Laure Guirguis considers how the state, through its subjugation of Coptic citizens, reproduces a political order based on religious identity and difference. The leadership of the Coptic Church, in turn, has taken more political stances, thus foreclosing opportunities for secularization or common ground. In each instance, the underlying logics of authoritarianism and sectarianism articulate a fear of the Other, and, as Guirguis argues, are ultimately put to use to justify the expanding Egyptian security state. In outlining the development of the security state, Guirguis focuses on state discourses and practices, with particular emphasis on the period of Hosni Mubarak's rule, and shows the transformation of the Orthodox Coptic Church under the leadership of Pope Chenouda III. She also considers what could be done to counter the growing tensions and violence in Egypt. The 2011 Egyptian uprising constitutes the most radical recent attempt to subvert the predominant order. Still, the revolutionary discourses and practices have not yet brought forward a new system to counter the sectarian rhetoric, and the ongoing counter-revolution continues to repress political dissent.Trade Review"Combining theoretical sophistication and vivid narrative, Copts and the Security State lays bare the technologies of power linking authoritarianism and sectarianism in Egypt. Laure Guirguis's analysis of the Coptic community, national politics, and international struggles over minority rights since the 1950s is a must-read for anyone interested in Egypt's Arab Spring, Christian experiences in the Middle East, and the logics of identity discourse and structural violence in modern states." -- Nancy Reynolds * Washington University in St. Louis *"In this well-researched, rigorous, and theoretically informed book, Laure Guirguis presents fresh, nuanced thinking on the understudied case of Egypt's Copts. This is an important and profound study of the relationship between the state and the Copts in Egypt." -- Lina Khatib, Head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme * Chatham House *"Laure Guirguis's book stands out for shining ample light on one of the largest and oldest Christian minorities in the Middle East—the Copts of Egypt.... Guirguis's erudite book is a timely and fundamental contribution, given that minorities are indispensable for diversity and pluralism in this deeply embattled region.... Any reader interested in Egypt, or in minorities in the region, will find the book informative and enlightening." -- Ibrahim Zabad * Journal of Church and State *"Guirguis presents an important and fresh approach to the studies of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East." -- Mina Ibrahim * Asian Journal of Social Science *"Based on the research presented in this book, Guirguis is quite possibly the best-informed commentator on Coptic affairs writing in English." -- Paul S. Rowe * Bustan *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Institutionalized Violence and the Identity-State chapter abstractAlthough sectarianism depends on a juridical and political order partly inherited from the Ottoman Empire, this legacy does not explain its contemporary specificities. Sectarianism has endured to the extent that the modern state has consolidated it, while profoundly modifying it. In other words, the state is the principal agent enforcing sectarianism. 2Purity as an Embodiment of Security? chapter abstractThis chapter deals with the formation of national and community imaginaires from the nineteenth century to the present day. During the nineteenth-century nation- and state-building processes, religion became an identity marker defining both nation and state in opposition to the occupying powers, which were considered as Christian. By the same token, group-representations — Egyptian nationalist, Coptic, or Islamist —became embedded in this logic of exclusion that governs the definition of the self and the other, and that mobilizes fear. 3The Coptic Church as Space of Resistance and Ally of the Regime chapter abstractThis chapter offers an analysis of the infra-community dynamics that have bolstered sectarianism. It shows how the transformation of the Church under Shenuda III and the contemporary politicization of the minority phenomenon were determined reciprocally, and how they also both depended on the relationship between the Church and the regimes. 4Intracommunitarian Dynamics and Tensions chapter abstractThis chapter sheds light on various dynamics in the community scene, from clerical rivalries to youth dissent to new kinds of religiosity and opposition to the Patriarch. Indeed, since the 2000s the clerical hierarchy's unconditional support for the regime has been the subject of ever-increasing criticism from Coptic youth and reformers. 5Sectarianism, Authoritarianism, and the Dynamics of Fear chapter abstractThis chapter continues an analysis of the interconnection between identity and authoritarian logics. Instead of focusing on the distinction between authoritarian and democratic regimes and the alleged transition to democracy, the chapter relies on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. This concept allows us to further an analysis of the exercise of social, political, and symbolic power in contemporary societies and to combine the analysis of micro- and macro-powers. This chapter shows how the controlled pluralization of the Egyptian political scene has strengthened sectarianism, though not without several changes, and it pays special attention to Muslim Brotherhood attitudes toward Copts. 6Contesting Sectarianism chapter abstractThe sixth chapter presents the Coptic strategies of resistance to state-imposed processes of minoritization. In return, it shows how the regime and the Coptic Church have integrated or neutralized critics. Finally, it interrogates the impact of advocacy activisms on social changes, while slightly shifting the terms of debate on the role of "civil society:" if the world is now in a phase of "de-democratization" how then should we reassess the impact of advocacy activisms and of the January 25 revolution on social and political change? Conclusion: 2011-2015: Subversion and the Restoration of Identity Logic chapter abstractThis chapter outlines the dynamics of the January 25 revolution and shows how the counter revolutionary governments of former President Muhammad Morsi and current President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi have reactivated sectarian discourses. While the January 25 revolution constitutes the most radical attempt to break the vicious circle of violence and sectarianism, revolutionary practices had not yet invented a coherent system of meaning that would replace the old one. And, the ongoing counter-revolution has established a new regime of fear.
£23.39
Stanford University Press Bread and Freedom: Egypt's Revolutionary
Book SynopsisA multivocal account of why Egypt's defeated revolution remains a watershed in the country's political history. Bread and Freedom offers a new account of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary mobilization, based on a documentary record hidden in plain sight—party manifestos, military communiqués, open letters, constitutional contentions, protest slogans, parliamentary debates, and court decisions. A rich trove of political arguments, the sources reveal a range of actors vying over the fundamental question in politics: who holds ultimate political authority. The revolution's tangled events engaged competing claims to sovereignty made by insurgent forces and entrenched interests alike, a vital contest that was terminated by the 2013 military coup and its aftermath. Now a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, Mona El-Ghobashy rethinks how we study revolutions, looking past causes and consequences to train our sights on the collisions of revolutionary politics. She moves beyond the simple judgments that once celebrated Egypt's revolution as an awe-inspiring irruption of people power or now label it a tragic failure. Revisiting the revolutionary interregnum of 2011–2013, Bread and Freedom takes seriously the political conflicts that developed after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, an eventful thirty months when it was impossible to rule Egypt without the Egyptians.Trade Review"Mona El-Ghobashy adds a new perspective to the canonical view of the Arab Spring with the immensely readable and thoughtfully constructed Bread and Freedom. Starting from Charles Tilly's insight that revolutions are more like traffic jams than eclipses of the sun, El-Ghobashy revisits how an Egyptian protest became a revolutionary situation."—Sidney G. Tarrow, Cornell University"If you read only one book on the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring, make it Bread and Freedom. Mona El-Ghobashy leads the reader behind the scenes to the real battles of 2011, for a rewarding read that challenges everything you thought you knew about revolutionary uprisings. A rare treat."—Elizabeth F. Thompson, American University"In this gripping political history, Mona El-Ghobashy overturns conventional dramaturgical narratives of Egypt's 2011 uprising as marked by hopeful beginnings and calamitous endings. Instead, she captures the uncertainty and interstitial quality of Egypt's interregnum as a 'revolutionary situation.' Marked by analytical rigor and immense narrative detail, Bread and Freedom is a must-read for anyone concerned with deeper conceptual questions surrounding the entanglement of revolution and democracy."—Omnia El Shakry, University of California, Davis"With an unusual command of detail and an uncommon facility with social science theory, El-Ghobashy recounts the years of upheaval in Egypt between the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak and the 2014 election of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi... As El-Ghobashy elegantly shows, it is small wonder that the politics of those years seemed so confusing and uncertain. They were, for actors and observers alike—and she provides much welcome clarity."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs"This is essential reading for specialists of Egyptian politics and theorists of revolution, as well as scholars of authoritarianism, contentious politics, and regime transition... Bread and Freedomwill spur important conversations. And hopefully, with time, it will facilitate the shared understandings that are necessary for Egyptians to build a common future."—Tamir Moustafa, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Bread and Freedomis well-written and thoroughly researched, and it utilizes a wide range of secondary sources. El-Ghobashy revives an old concept but pushes the reader to rethink revolutions by focusing on uncertainty. Her argument that focuses on uncertainty through the concept of a revolutionary situation holds up to the evidence... She thus encourages the reader to understand revolutions and their aftermath not as pre-determined events but as unpredictable competitions among multiple sovereignty claims that strive to end revolutionary situations."—Sarp Kurgan, Middle East Librarians Association"Mona El-Ghobashy's Bread and Freedom is a richly detailed and theoretically deft unsettling of arguments that Egypt's Arab Spring trajectory was linear or preordained. Adopting the concept of a "revolutionary situation," she highlights how circumstance, uncertainty, and reaction interacted to drive forward events on the ground...Bread and Freedom narrates Egypt's "revolutionary situation" as a series of critical junctures, each produced by some prior interaction, and in turn generative of a new one."—Steven Brooke, Perspectives on PoliticsMona el-Ghobashy's Bread and Freedom offers perhaps the single best narrative of Egypt from 2011 to the present which has yet been written. Her finely grained, beautifully crafted storytelling reveals the sheer complexity of the revolutionary period and the multiplicity of actors trying to navigate a profoundly uncertain environment."—Marc Lynch, Project on Middle East Political Science"Bread and Freedom is an exceptional work that offers a clear analysis of the Egyptian revolution of 2011—a notably confusing case. It also presents a novel and refreshing assessment of scholarship on both the Egyptian case specifically, and on revolution in general."—Atef Said, Mobilization: An International QuarterlyThis is an essential work for students of contemporary Egypt and the politics of the Arab world generally and also for those with a comparative focus on revolution, social movements, or democratization. ... [T]his book's rich analysis should induce many scholars to read it from cover to cover and to return to it again and again. Essential."—G. E. Perry, ChoiceTable of ContentsPrologue: We Won't Leave, He Must Go 1. Narratives of Egypt's Revolution 2. Let Them Say What They Want, and We'll Do What We Want 3. Fear Us, O Government 4. Let's Write Our Constitution 5. Down, Down with the General Guide's Rule 6. State Prestige Conclusion: Bread and Freedom
£86.40
Stanford University Press Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women,
Book SynopsisFollowing the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government set out to Islamize society. Muslim piety had to be visible, in personal appearance and in action. Iranians were told to pray, fast, and attend mosques to be true Muslims. The revolution turned questions of what it means to be a true Muslim into a matter of public debate, taken up widely outside the exclusive realm of male clerics and intellectuals. Say What Your Longing Heart Desires offers an elegant ethnography of these debates among a group of educated, middle-class women whose voices are often muted in studies of Islam. Niloofar Haeri follows them in their daily lives as they engage with the classical poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi, illuminating a long-standing mutual inspiration between prayer and poetry. She recounts how different forms of prayer may transform into dialogues with God, and, in turn, Haeri illuminates the ways in which believers draw on prayer and ritual acts as the emotional and intellectual material through which they think, deliberate, and debate.Trade Review"This is one of the best books on prayer in all of anthropology. Niloofar Haeri shows that prayer is not an empty ritual, but that it becomes a relationship that changes people—and allows the secular reader to understand how poetry enables women to feel spiritual presence. A beautifully written work."—Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God"Say What Your Longing Heart Desires is a work that deserves to be widely read by all who are interested in understanding the different approaches to 'authentic' religion that exist in the Muslim world. A rich and detailed account, and a valuable contribution to our knowledge of religious practice."—Talal Asad, author of Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam"Say What Your Longing Heart Desires establishes itself immediately as an essential work in the anthropology of prayer and a major contribution to the study of religious practice and experience. A subtle and compelling work."—Robert A. Orsi, Northwestern University, author of Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them"Say What Your Longing Heart Desires will change common perceptions about women's experiences in Iran. Niloofar Haeri examines competing claims of Muslimhood and offers novel readings of theological conversations on spirituality and religious conviction in the Islamic Republic. An empirically rich and theoretically nuanced book."—Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton University, author of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment"Niloofar Haeri's deeply researched and elegantly written book brings readers into the most intimate and exigent spaces of a religious world. Haeri examines the everyday prayer practices of Iranian women as the basis for reflecting on the relationship between prayer and poetry and on how ideas about religiosity debated in classical Persian poetry inform the world of prayer. Haeri's ethnographic study of Muslim women at prayer, a practice that is at once deeply personal and utterly social, underscores the diversity of Muslim religious practices and challenges conceptions of what constitutes 'authentic' religion, complicating the distinction between ritual and non-ritual forms of worship. This beautiful book is a signal contribution to the study of women and Islam, with implications for the study of religion itself."—Jury for the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies"Using beautiful, limpid prose, Haeri weaves together poetry, religion, and ethnography to show how a group of middle-class, educated Iranian women counter the state's version of Islam. They regularly revisit and reconsider Islamic theology by drawing on the vast body of mystic poetry that is so central to Iranian culture. In the process, Haeri blurs lines thrown up between the secular and the religious in recent scholarship and invites us to consider the deeper, political, and public meaning of ritualistic religious practices."—Committee for the Fatema Mernissi Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association"As one of the best examples of works on 'lived Islam,' [Say What Your Longing Heart Desires] showcases how much analysis, critical thinking, and self-reflection is involved in the construction and performance of 'religious' acts and will be helpful to both students and experts in the fields of religion, ritual, and literature."—Ahoo Najafian, International Journal of Middle East Studies"Students and teachers of comparative religion will appreciate this fresh and unusual way to learn about how Iranians practice Islam... Readers get the rare gift of hearing the women's words and reading about events in their lives. As Haeri points out, we in the West don't often get that intimacy with Muslims in general or Iranians in particular."—Karie Firoozmand, Friends JournalTable of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: Where Do Ideas Come from? An Education in Classical Poetry Chapter 2: Fixed Forms and the Play of Imagination: Everyday Ritual Prayers Chapter 3: What Are We up to When We Pray? Spontaneous Conversations with God Chapter 4: Movable Mosques: Prayer Books, Women, and Youth Conclusion
£75.20
Stanford University Press The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and
Book SynopsisWith the exception of a few targeted aerial bombardments of the city's port, Beirut and Mount Lebanon did not see direct combat in World War I. Yet civilian casualties in this part of the Ottoman Empire reached shocking heights, possibly numbering half a million people. No war, in its usual understanding, took place there, but Lebanon was incontestably war-stricken. As a food crisis escalated into famine, it was the bloodless incursion of starvation and the silent assault of fatal disease that defined everyday life. The Charity of War tells how the Ottoman home front grappled with total war and how it sought to mitigate starvation and sickness through relief activities. Melanie S. Tanielian examines the wartime famine's reverberations throughout the community: in Beirut's municipal institutions, in its philanthropic and religious organizations, in international agencies, and in the homes of the city's residents. Her local history reveals a dynamic politics of provisioning that was central to civilian experiences in the war, as well as to the Middle Eastern political landscape that emerged post-war. By tracing these responses to the conflict, she demonstrates World War I's immediacy far from the European trenches, in a place where war was a socio-economic and political process rather than a military event.Trade Review"Melanie Tanielian provides us with an honest history of the miseries in Lebanon during the Great War, as well as the humanitarian efforts to relieve them. The Charity of War offers a unique story, neglected until now in other histories of the region. A highly original and important contribution." -- M. Talha Çiçek * Istanbul Medeniyet University *"Melanie S. Tanielian's The Charity of War is an important work that contributes to our broader understanding of the origins of modern humanitarianism in the Middle East and beyond. Built on both a solid archival foundation and broad reading in famine and food insecurity, the book is a critical text in the emerging literature on the global history of humanitarian organizations, relief work, and development." -- Keith David Watenpaugh * University of California, Davis, and author of Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism *"Deeply felt, thoughtfully considered, and impressively researched, The Charity of War places Beirut at the cutting edge of World War I history, alongside the local histories of wartime Paris, London, and Berlin. With an eye for the telling anecdote and the skill of a social analyst, Melanie Tanielian brings the reader into the heart of a city under siege, and reconstructs the complex web of social norms and political structures that converged toward catastrophe." -- Elizabeth F. Thompson * American University *"For her part, Tanielian must be lauded for her diligence at employing previously neglected local sources. Particularly impressive is her work in the confessional communities' archives in Beirut. These 'new' sources, in tandem with established work, contribute to Tanielian's captivating memoir of a city and a region at war." -- Leila Fawaz * Middle East Journal *"The Charity of War's diverse array of sources will make it especially valuable for scholars interested in the Ottoman civilian experience....[It] is a welcome addition to the history of humanitarianism. It shows how charity was intimately tied to political power in the Ottoman and colonial Middle East....It also makes an invaluable contribution to historiography on the civilian experience of war in the Ottoman Empire." -- Conrad Allen * H-War, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Total War: Politics, Power, and Benevolence chapter abstractThe Introduction establishes Beirut and Mount Lebanon as sites of total war and a civilian catastrophe of unprecedented proportion. It outlines the broader contributions of the book: the war's centrality to everyday life in what has been considered a geographic and political periphery. It situates provincial actors as important historical agents who negotiate their power positions and shape the political landscape despite and in response to an increasing interventionist state. It insists that the exigencies of war and famine constituted a generative force. It introduces the concept of politics of provisioning as a competitive engagement in war relief as one of the many arenas in which we can see war as a productive force. In this sense, the book's purpose is to portray the war of famine as simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically, destructive and formative. 1A City and Its Mountain, a Mountain and Its City chapter abstractThis chapter places the famine into the context of long-term socioeconomic developments and locally and historically specific configurations that determine how civilians in Beirut and Mount Lebanon would experience the war and the accompanying famine. Nineteenth-century economic changes, it is argued, not only rendered Beirut and Mount Lebanon particularly vulnerable to wartime famine but also, combined with increased access to education and the emergence of mass politics following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, broadened access to politics. The result was a particular set of local, national, and international actors in both state and civil society institutions who had varied degrees of access to power and whose social position dictated their capabilities to participate within the political field of provisioning and their potential to mitigate the horrors of the famine. 2Wartime Famine: Strategies, Logistics, and Catastrophe chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the totalizing process of World War I and the effect it had on food supplies and civilian provisioning on the home front. It outlines the historically specific social, economic, and political relational processes linked directly to the war, with a focus on access to food supplies. While food is indispensable both on the battlefronts and home fronts, political negotiations and military campaigns have dominated the historiography of World War I in the Middle East. In Greater Syria, the famine generated an unprecedented urgency visible in talk and action around feeding Ottoman subjects. It is argued that the famine was a unique event contingent on the caprices of human action in times of war. It was neither a direct result of an absolute absence of food nor an unadulterated natural disaster. International and national wartime strategies, situations, and struggles determined much of individuals' relationships to daily necessities. 3The Politics of Food: Wartime Provisioning for Civilians chapter abstractThe Ottoman authorities at times responded to civilian food shortages, but the central government implemented an empire-wide civilian provisioning scheme only in the spring of 1916. In the absence of organized relief, local actors were pivotal in organizing provisions. Representatives of the state such as the Ottoman governor and Beirut's elites and politicians, many of whom came from a merchant background, were particularly well positioned to take up the responsibilities of provisioning because of their thorough understanding of the subtleties of the local food system. The chapter provides a close look at civilian provisioning as a competitive arena for local and state actors to establish, maintain, and strengthen their legitimacy as power brokers in the provinces. It showcases, in particular, local urban wartime politics by exposing communal dynamics in times of crisis and the intricacies of existing communal and social orders that shaped the experience on the home front. 4Prayers and Patrons: The Politics of Neutrality chapter abstractExamining food distribution in rural Mount Lebanon, the chapter argues that the Maronite Church, despite its many failures, contributed to the reshaping of Mount Lebanon's political landscape through its active role in wartime provisioning. The chapter outlines the church's practices of provisioning and situates them in the larger context of diaspora politics, foreign influence, and the relationship between Maronites, France, and the Ottoman state, which shaped wartime provisioning politics in Mount Lebanon. It argues that the church's existing institutions and personnel, utilized to distribute food in the most remote corners of the mountain, and Jamal Pasha's distinct efforts to sideline its main political competitor, the secular Administrative Council, guaranteed and expanded its political position. The chapter showcases the processes that allowed the Maronite Church to solidify its position as the temporal leadership of the Christians of Mount Lebanon, which guaranteed its seat at the postwar political bargaining table. 5Rats, Lice and Microbes: The Struggle against Infectious Diseases chapter abstractLike providing food, combating infectious diseases defined much of the wartime agenda of local officials and municipal offices in both Beirut and Mount Lebanon. The administrative health concerns were not only front-page news but also subject to politics of health provisioning and state intervention. The crises of total war accelerated the consolidation of a preexisting health regime, and interventionist policies focused on making sick bodies a public concern to be reported, isolated, and disinfected. The invasive nature of health provisioning made it a less competitive political space. The state needed local knowledge, and local health administrators needed the power of the military command to back up their work. The state worked in society. The combined work of local municipal agencies and actors and the state to fight disease and implement sanitary measures was exemplar of an increasingly more militant state intervention into civilians' daily life. 6Local Relief Initiatives: Civil Society, Women, and the State chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the politics of provisioning in civil society, focusing on the experience of local philanthropic societies run by local elites. These organizations had dominated the social welfare sectors in prewar Beirut, providing education, health care, and material charity. The outbreak of the war and increasing Ottoman paranoia turned such organizations into feared competitors that could undermine the state's credibility, stir up resentment, and possibly be venues for organizing against state authorities. In Beirut, the Ottomans incapacitated male-dominated local charitable organizations by denying government support, raising taxes, or simply closing them. At the same time, government officials encouraged female volunteer work, indicating that the Ottoman authorities did not see Lebanese women as a threat to the legitimacy of their regime. The recruitment of women into relief efforts closely associated with a patriotic discourse and government patronage boosted Lebanese women's political self-confidence, not easily reversed after the war. 7Beneficial Benevolence: International Wartime Relief Efforts chapter abstractThis chapter tells the story of war relief rendered by international agents, who had direct experience with the famine's inhumanity and, due to their diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, had continued access to its victims. American and German diplomats, missionaries, and military officials witnessed, recorded, and responded to the local suffering based on their political position in the empire and the international context of World War I. The chapter discusses foreign relief workers and government officials' engagement with or abstention from humanitarian work as a political tool advertising the benevolence and goodwill of their nations to local populations, while at the same time preserving their positive relationship with the Ottoman government. The decisions of foreigners whether to distribute aid, the chapter argues, were based on their position within local society, international obligations, and the careful consideration of short- and long-term economic interests. Conclusion: Beirut 1919: The Chaos of Memory and Politics chapter abstractIn 1919, the victors of war with a stroke of their pens determined the national futures of Beirut and Mount Lebanon. Local aspirations proved peripheral to decision making in Europe. The Conclusion argues that 1919 was not only a Parisian year. In Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1919 was a year of swift changes, hopes, promises, rewards, despair, and disappointments. Wartime suffering and postwar ambiguities persuaded various political groups to articulate and lobby for their preferred postwar political constellation. And their differential and at times competing territorial and political desires entered into public discourse over national independence, Mandatory tutelage, and humanitarian aid. The Conclusion discusses how local and international agents of wartime provisioning, with their main competitors—the Ottoman state—removed from the scene, used accounts of real and fictitious wartime benevolence to construct discourses of legitimacy.
£86.40
Stanford University Press Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel
Book SynopsisWhen the state of Israel was established in 1948, not all Palestinians became refugees: some stayed behind and were soon granted citizenship. Those who remained, however, were relegated to second-class status in this new country, controlled by a military regime that restricted their movement and political expression. For two decades, Palestinian citizens of Israel were cut off from friends and relatives on the other side of the Green Line, as well as from the broader Arab world. Yet they were not passive in the face of this profound isolation. Palestinian intellectuals, party organizers, and cultural producers in Israel turned to the written word. Through writers like Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, poetry, journalism, fiction, and nonfiction became sites of resistance and connection alike. With this book, Maha Nassar examines their well-known poetry and uncovers prose works that have, until now, been largely overlooked. The writings of Palestinians in Israel played a key role in fostering a shared national consciousness and would become a central means of alerting Arabs in the region to the conditions—and to the defiance—of these isolated Palestinians. Brothers Apart is the first book to reveal how Palestinian intellectuals forged transnational connections through written texts and engaged with contemporaneous decolonization movements throughout the Arab world, challenging both Israeli policies and their own cultural isolation. Maha Nassar reexamines these intellectuals as the subjects, not objects, of their own history and brings to life their perspectives on a fraught political environment. Her readings not only deprovincialize the Palestinians of Israel, but write them back into Palestinian, Arab, and global history.Trade Review"Brothers Apart offers a delightfully fresh take on Palestinian cultural history and the Arab world in the mid-twentieth century. Maha Nassar brings to life the artistic prowess, rallying cries, and dashed dreams of the leading Palestinian litterateurs in Israel in the age of Arab revolution, African decolonization, and the global struggle for racial equality." -- Shira Robinson * The George Washington University *"Maha Nassar offers readers a window onto the cultural work of Palestinian intellectuals in Israel. With Brothers Apart, she illuminates the life, politics, and cultural production of these writers, and, importantly, connects them with anti-colonial movements and resistance literature around the world." -- Ilana Feldman * The George Washington University *"Brothers Apart is an outstanding work of social and cultural history. Readers of Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Emile Habibi and Rashid Husayn will find much new material to contemplate. Through their works, as well as those of dozens of other authors, Maha Nassar introduces the resilient figures, who in the face of concerted efforts to detach and erase Palestinian presence, somehow managed to make a uniquely vibrant and engaged world of letters." -- Elliott Colla * Georgetown University *"Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World offers outstanding research findings regarding unexplored territories of resistance employed by Palestinians in Israel between 1948 and 1971....The evidence presented in <>Brothers Apart is solid and the argument nuanced. It is an impressive scholarly work." -- Arab Studies QuarterlyTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction opens with a recounting of the reaction that poet and journalist Rashid Husayn encountered from Arab delegates at the 1959 World Youth Festival. The encounter highlights the fraught relationship between Palestinian intellectuals in Israel and their Arab counterparts during a time in which the latter knew very little (and were extremely suspicious of) the former. It then provides an overview of how the Palestinian citizens of Israel came to be isolated in the aftermath of the 1948 war and the strategies they developed to try to overcome this isolation. The last sections discuss the role that textual production and circulation play in these strategies of resistance; define who is an organic intellectual in the context of this study; and lay out the concept of decolonizing citizens. 1Strategies of Resistance chapter abstractThis chapter lays out the major contours of Palestinian cultural and intellectual history before 1948 by examining the lives of Hanna Naqqara, Emile Habibi, and Hanna Abu Hanna, all of whom became important figures in the Palestinian intellectual and cultural scene in Israel. They were part of a newly mobilized group of nationalist- and leftist-minded Palestinian Arab intellectuals who disseminated an anticolonial discourse rooted in calls for social justice, sovereignty, and pan-Arab cultural pride. During the interwar period, as British rule became entrenched and as Zionist immigration increased, these intellectuals developed strategies of resistance that included the dissemination of anticolonial discourses through schools, books, the press, poetry, social clubs, and radio programs. Examining these dynamics challenges the notion that 1948 was solely a moment of rupture since many of the strategies laid out here would continue to be used in the post-1948 period. 2Competing Narratives chapter abstractThis chapter discusses cultural and intellectual developments during the first few years after the establishment of Israel. By 1955 two competing narratives came to dominate the local Arab public sphere. One narrative, propagated by the Israeli government and establishment figures on the pages of al-Yawm, demanded that Palestinian citizens be loyal to the state that was undertaking the modernization of their society. The second narrative, disseminated primarily by intellectuals affiliated with the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) through al-Ittihad and al-Jadid, drew on the legacy of Arab leftist discourses to adopt a more confrontationist stance that pushed back against these Israeli demands. Drawing on tropes popularized in the interwar period, they stressed that Palestinians in Israel were part of a global struggle for social justice, decolonization, and national pride. Once these goals were achieved, they argued, Arabs and Jews in Israel could live together in harmony. 3Debates on Decolonization chapter abstractThis chapter shows how regional debates between pan-Arab nationalists and communists about the best means to achieve decolonization reverberated among Palestinian intellectuals in Israel. After an initial spirit of cooperation following the tragedy of the Kafr Qasim massacre, subsequent rivalries between communists and pan-Arab nationalists in the region also reverberated back home. This led to the rise of Arab nationalist voices on the pages of the MAPAM-sponsored al-Fajr journal and the short-lived paper of the al-Ard movement, both of which challenged the CPI's position as the primary champion of the Palestinians in Israel. This chapter also demonstrates the role that poetry festivals played in facilitating expressions of belonging and solidarity with global decolonization movements. This was especially true for a younger generation of poets, including Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, who would soon become leading spokesmen of the Palestinians. 4Palestinian Spokesmen chapter abstractThis chapter discusses how Palestinian intellectuals in Israel drew on global decolonization movements to challenge Israel more forthrightly than before. Darwish in particular pushed a line of argument that tied Israel to other settler-colonial regimes, notably France in Algeria. As a result of such challenges, Darwish, Qasim, and other poets found themselves under house arrest or in prison. In addition, the Ard group issued a memorandum to international bodies in 1964 laying out the systems of oppression the Palestinian community faced under Israeli rule, leading to greater international awareness of their circumstances. Meanwhile, Palestinians in exile began drawing attention to the ways in which Palestinians inside the Green Line were resisting their ongoing physical and political isolation both politically and culturally. Novelist and critic Ghassan Kanafani was especially emphatic in situating the Palestinian "resistance poets" within a larger temporal and spatial context of the Palestinian struggle for justice. 5Complicated Heroes chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the impact of the June 1967 War and the Israeli occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands on the dynamics laid out earlier. The occupation allowed Palestinians on either side of the Green Line to reconnect with friends and family members after spending nearly two decades apart. The war also led Arab intellectuals to look anew at the Palestinian resistance poets, whose defiant verses inspired those still reeling from the shock of the defeat. As a result, Darwish and Qasim were celebrated by Arab delegates at the 1968 World Youth Festival in Sofia. But their heroic image as resistance poets was complicated because they differed from many Arab intellectuals concerning what Palestinian resistance was and how it was to be achieved. Meanwhile, Israeli restrictions on the ability of cultural producers to travel and meet with one another led Darwish to self-imposed exile in Cairo. Conclusion chapter abstractIn addition to summarizing the main arguments of the book, the Conclusion carries forward the story of the relationship between Palestinian intellectuals in Israel and their Arab counterparts to the present day. The 1976 Land Day protests in the Galilee marked the first such protest to feature solidarity actions by Palestinians and Arabs in the region. But as Palestinians in Israel were identifying more closely with the Palestinian national movement, Palestinian leaders in the late 1980s and 1990s largely excised this group from the national agenda. This began to change in the twenty-first century as Palestinians in Israel became more integrated into the Palestinian national agenda, even as there continued to be misunderstandings about them in the Arab world and as they continued to face sanctions from the Israeli authorities at home.
£79.20
Stanford University Press Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean
Book SynopsisThe 1570s marked the beginning of an age of pervasive piracy in the Mediterranean that persisted into the eighteenth century. Nowhere was more inviting to pirates than the Ottoman-dominated eastern Mediterranean. In this bustling maritime ecosystem, weak imperial defenses and permissive politics made piracy possible, while robust trade made it profitable. By 1700, the limits of the Ottoman Mediterranean were defined not by Ottoman territorial sovereignty or naval supremacy, but by the reach of imperial law, which had been indelibly shaped by the challenge of piracy. Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean is the first book to examine Mediterranean piracy from the Ottoman perspective, focusing on the administrators and diplomats, jurists and victims who had to contend most with maritime violence. Pirates churned up a sea of paper in their wake: letters, petitions, court documents, legal opinions, ambassadorial reports, travel accounts, captivity narratives, and vast numbers of decrees attest to their impact on lives and livelihoods. Joshua M. White plumbs the depths of these uncharted, frequently uncatalogued waters, revealing how piracy shaped both the Ottoman legal space and the contours of the Mediterranean world.Trade Review"Through his exhaustive examination of the Ottoman legal strategies to confront violence at sea, Joshua White gives us the first cogent definition of the Ottoman Mediterranean in the early modern period. Moreover, he shows how these legal norms were disseminated and adopted by a wide range of actors, both European and Ottoman. White has put the early modern Ottoman Mediterranean on the map." -- Molly Greene * Princeton University *"Joshua White offers an elegant and sophisticated discussion of the Ottoman laws on piracy and tells a vivid story of swashbuckling in the early modern Mediterranean. Providing what has been, until now, a huge missing piece in the history of piracy, this book will engage and excite readers with interests in piracy, the development of the early modern state, and the formation of international law." -- Judith E. Tucker * Georgetown University *"Meticulously researched and convincingly argued, this book serves to place Islamic law and procedure into a specific time frame and reveals both the persistence and the limits of law in that turbulent period. It is valuable both as a history and description of piracy as well as a compilation of case studies of Islamic/Ottoman maritime law." -- Mark D. Welton * Middle East Journal *"The author's profound and wide-ranging scholarship make this book a highly important contribution to Mediterranean and Ottoman history. It is also a page-turner." -- Colin Imber * Journal of Early Modern History *"[A] valuable contribution, urging historians to reconsider familiar legal and geographic categories while bringing the Ottoman Empire into the history of global maritime law." -- Will Smiley * Comparative Legal History *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Ottoman Pirates, Ottoman Victims chapter abstractThis chapter chronicles the rise of Ottoman-on-Ottoman maritime violence in the post-1570 period, accounting for its endurance and examining its internal social and political significance for the Ottoman state and its implications for our understanding of Ottoman power and center-periphery relations. Introducing the Ottoman pirate "life cycle," it explores the connections between "local" and "long-distance" manifestations of piracy and the slippery distinctions between pirate and corsair, positing that Ottoman subjects were the prey that sustained all pirates in the Ottoman Mediterranean and enabled them to expand their operations. Because the Ottoman central administration relied heavily on naval irregulars to safeguard the coasts and provide intelligence on enemy movements, it was forced to balance the demands of law and justice with its security needs and the limits of its political and military capacity. 2The Kadi of Malta chapter abstractThis chapter turns to the Ottoman victims of Catholic corsairs and pirates who were carried off to Malta and Livorno to be sold as slaves and/or held for ransom. It focuses on the Ottoman magistrates (kadis) who, as judge-notaries, as captives, and as official mouthpieces of the Ottoman state, were involved in every stage of the ransom slavery industry in the eastern Mediterranean. From the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, a number of Ottoman judges could always be found imprisoned in Maltese dungeons, where their legal expertise proved critical for preparing surety agreements and ransom contracts acceptable in courts throughout the Ottoman Mediterranean. The phenomenon of the kadis of Malta reflects the essential paradox of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mediterranean: the inverse relationship between Ottoman maritime security and the importance of Ottoman law as an almost universally acceptable legal lingua franca from Istanbul to Malta. 3Piracy and Treaty Law chapter abstractPiracy was an early and constant subject of negotiation between the Ottomans and their treaty partners, who developed a legal and diplomatic framework prohibiting piracy and establishing the procedures for redress when attacks did occur. Focusing primarily on Ottoman-Venetian relations, this chapter parses the form and content of their treaties (ahdname), examines how their antipiracy provisions were understood, and traces their development from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century, by which point treaties with similar antipiracy clauses had been extended to France (1569), England (1580), and the Netherlands (1612). The antipiracy articles of these treaties were regularly expanded and modified to address new challenges, including how to deal with and defend against the proliferation of uncontrollable nonstate actors, but developments around the turn of the seventeenth century threatened to bring down the entire order on which the treaty regime was founded. 4Diplomatic Divergence chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the political and religious-legal challenge that North African corsairs posed to the Ottoman treaty regime in a post–"Northern Invasion" Mediterranean, and explores the reasons for and consequences of the diplomatic divergence of the 1620s, when England, France, and the Netherlands began concluding treaties directly with the North African port cities. It argues that the legal and diplomatic fallout of a series of Algerian-Tunisian piratical raids in the 1620s and 1630s led to a permanent restructuring of the imperial center's relationship with North Africa. As a result, Istanbul washed its hands of responsibility for the North African corsairs' predations, granting explicit permission to its treaty partners to destroy any African corsairs who threatened them and creating conditions that led to dozens of European punitive expeditions against the North African port cities beginning in the 1660s and culminating in the French invasion of Algiers in 1830. 5Piracy in Ottoman Islamic Jurisprudence chapter abstractThis chapter examines the legal opinions (Arabic: fatwa, Turkish: fetva) issued by the chief Islamic legal authorities of the empire (şeyhülislam) concerning maritime violence and explores the implications of their rulings for judges and litigants throughout the empire and for the corsairs based on its margins. Drawing on research in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fetva collections, the chapter establishes the kinds of legal questions that piracy and captivity posed for the Ottomans and how they were answered as the intensity, frequency, and focus of Mediterranean piracy mutated in sometimes alarming ways. Showing how secular, interstate, and Islamic law were harmonized through fetvas, the chapter lays the groundwork for the subsequent analysis of the convergence of theory and practice in Ottoman courts. 6Piracy in the Courts chapter abstractRelying on Ottoman court records from Istanbul to Crete, this chapter shows how merchants, monks, and mariners, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Ottomans, and foreigners used the Ottoman Islamic courts, how victims of piracy sought restitution and sometimes revenge. It asks how complex jurisdictional questions were addressed and how the legal theory introduced in the previous chapter impacted the legal strategies of litigants, Ottoman and foreign alike, in Ottoman courts. It explores examples of disputes over ships and cargo seized by pirates, suits lodged by victims against their alleged pirates, privateering arrangements contracted and disputed in court, and prosecutions of alleged pirates. Telling these stories and examining their outcomes, the chapter ties together the threads from the preceding examination of the courts, Islamic law, the Ottomans' diplomatic dealings, and Ottoman administrative responses to piracy. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion recapitulates the book's key arguments, fast-forwarding to the mid-eighteenth century to test the assertion that the Ottoman Mediterranean was a legal space, defined in large part by the challenge of piracy. Recounting an incident from the 1740s, in which Cretan seamen traveled to Tripoli to acquire licenses to attack Venice—with which Tripoli then considered itself at war—it reflects on the path by which Tripoli and the rest of North Africa came to be excluded from the Ottoman Mediterranean legal space, such that neither administrators in Istanbul nor sailors in Candia considered Tripoli truly "Ottoman." It then reconsiders the connections between legal corsairing/privateering and illegal piracy, and the complex roles religion and subjecthood played in fixing the line between them. Introduction chapter abstractIn September 1614, Ali bin Yusuf of Jerba lodged a lawsuit against a Venetian merchant named Nicolo in the court of Galata, a suburb of Istanbul. Ali accused Nicolo of having murdered his son, Süleyman, a ship captain, and five of his son's shipmates in a piratical attack eight years earlier. Ali's claims before the court, and his difficulty substantiating them—for the Venetian pirate had murdered the Ottoman crew to eliminate witnesses (one escaped, but two were required)—frame the fundamental questions the book addresses, first and foremost: who, what, or when is a pirate? The introduction also provides the historical context, surprisingly absent from most studies of Mediterranean piracy, essential to understanding why the period between 1570 and 1720 was one of pervasive piracy.
£50.40
Stanford University Press Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel
Book SynopsisBetween 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to the newly established Israeli state. Lacking the resources to absorb them all, the Israeli government resettled them in maabarot, or transit camps, relegating them to poverty. In the tents and shacks of the camps, their living conditions were squalid and unsanitary. Basic necessities like water were in short supply, when they were available at all. Rather than returning to a homeland as native sons, Iraqi Jews were newcomers in a foreign place. Impossible Exodus tells the story of these Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel. Faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, Iraqi Jews resisted: they joined Israeli political parties, demonstrated in the streets, and fought for the education of their children, leading a civil rights struggle whose legacy continues to influence contemporary debates in Israel. Orit Bashkin sheds light on their everyday lives and their determination in a new country, uncovering their long, painful transformation from Iraqi to Israeli. In doing so, she shares the resilience and humanity of a community whose story has yet to be told. Trade Review"Orit Bashkin sheds light on a case of historical injustice. Impossible Exodus will greatly enhance our understanding of the pain, discrimination, and struggle to survive in a different culture that those immigrants had to endure." -- Abbas Shiblak * University of Oxford *"A marvelously clear-eyed and compassionate recovery of the experience of Iraqi Jews forced to seek a new life in Israeli transit camps. Orit Bashkin gives these people voice, agency, and sympathetic understanding in their complex struggles against discrimination and cultural loss." -- Roger Owen * Harvard University *"What is distinctive about Bashkin's book on Iraqi Jews is the many stories she recovers that describe not only the difficulties encountered by immigrants but also the humiliations imposed by thoughtless and prejudiced officials put in charge of people whose culture they neither understood nor respected." -- Donna Robinson Divine * Middle East Journal *"[Impossible Exodus] documents with great skill and in great detail the conflicts that followed the confrontation with a dominant Ashkenazi elite and its hegemonic grip on Israel's politics, culture, and economy. Bashkin has written a balanced, meticulously referenced, non-polemical, yet deeply critical account of structural and open racism in Israel."––Peter Wein, American Historical Review"Bashkin's book offers a unique opportunity to learn more about the Iraqi-Jewish experience in both local and regional terms. As such, it opens new vistas on current debates and advances our understanding of historical phenomena of enduring relevance to Israeli discourse today." -- Haim Saadoun * Israel Studies Review *"Impossible Exodus is a valuable addition to the growing literaturewhich has first raised awareness of the experiences of Jewish populations in the Arabic-speaking world in their home countries and within Israel." -- Sarah Irving * Mashriq & Mahjar *"Impossible Exodus is an exceptional exposé of the sufferings of the Iraqi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel during the 1950s...[It] paves the way for a critical rethinking of ethnic, racial, and sectarian discrimination of Iraqi Jews as practiced by the Israeli state elites in the 1950s." -- Övg Ülgen * Shofar *"Bashkin's evaluation of the complex identities and nomenclature of Iraqi Jews in Israel could serve as a model for scholars studying populations shaped by common loyalties, migrations, and responses to shifting political circumstances." -- Liora R. Halperin * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *"Bashkin's project is humanistic at its core, weaving together both [Iraqis'] sufferings and their triumphs in fighting marginality and asserting their Mizrahiyut in a system that denied them a voice and recognition." -- Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud * The Tel Aviv Review of Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Death of an Arab Jew chapter abstractThis chapter contextualizes the history of Iraqi Jews in Israel within Zionist, Mizrahi, Arab, and global histories. While liberal Zionist discourse emphasizes that Israel before 1967 was an ethical society, attempting to meet the challenges of survival and migration, the Introduction argues that the period from 1948 to 1967 was one of the most horrific eras in Israel's history, when many of its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, were faced with losing their past homes, livelihoods, and, essentially, everything that they had, amid the indifference of the people living around them. This chapter describes how the state interacted with the Iraqi Jewish community as a project of social engineering, wherein state elites believed that all immigrants, especially Middle Eastern Jews, needed to become Hebrew-speaking, socialist Zionists. 1Human Material chapter abstractThis chapter shows that Iraqi Jews in Israel were migrant-citizens. They had been granted citizenship rights upon their arrival, so that they could vote in general elections and receive welfare benefits and social services. Nonetheless, because the authorities believed they came from a primitive country and were in need of discipline, and because the state did not have resources to attend to their needs, Iraqi Jews were treated as migrant-citizens, namely, as people who should be thankful for the little they got and who were undeserving of full citizenship rights. Iraqi Jews, as well as other groups of migrants to Israel, were classified as "human material," a classification that reflects their dependency on the state and their dehumanization as a result of migration. 2Children of Iraq, Children of Israel chapter abstractThis chapter tells the story of Iraqi-Jewish children in Israel, who grew up in transit camps, in the poor neighborhoods, and on kibbutzim. These children were quicker to adjust to the new living conditions in Israel as their memories of Iraq faded and they learned Hebrew. And yet, these children were the most vulnerable group among the newcomers. They suffered from malnutrition; their parents could not always deal with the pain of displacement and sometimes took out their anger on their children; they attended poor-quality schools; and they often had to leave school to work to support their families. These able and creative children, however, learned how to adjust to the new conditions and challenge and resist the state. 3The Only Democracy in the Middle East chapter abstractThis chapter proposes that the Israeli political system, despite being only partially democratic, offered venues in which Iraqi Jews could voice their complaints. It looks at political parties that had Iraqi-Jewish members who were active in the transit camps and published in the Arabic newspapers of various political parties. The chapter explores Iraqi-Jewish involvement in these organizations and analyzes how parties' leaders conceptualized their relationship to Iraqi Jews. Despite the parties' efforts at outreach, however, none of the political organizations in Israel offered a comprehensive solution to the Iraqi problem. At each and every step of the way, the parties' refusal to recognize the racism of their own members curtailed the possibility of providing a genuine solution. 4Elements of Resistance chapter abstractFocusing on the issue of political action, this chapter explores elements of resistance to the state's politics. Despite being poor migrants, Iraqi Jews became subversive political actors. From transit camps to the streets of towns, Iraqi Jews resisted the state's housing and employment politics, wrote and sang protest songs, established local committees to negotiate their concerns with the state, showered the state's ministries and administrative bodies with petitions, and destroyed public property. Some were successful in that they managed to secure livelihoods for unemployed individuals, improve their living conditions, or gain employment. Others' protests were less successful in achieving the newcomers' goals, but were effective in raising public awareness of the sufferings of Iraqi Jews. 5Israeli Babylonians chapter abstractThis chapter highlights three identities of the Iraqi-Jewish community that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s in Israel. The first is Iraqi; facing hardships in Israel, Iraq became the Promised Land for many Iraqi Jews. The second was Arab-Jewish; Iraqi Jews continued writing and communicating in Arabic with Arabic-speaking Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Their mastery of Arabic also made them valuable to the state as teachers, translators, and members of the state's security apparatus. The third was Mizrahi, an identity shaped through the struggle against Ashkenazi hegemony, which connected Iraqi Jews to other non-European Jews. The intertwining of these identities created Israelis of Iraqi descent, who were critical of the Ashkenazi establishment, and yet considered themselves Israeli patriots. Conclusion: The Death of Arab Jewishness chapter abstractThe chapter looks at the history of Iraqi Jews in Israel after 1967. It suggests that contemporary Mizrahi debates have their roots in the 1950s and 1960s, when some Iraqi Jews chose to focus on exclusively the Mizrahi and Iraqi struggle for civil rights, while others, especially communists, sided with the Palestinian struggle. Today, Mizrahi radicals are torn on the issue of the connections, or their absence, between their struggles and those of other oppressed groups in Israel, especially the Palestinians. Looking ahead, it seems very plausible that Israel will become a more segregated society, where Iraqi Jews will still partake of Mizrahi Arab culture as produced in Israel, yet will struggle as Jews in the Jewish state.
£19.79
Stanford University Press Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the
Book SynopsisIn 1991, the Israeli government introduced emergency legislation canceling the general exit permit that allowed Palestinians to enter Israel. The directive, effective for one year, has been reissued annually ever since, turning the Occupied Territories into a closed military zone. Today, Israel's permit regime for Palestinians is one of the world's most extreme and complex apparatuses for population management. Yael Berda worked as a human rights lawyer in Jerusalem and represented more than two hundred Palestinian clients trying to obtain labor permits to enter Israel from the West Bank. With Living Emergency, she brings readers inside the permit regime, offering a first-hand account of how the Israeli secret service, government, and military civil administration control the Palestinian population. Through interviews with Palestinian laborers and their families, conversations with Israeli clerks and officials, and research into the archives and correspondence of governmental organizations, Berda reconstructs the institutional framework of the labyrinthine permit regime, illuminating both its overarching principles and its administrative practices. In an age where terrorism, crime, and immigration are perceived as intertwined security threats, she reveals how the Israeli example informs global homeland security and border control practices, creating a living emergency for targeted populations worldwide. Trade Review"Yael Berda's pointed and precise study plunges readers into an ugly and dark reality. A lawyer and ethnographer, she knows the jurisprudence of the Israeli 'permit regime' and sees the damages and despair it inflicts. Living Emergency tracks a form of infliction that operates on minute and life altering scales." -- Ann Stoler * The New School, and author of Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times *"The next time someone tells you that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is benign—or designed only to provide Israel security—hand them Yael Berda's Living Emergency." -- Peter Beinart * author of The Crisis of Zionism *"Living Emergency is a deeply humane study of the permit regime in the West Bank. The neocolonial resonances of this malign system of control, and the technologies and institutional logics it bares for us, are fast being replicated in other places around the world, and in ways that are too loud for any reader to ignore." -- Sanjay Kak * filmmaker and editor of Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir *"Living Emergency is a groundbreaking analysis of the bureaucracy of occupation. And in Yael Berda, this intricate and obfuscated bureaucracy has met its match: Her meticulous research and brilliant insights call on us all to acknowledge the ways in which the contemporary rule of officials has developed across the globe." -- Eyal Weizman * University of London, author of Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability *"In Living Emergency, Jewish Israeli lawyer Yael Berda leverages her years of experience representing Palestinian laborers by using detailed personal anecdotes, administrative documents, and extensive historical research to construct a thorough picture of how the Israeli government manages and restricts the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank." -- Zander Guzy-Sprague * Middle East Journal *"Living Emergency argues convincingly that the permit regime functions in ways that exceed the security logics it is meant to uphold, operating instead as a powerful mechanism of population management and deepening Israeli control and surveillance of everyday life in Palestine." -- Michelle D. Weitzel * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Living Emergency is impressive in how it makes accessible and legible the way that the Occupation works in practice. It manages to lift the veil off the regime and enables us to peer into its institutional brain." -- Hilla Daya * Israel Studies Review *"Berda's [Living Emergency] and Erakat's [Justice for Some] are essential reads, not just for those who wish to understand the central place of law in both Palestinian liberation and Israel's expansionist policies. They also offer instructive perspectives for anyone who wants to think more profoundly about the law's entanglement with sovereignty, violence, liberation, and politics." -- Elif M. Babül * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue chapter abstractThe reader joins Issa, a Palestinian construction worker from the West Bank who suddenly received word from his employer that his permit has been denied by the Israeli military, on the long and convoluted journey through the bureaucracy of the occupation, to try to recover his permit. He encounters many obstacles: police detention, attempts to find clandestine ways to work during closure, and mostly, long waiting times in offices and courtyards of the bureaucracy. Following his classification as a security threat by the secret service, he engages two lawyers in his struggle, one of them the author, who represent him in Israel's Supreme Court in the attempt to annul his classification as a security threat and secure his work permit. 1Dangerous Populations chapter abstractThis chapter provides a concise history of Israel's military rule over the Occupied West Bank, focusing on population monitoring and control. It outlines the development of the messy bureaucracy of the occupation and the establishment of the permit regime by an array of agencies, technologies, rules, and practices. Following the institutional changes brought about by the Oslo Accords, the chapter shows that while it is administratively inefficient, the population management system followed an effective institutional logic to achieve two major goals. First, it makes the Palestinian population dependent on the administrative system to construct, maintain, and widen the scope of monitoring and control, based on a racial separation through laws and enforcement. Second, it produces uncertainty, disorientation, and suspicion within Palestinian society through the prevention of mobility. 2Perpetual Emergency chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the shift in the role of Israel's secret service, the Shin Bet, in the bureaucracy of the occupation, from an intelligence agency to the central organization that designed, strategized, and made administrative decisions regarding the population of the West Bank. Focusing on the expanding category of Palestinians classified as security threats that encompassed over a quarter of a million people after the Second Intifada, the chapter explores the contradictory profiling practices. It suggests that the permit regime became the major asset of the Shin Bet, increasing its capabilities to recruit thousands of low-grade informers in the West Bank. 3Labor of Uncertainty chapter abstractThe permit regime includes the Ministries of Economy, Interior, and Defense, which created a political economy that controlled the lives of Palestinian Laborers and their employers. The complex array of military and civil organizations that populated the expanding flow chart of regulations, forms, and offices created an economy of shortage, in which there were consistently fewer permit quotas than need by employers. This chapter traces how this administrative shortage, the product of the negotiation between the different fragmented institutions of the state, created the perfect conditions for a black market of permits sold, rented, and exchanged between employers and employees, ruled by middlemen, intermediaries, and semiofficials who ran networks of forgeries that were criminalized but not severely punished. 4Effective Inefficiency chapter abstractThis chapter outlines how institutional practices of the permit regime affected and shaped Palestinian daily life in the West Bank by disorientation, atomization, and routinization of emergency. Administrative flexibility and the wide discretion of clerks who actually made law during the permit process produced a different kind of bureaucracy, where contradictory decisions, overlapping policies, and secret information turned freedom of movement into an unknown variable in Palestinian life across Israel and the Occupied Territories. Attempts of international and human rights organizations to standardize practices helped develop the permit regime, while resistance to life in the emergency took various forms. People found ways to obtain permits, broke pathways into Israel and across the separation wall, and challenged the Shin Bet classifications in the High Court. Epilogue chapter abstractThe reader joins the author as she recounts her first contact with the bureaucracy of the occupation through the military courts of Judea and Samaria. She sets up a makeshift office on Saturday mornings at a restaurant in Area C, where Palestinians who are denied entry because they are classified as a security threat come to prepare documents and affidavits for their petition to the Supreme Court. She then realizes that legal attempts to retrieve permits and remove someone's classification as a security threat are futile. Understanding that legal representation of Palestinians provides legitimacy to an illegal colonial bureaucracy that constituted a security threat for both Israelis and Palestinians leads her to leave her practice.
£13.94
Stanford University Press Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel
Book SynopsisWhen the state of Israel was established in 1948, not all Palestinians became refugees: some stayed behind and were soon granted citizenship. Those who remained, however, were relegated to second-class status in this new country, controlled by a military regime that restricted their movement and political expression. For two decades, Palestinian citizens of Israel were cut off from friends and relatives on the other side of the Green Line, as well as from the broader Arab world. Yet they were not passive in the face of this profound isolation. Palestinian intellectuals, party organizers, and cultural producers in Israel turned to the written word. Through writers like Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, poetry, journalism, fiction, and nonfiction became sites of resistance and connection alike. With this book, Maha Nassar examines their well-known poetry and uncovers prose works that have, until now, been largely overlooked. The writings of Palestinians in Israel played a key role in fostering a shared national consciousness and would become a central means of alerting Arabs in the region to the conditions—and to the defiance—of these isolated Palestinians. Brothers Apart is the first book to reveal how Palestinian intellectuals forged transnational connections through written texts and engaged with contemporaneous decolonization movements throughout the Arab world, challenging both Israeli policies and their own cultural isolation. Maha Nassar reexamines these intellectuals as the subjects, not objects, of their own history and brings to life their perspectives on a fraught political environment. Her readings not only deprovincialize the Palestinians of Israel, but write them back into Palestinian, Arab, and global history.Trade Review"Brothers Apart offers a delightfully fresh take on Palestinian cultural history and the Arab world in the mid-twentieth century. Maha Nassar brings to life the artistic prowess, rallying cries, and dashed dreams of the leading Palestinian litterateurs in Israel in the age of Arab revolution, African decolonization, and the global struggle for racial equality." -- Shira Robinson * The George Washington University *"Maha Nassar offers readers a window onto the cultural work of Palestinian intellectuals in Israel. With Brothers Apart, she illuminates the life, politics, and cultural production of these writers, and, importantly, connects them with anti-colonial movements and resistance literature around the world." -- Ilana Feldman * The George Washington University *"Brothers Apart is an outstanding work of social and cultural history. Readers of Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Emile Habibi and Rashid Husayn will find much new material to contemplate. Through their works, as well as those of dozens of other authors, Maha Nassar introduces the resilient figures, who in the face of concerted efforts to detach and erase Palestinian presence, somehow managed to make a uniquely vibrant and engaged world of letters." -- Elliott Colla * Georgetown University *"Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World offers outstanding research findings regarding unexplored territories of resistance employed by Palestinians in Israel between 1948 and 1971....The evidence presented in <>Brothers Apart is solid and the argument nuanced. It is an impressive scholarly work." -- Arab Studies QuarterlyTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction opens with a recounting of the reaction that poet and journalist Rashid Husayn encountered from Arab delegates at the 1959 World Youth Festival. The encounter highlights the fraught relationship between Palestinian intellectuals in Israel and their Arab counterparts during a time in which the latter knew very little (and were extremely suspicious of) the former. It then provides an overview of how the Palestinian citizens of Israel came to be isolated in the aftermath of the 1948 war and the strategies they developed to try to overcome this isolation. The last sections discuss the role that textual production and circulation play in these strategies of resistance; define who is an organic intellectual in the context of this study; and lay out the concept of decolonizing citizens. 1Strategies of Resistance chapter abstractThis chapter lays out the major contours of Palestinian cultural and intellectual history before 1948 by examining the lives of Hanna Naqqara, Emile Habibi, and Hanna Abu Hanna, all of whom became important figures in the Palestinian intellectual and cultural scene in Israel. They were part of a newly mobilized group of nationalist- and leftist-minded Palestinian Arab intellectuals who disseminated an anticolonial discourse rooted in calls for social justice, sovereignty, and pan-Arab cultural pride. During the interwar period, as British rule became entrenched and as Zionist immigration increased, these intellectuals developed strategies of resistance that included the dissemination of anticolonial discourses through schools, books, the press, poetry, social clubs, and radio programs. Examining these dynamics challenges the notion that 1948 was solely a moment of rupture since many of the strategies laid out here would continue to be used in the post-1948 period. 2Competing Narratives chapter abstractThis chapter discusses cultural and intellectual developments during the first few years after the establishment of Israel. By 1955 two competing narratives came to dominate the local Arab public sphere. One narrative, propagated by the Israeli government and establishment figures on the pages of al-Yawm, demanded that Palestinian citizens be loyal to the state that was undertaking the modernization of their society. The second narrative, disseminated primarily by intellectuals affiliated with the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) through al-Ittihad and al-Jadid, drew on the legacy of Arab leftist discourses to adopt a more confrontationist stance that pushed back against these Israeli demands. Drawing on tropes popularized in the interwar period, they stressed that Palestinians in Israel were part of a global struggle for social justice, decolonization, and national pride. Once these goals were achieved, they argued, Arabs and Jews in Israel could live together in harmony. 3Debates on Decolonization chapter abstractThis chapter shows how regional debates between pan-Arab nationalists and communists about the best means to achieve decolonization reverberated among Palestinian intellectuals in Israel. After an initial spirit of cooperation following the tragedy of the Kafr Qasim massacre, subsequent rivalries between communists and pan-Arab nationalists in the region also reverberated back home. This led to the rise of Arab nationalist voices on the pages of the MAPAM-sponsored al-Fajr journal and the short-lived paper of the al-Ard movement, both of which challenged the CPI's position as the primary champion of the Palestinians in Israel. This chapter also demonstrates the role that poetry festivals played in facilitating expressions of belonging and solidarity with global decolonization movements. This was especially true for a younger generation of poets, including Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, who would soon become leading spokesmen of the Palestinians. 4Palestinian Spokesmen chapter abstractThis chapter discusses how Palestinian intellectuals in Israel drew on global decolonization movements to challenge Israel more forthrightly than before. Darwish in particular pushed a line of argument that tied Israel to other settler-colonial regimes, notably France in Algeria. As a result of such challenges, Darwish, Qasim, and other poets found themselves under house arrest or in prison. In addition, the Ard group issued a memorandum to international bodies in 1964 laying out the systems of oppression the Palestinian community faced under Israeli rule, leading to greater international awareness of their circumstances. Meanwhile, Palestinians in exile began drawing attention to the ways in which Palestinians inside the Green Line were resisting their ongoing physical and political isolation both politically and culturally. Novelist and critic Ghassan Kanafani was especially emphatic in situating the Palestinian "resistance poets" within a larger temporal and spatial context of the Palestinian struggle for justice. 5Complicated Heroes chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the impact of the June 1967 War and the Israeli occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands on the dynamics laid out earlier. The occupation allowed Palestinians on either side of the Green Line to reconnect with friends and family members after spending nearly two decades apart. The war also led Arab intellectuals to look anew at the Palestinian resistance poets, whose defiant verses inspired those still reeling from the shock of the defeat. As a result, Darwish and Qasim were celebrated by Arab delegates at the 1968 World Youth Festival in Sofia. But their heroic image as resistance poets was complicated because they differed from many Arab intellectuals concerning what Palestinian resistance was and how it was to be achieved. Meanwhile, Israeli restrictions on the ability of cultural producers to travel and meet with one another led Darwish to self-imposed exile in Cairo. Conclusion chapter abstractIn addition to summarizing the main arguments of the book, the Conclusion carries forward the story of the relationship between Palestinian intellectuals in Israel and their Arab counterparts to the present day. The 1976 Land Day protests in the Galilee marked the first such protest to feature solidarity actions by Palestinians and Arabs in the region. But as Palestinians in Israel were identifying more closely with the Palestinian national movement, Palestinian leaders in the late 1980s and 1990s largely excised this group from the national agenda. This began to change in the twenty-first century as Palestinians in Israel became more integrated into the Palestinian national agenda, even as there continued to be misunderstandings about them in the Arab world and as they continued to face sanctions from the Israeli authorities at home.
£21.59
Stanford University Press The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and
Book SynopsisWith the exception of a few targeted aerial bombardments of the city's port, Beirut and Mount Lebanon did not see direct combat in World War I. Yet civilian casualties in this part of the Ottoman Empire reached shocking heights, possibly numbering half a million people. No war, in its usual understanding, took place there, but Lebanon was incontestably war-stricken. As a food crisis escalated into famine, it was the bloodless incursion of starvation and the silent assault of fatal disease that defined everyday life. The Charity of War tells how the Ottoman home front grappled with total war and how it sought to mitigate starvation and sickness through relief activities. Melanie S. Tanielian examines the wartime famine's reverberations throughout the community: in Beirut's municipal institutions, in its philanthropic and religious organizations, in international agencies, and in the homes of the city's residents. Her local history reveals a dynamic politics of provisioning that was central to civilian experiences in the war, as well as to the Middle Eastern political landscape that emerged post-war. By tracing these responses to the conflict, she demonstrates World War I's immediacy far from the European trenches, in a place where war was a socio-economic and political process rather than a military event.Trade Review"Melanie Tanielian provides us with an honest history of the miseries in Lebanon during the Great War, as well as the humanitarian efforts to relieve them. The Charity of War offers a unique story, neglected until now in other histories of the region. A highly original and important contribution." -- M. Talha Çiçek * Istanbul Medeniyet University *"Melanie S. Tanielian's The Charity of War is an important work that contributes to our broader understanding of the origins of modern humanitarianism in the Middle East and beyond. Built on both a solid archival foundation and broad reading in famine and food insecurity, the book is a critical text in the emerging literature on the global history of humanitarian organizations, relief work, and development." -- Keith David Watenpaugh * University of California, Davis, and author of Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism *"Deeply felt, thoughtfully considered, and impressively researched, The Charity of War places Beirut at the cutting edge of World War I history, alongside the local histories of wartime Paris, London, and Berlin. With an eye for the telling anecdote and the skill of a social analyst, Melanie Tanielian brings the reader into the heart of a city under siege, and reconstructs the complex web of social norms and political structures that converged toward catastrophe." -- Elizabeth F. Thompson * American University *"For her part, Tanielian must be lauded for her diligence at employing previously neglected local sources. Particularly impressive is her work in the confessional communities' archives in Beirut. These 'new' sources, in tandem with established work, contribute to Tanielian's captivating memoir of a city and a region at war." -- Leila Fawaz * Middle East Journal *"The Charity of War's diverse array of sources will make it especially valuable for scholars interested in the Ottoman civilian experience....[It] is a welcome addition to the history of humanitarianism. It shows how charity was intimately tied to political power in the Ottoman and colonial Middle East....It also makes an invaluable contribution to historiography on the civilian experience of war in the Ottoman Empire." -- Conrad Allen * H-War, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Total War: Politics, Power, and Benevolence chapter abstractThe Introduction establishes Beirut and Mount Lebanon as sites of total war and a civilian catastrophe of unprecedented proportion. It outlines the broader contributions of the book: the war's centrality to everyday life in what has been considered a geographic and political periphery. It situates provincial actors as important historical agents who negotiate their power positions and shape the political landscape despite and in response to an increasing interventionist state. It insists that the exigencies of war and famine constituted a generative force. It introduces the concept of politics of provisioning as a competitive engagement in war relief as one of the many arenas in which we can see war as a productive force. In this sense, the book's purpose is to portray the war of famine as simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically, destructive and formative. 1A City and Its Mountain, a Mountain and Its City chapter abstractThis chapter places the famine into the context of long-term socioeconomic developments and locally and historically specific configurations that determine how civilians in Beirut and Mount Lebanon would experience the war and the accompanying famine. Nineteenth-century economic changes, it is argued, not only rendered Beirut and Mount Lebanon particularly vulnerable to wartime famine but also, combined with increased access to education and the emergence of mass politics following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, broadened access to politics. The result was a particular set of local, national, and international actors in both state and civil society institutions who had varied degrees of access to power and whose social position dictated their capabilities to participate within the political field of provisioning and their potential to mitigate the horrors of the famine. 2Wartime Famine: Strategies, Logistics, and Catastrophe chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the totalizing process of World War I and the effect it had on food supplies and civilian provisioning on the home front. It outlines the historically specific social, economic, and political relational processes linked directly to the war, with a focus on access to food supplies. While food is indispensable both on the battlefronts and home fronts, political negotiations and military campaigns have dominated the historiography of World War I in the Middle East. In Greater Syria, the famine generated an unprecedented urgency visible in talk and action around feeding Ottoman subjects. It is argued that the famine was a unique event contingent on the caprices of human action in times of war. It was neither a direct result of an absolute absence of food nor an unadulterated natural disaster. International and national wartime strategies, situations, and struggles determined much of individuals' relationships to daily necessities. 3The Politics of Food: Wartime Provisioning for Civilians chapter abstractThe Ottoman authorities at times responded to civilian food shortages, but the central government implemented an empire-wide civilian provisioning scheme only in the spring of 1916. In the absence of organized relief, local actors were pivotal in organizing provisions. Representatives of the state such as the Ottoman governor and Beirut's elites and politicians, many of whom came from a merchant background, were particularly well positioned to take up the responsibilities of provisioning because of their thorough understanding of the subtleties of the local food system. The chapter provides a close look at civilian provisioning as a competitive arena for local and state actors to establish, maintain, and strengthen their legitimacy as power brokers in the provinces. It showcases, in particular, local urban wartime politics by exposing communal dynamics in times of crisis and the intricacies of existing communal and social orders that shaped the experience on the home front. 4Prayers and Patrons: The Politics of Neutrality chapter abstractExamining food distribution in rural Mount Lebanon, the chapter argues that the Maronite Church, despite its many failures, contributed to the reshaping of Mount Lebanon's political landscape through its active role in wartime provisioning. The chapter outlines the church's practices of provisioning and situates them in the larger context of diaspora politics, foreign influence, and the relationship between Maronites, France, and the Ottoman state, which shaped wartime provisioning politics in Mount Lebanon. It argues that the church's existing institutions and personnel, utilized to distribute food in the most remote corners of the mountain, and Jamal Pasha's distinct efforts to sideline its main political competitor, the secular Administrative Council, guaranteed and expanded its political position. The chapter showcases the processes that allowed the Maronite Church to solidify its position as the temporal leadership of the Christians of Mount Lebanon, which guaranteed its seat at the postwar political bargaining table. 5Rats, Lice and Microbes: The Struggle against Infectious Diseases chapter abstractLike providing food, combating infectious diseases defined much of the wartime agenda of local officials and municipal offices in both Beirut and Mount Lebanon. The administrative health concerns were not only front-page news but also subject to politics of health provisioning and state intervention. The crises of total war accelerated the consolidation of a preexisting health regime, and interventionist policies focused on making sick bodies a public concern to be reported, isolated, and disinfected. The invasive nature of health provisioning made it a less competitive political space. The state needed local knowledge, and local health administrators needed the power of the military command to back up their work. The state worked in society. The combined work of local municipal agencies and actors and the state to fight disease and implement sanitary measures was exemplar of an increasingly more militant state intervention into civilians' daily life. 6Local Relief Initiatives: Civil Society, Women, and the State chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the politics of provisioning in civil society, focusing on the experience of local philanthropic societies run by local elites. These organizations had dominated the social welfare sectors in prewar Beirut, providing education, health care, and material charity. The outbreak of the war and increasing Ottoman paranoia turned such organizations into feared competitors that could undermine the state's credibility, stir up resentment, and possibly be venues for organizing against state authorities. In Beirut, the Ottomans incapacitated male-dominated local charitable organizations by denying government support, raising taxes, or simply closing them. At the same time, government officials encouraged female volunteer work, indicating that the Ottoman authorities did not see Lebanese women as a threat to the legitimacy of their regime. The recruitment of women into relief efforts closely associated with a patriotic discourse and government patronage boosted Lebanese women's political self-confidence, not easily reversed after the war. 7Beneficial Benevolence: International Wartime Relief Efforts chapter abstractThis chapter tells the story of war relief rendered by international agents, who had direct experience with the famine's inhumanity and, due to their diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, had continued access to its victims. American and German diplomats, missionaries, and military officials witnessed, recorded, and responded to the local suffering based on their political position in the empire and the international context of World War I. The chapter discusses foreign relief workers and government officials' engagement with or abstention from humanitarian work as a political tool advertising the benevolence and goodwill of their nations to local populations, while at the same time preserving their positive relationship with the Ottoman government. The decisions of foreigners whether to distribute aid, the chapter argues, were based on their position within local society, international obligations, and the careful consideration of short- and long-term economic interests. Conclusion: Beirut 1919: The Chaos of Memory and Politics chapter abstractIn 1919, the victors of war with a stroke of their pens determined the national futures of Beirut and Mount Lebanon. Local aspirations proved peripheral to decision making in Europe. The Conclusion argues that 1919 was not only a Parisian year. In Beirut and Mount Lebanon, 1919 was a year of swift changes, hopes, promises, rewards, despair, and disappointments. Wartime suffering and postwar ambiguities persuaded various political groups to articulate and lobby for their preferred postwar political constellation. And their differential and at times competing territorial and political desires entered into public discourse over national independence, Mandatory tutelage, and humanitarian aid. The Conclusion discusses how local and international agents of wartime provisioning, with their main competitors—the Ottoman state—removed from the scene, used accounts of real and fictitious wartime benevolence to construct discourses of legitimacy.
£23.39
Stanford University Press The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power, and
Book SynopsisThe "natural order of the state" was an early modern mania for the Ottoman Empire. In a time of profound and pervasive imperial transformation, the ideals of stability, proper order, and social harmony were integral to the legitimization of Ottoman power. And as Ottoman territory grew, so too did its network of written texts: a web of sultanic edicts, aimed at defining and supplementing imperial authority in the empire's disparate provinces. With this book, Heather L. Ferguson studies how this textual empire created a unique vision of Ottoman legal and social order, and how the Ottoman ruling elite, via sword and pen, articulated a claim to universal sovereignty that subverted internal challengers and external rivals. The Proper Order of Things offers the story of an empire, at once familiar and strange, told through the shifting written vocabularies of power deployed by the Ottomans in their quest to thrive within a competitive early modern environment. Ferguson transcends the question of what these documents said, revealing instead how their formulation of the "proper order of things" configured the state itself. Through this textual authority, she argues, Ottoman writers ensured the durability of their empire, creating the principles of organization on which Ottoman statecraft and authority came to rest.Trade Review"The Proper Order of Things invites us to rethink Ottoman empire-building with its capacity to codify, categorize, and monopolize symbolic violence. A brilliant book." -- Ali Yaycioglu * Stanford University *"The Proper Order of Things offers an ambitious treatment of Ottoman bureaucratic textual production. Heather Ferguson's intelligent discursive analysis of the different bureaucratic genres as both texts and spatial practices allows for a new understanding of the nature of Ottoman governance and the longevity of the empire." -- Dana Sajdi * Boston College *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Structure of Empire and a Grammar of Rule chapter abstractThis chapter draws on Katip Çelebi's Düstūrü'l-'amel li ıṣlāhı 'l-ḥalel, or the Guiding Principles for the Rectification of Defects, to outline how attention to genre, to the relationship between conceptual models and administrative practice, to the role of sultanic authority as an anchor for imperial order, and to the significance of comparative historical analysis offers an alternative approach to Ottoman state-making in the early modern period. It further suggests that the "middle years" of the state might best be understood as a tension between principles of universal rule and the practices designed to entice and co-opt regional elites into a coherent sociopolitical order. 1The Sovereign State: Spatial and Textual Politics in Early Modern Eurasian Courts chapter abstractThis chapter demonstrates that qualities once thought to be unique to the Ottoman confederation were of a piece with other imperial strategies to affirm the power of the court amid disparate territorial domains. The chapter builds a basis especially for thinking about the relationship between an expanding bureaucracy, a new set of spatial protocols within an established palatial seat, and the textual habits that extended authority outside the palace confines. It draws on comparisons with the Habsburg court in Spain, addresses the emergence of a hierarchical imperial chancery, and outlines features of the scribal culture that play a key role in the book as a whole. It draws on diverse chroniclers, early kanunname, imperial expenditures, and sultanic edicts in various forms to trace these dynamics between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. 2The State of Stability: The Kanunname as a Genre for Administrative Governance chapter abstractThis chapter shows how diverse practices of land management and competing legal traditions gradually cohered into an imperial program of revenue generation. It argues that the process of crafting and dispersing kanunnames (legal regulations) was also a process of genre creation, whereby taxation schemas not only naturalized social relations but also became actionable frameworks for both state and nonstate agents. Both their form, as an expression of dynastic authority, and their content, as an assessment of tax obligations and privileges, serve to illustrate the mechanism whereby Ottoman dynasts asserted a new sovereign law amid competing legacies of land management and sought, ultimately, to generate a stable vocabulary for sultanic intervention. It engages with the meaning of "lawmaking" within Muslim-based polities, addresses its adaptation within the Ottoman context, and reflects on the evolution of the kanunname in the reigns of Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Süleyman I. 3The Bureaucratic State: Reforming Documentary Practices chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the emergence of new cohorts of bureaucrats under Süleyman I and an expanded jurisdiction for sultanic authority. His reign marked a shift from hybrid to hegemonic administrative, textual, and linguistic practices and demonstrated the coincident importance of military, legal, and textual campaigns. The chapter follows the legal activities of Süleyman's head chancellor, Celalzade Mustafa, and şeyhülislam Ebu's-Su'ud Efendi, as they addressed increasing competition with rivals such as the Habsburgs and the Safavids and contributed to an administrative reorganization intent on asserting sultanic rights to resources. This led, as one example, to a new mechanism for registering imperial affairs, the mühimme defteri (things of import), which "captured" the varied activities of the administration. Collectively, the copies of daily transactions recorded in the mühimme illustrate an effort to conform regional diversity to an ideal of imperial order, and to co-opt political factions capable of subverting dynastic authority. 4The Brokered State: "The Past Is No Longer the Present" in the "Land Between the Rivers" chapter abstractThis chapter presents the northern "external frontier" of Buda and the occupied Hungarian territories as the fulcrum in which new strategies of governance and imperial display emerged. The chapter argues that rival Ottoman and Habsburg imperial claims each increasingly relied on linguistic manipulations to assert jurisdictional power. It further explores the way in which clear boundaries were never certain but rather were constantly asserted through diplomatic letters and surveillance tactics ever more reliant on imperial translators. While typically assayed in terms of the "limits" of Ottoman expansion, here Buda and the Hungarian territories become the crucible for an emergent framework of imperial sovereignty. The chapter relies on edicts dispatched to the governors of Buda, as well as their letters sent in turn to Habsburg authorities, and illustrates the fraught nature of Ottoman territorial claims. 5A State of Rebellion: The Reterritorialization of Ottoman Sovereignty in Greater Syria chapter abstractThis chapter moves to an "internal frontier" in Greater Syria and the province of Trablus-ı Şam and addresses a long military and administrative campaign beginning in 1585 to reinstate order in a rebellious territory. The chapter traces the imperial response to dissident rebels in the desert and coastal highlands by focusing on the Sayfa family, whose activity as regional governors indicate how difficult it was for the Ottoman establishment to police the boundaries between rebel and official. The Sayfas moved in and out of favor with the Ottoman court, relied on their own uneven alliances to extend power, and acted sometimes in concert with, and sometimes in direct opposition to, imperial commands. The chapter thus traces imperial efforts to "reterritorialize" or reinstate sovereign power but highlights how imperial claims to revenue remained contested despite military ventures into the territory. 6On the Perfect State: An Ottoman Vision of Order chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the link between medieval political theories and a flourishing Ottoman intellectual engagement with ideas concerning a perfect order of governance from within a sense of crisis. This crisis was driven by an increasingly mobile population, regional rebellions, and global climactic and monetary shifts that together challenged the "fundamentals" of Ottoman administrative order. It traces examples of a mode of political analysis, distinct from advice-giving, that linked justice to proper governance rather than to religion or to the sultan. The chapter demonstrates that Ottoman literary producers of the seventeenth century, while apprehensive of change, became innovators themselves and revived rational modes of political critique in the process. It further highlights how seventeenth-century scholar-bureaucrats came to focus on the archival past of the state itself and located Ottoman power in methods of record keeping. Ultimately they sought to restore a commitment to textual transparency. Conclusion: The Archiving State chapter abstractA key methodological reflection, the conclusion addresses distinctions among documents, registers, and the methods of categorization by both Ottomans and Ottomanists. It further posits a key connection between the "space of the empire" and the "space of the text," and thus between legal and territorial authority. Finally, it addresses significant shifts in the horizon of political practice in the Ottoman empire post-seventeenth century dynamics. Together, the chapters and conclusion of The Proper Order of Things illuminate the intersections of sovereign claims, bureaucratic organization, administrative practice, and the textual habits that produced sultanic authority through a documentary record that served as the baseline for analytic reflection by Ottomans and Ottomanists alike.
£53.60
Stanford University Press When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War
Book SynopsisThe Ottoman Empire was unprepared for the massive conflict of World War I. Lacking the infrastructure and resources necessary to wage a modern war, the empire's statesmen reached beyond the battlefield to sustain their war effort. They placed unprecedented hardships onto the shoulders of the Ottoman people: mass conscription, a state-controlled economy, widespread food shortages, and ethnic cleansing. By war's end, few aspects of Ottoman daily life remained untouched. When the War Came Home reveals the catastrophic impact of this global conflict on ordinary Ottomans. Drawing on a wide range of sources—from petitions, diaries, and newspapers to folk songs and religious texts—Yiğit Akın examines how Ottoman men and women experienced war on the home front as government authorities intervened ever more ruthlessly in their lives. The horrors of war brought home, paired with the empire's growing demands on its people, fundamentally reshaped interactions between Ottoman civilians, the military, and the state writ broadly. Ultimately, Akın argues that even as the empire lost the war on the battlefield, it was the destructiveness of the Ottoman state's wartime policies on the home front that led to the empire's disintegration.Trade Review"When the War Came Home is an authoritative social history among the many recent works on the Ottoman experience of World War I. Based on an imaginative array of sources, Yiğit Akın portrays meticulously and eloquently the upended lives of civilians and soldiers in the morass of the Middle East's fateful war."—Hasan Kayalı, University of California, San Diego"Yiğit Akın's treatment of the Ottoman homefront represents a critical breakthrough in the study of the First World War. Drawing upon highly original and interesting archival sources, as well as previously untapped published material, Akin vividly depicts the many hardships faced by Ottoman civilians during the course of the conflict. The book's artful prose makes it an engaging read for both students and scholars of the war, adding to its critical value for readers well beyond the field of modern Middle Eastern history."—Ryan Gingeras, Naval Postgraduate School"Yiğit Akın has written a pioneering study, examining the long-neglected Ottoman home front during World War I. When the War Came Home illuminates the war's deep social and economic impact on the empire's civilian population."—Mustafa Aksakal, Georgetown University"WW I has long been a topic of interest for Ottoman scholars, but the Ottoman home front has been largely ignored or, at best, unevenly treated. In this book Akın (Tulane Univ.) shows that the length and scale of the war meant that everyone in the Ottoman empire was affected....Akın's research was extensive (he even usedoften-ignored folklore), and it enabled him to provide vivid descriptions ofthose left behind struggling to meet the state's growing material demands, succumbing to starvation and banditry, and becoming increasingly alienated from the state."—R.W. Zens, Choice"Yiğit Akın's book, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire, is a well-researched and sophisticated study of the impact of the Great War on Ottoman politics, society, and culture....Akın's study of the Ottoman civilian experience of the Great War brings to life a rich trove of sources. The book's strong research base, its sophisticated and multidisciplinary analysis, and comparative approach make it a valuable addition to the lively field of Ottoman Great War studies and to the broader scholarship on the history of the Great War."—Najwa Al-Qattan, H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews"Akın's When the War Came Home is an important historical revision that fully portrays the imperial home front for the first time. Moreover, this unique interdisciplinary work reconsiders existing temporal, geographical, and methodological approaches to the study of World War I in the Middle East."––Melanie S. Tanielian, Journal of Interdisciplinary History"Yiğit Akın's fascinating book is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of World War I, the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and is certain to occupy an important place in these fields for many years to come."—Erdem Sönmez, European History QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. From the Balkan Wars to the Great War 2. From the Fields to the Ranks 3. Filling the Ranks, Emptying Homes 4. Feeding the Army, Starving the People 5. In the Home: Wives and Mothers 6. On the Road: Refugees and Deportees Conclusion
£86.40
Stanford University Press Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and
Book SynopsisIs religion a source of political stability and social continuity, or an agent of radical change? This question, so central to contemporary conversations about religion and extremism, has generated varied responses over the last century. Taking Jewish and Islamic education as its objects of inquiry, Mandatory Separation sheds light on the contours of this debate in Palestine during the formative period of British rule, detailing how colonial, Zionist, and Palestinian-Muslim leaders developed competing views of the form and function of religious education in an age of mass politics. Drawing from archival records, school syllabi, textbooks, newspapers, and personal narratives, Suzanne Schneider argues that the British Mandatory government supported religious education as a supposed antidote to nationalist passions at the precise moment when the administrative, pedagogic, and curricular transformation of religious schooling rendered it a vital tool for Zionist and Palestinian leaders. This study of their policies and practices illuminates the tensions, similarities, and differences among these diverse educational and political philosophies, revealing the lasting significance of these debates for thinking about religion and political identity in the modern Middle East.Trade Review"Mandatory Separation sheds welcome light on a crucial aspect of the British Mandate for Palestine, education for mass politics among both Jews and Muslims. Through this discussion, Suzanne Schneider exposes some of the essential foundations for the decades of conflict in Palestine and Israel that have followed. An important and timely work."—Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University"Brilliantly weaving together British, Zionist, and Palestinian Arab sources, Suzanne Schneider reveals the roots of national politics in the continuities, disjunctures, and struggles among the educators and reformers who saw the schools of Palestine as ground zero in their efforts to construct the ideal modern citizen. Mandatory Separation shows that the intertwining of religion and national politics in Israel/Palestine today is neither new nor eternal."—Liora R. Halperin, University of Washington"The book's novelty lies in its inclusion of education in [its] analytical framework, seeking to examine how two separate national communities operated under and interacted with the same system. Schneider reveals how, instead of promoting understanding, British colonial educational policy adopted and promoted a mandatory separation between the two communities....The book is articulate, straightforward and fun to read—a must read for scholars of the Palestine Mandate, the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, and British colonial history."—Yoni Furas, Middle East Journal"Schneider's book provides a compelling case study of how "religion" was defined and produced in a semi-colonial context in Palestine, and how those efforts connected with earlier labors concerning Judaism in Europe and Islam in the Levant. She also effectively argues that despite the determined portrayal in archival documents of religions as known, stable, and fixed categories, the reality in Palestine was that "religion," and specifically "Judaism" and "Islam," continued to escape and confound fixity. Her focus on education helps elucidate how "religious education" was produced as a particular category of knowledge, in which direct, unmediated access to scripture for the purpose of understanding its edifying moral lessons was privileged over studying the exegetical traditions."—Andrea Stanton, Reading Religion"In Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine, Suzanne Schneider astutely identifies an underexplored set of questions regarding the nature, political aims, and internal contradictions of British Mandate education policy...Adding to an important body of literature, Mandatory Separation offers new ways of understanding questions of economy, education, and settler colonialism in the study of British Mandate Palestine."—Hanna Alshaikh, Journal of Palestine StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Politics of Denial 1. Religious Education in the Modern Age 2. Educational Modernity in Palestine 3. Education and Community under Sectarian Rule 4. New Schooling for an "Old" Order 5. The Boundaries of Religious Knowledge 6. Border Clashes Conclusion: The Invisible Cross
£79.20
Stanford University Press Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and
Book SynopsisIs religion a source of political stability and social continuity, or an agent of radical change? This question, so central to contemporary conversations about religion and extremism, has generated varied responses over the last century. Taking Jewish and Islamic education as its objects of inquiry, Mandatory Separation sheds light on the contours of this debate in Palestine during the formative period of British rule, detailing how colonial, Zionist, and Palestinian-Muslim leaders developed competing views of the form and function of religious education in an age of mass politics. Drawing from archival records, school syllabi, textbooks, newspapers, and personal narratives, Suzanne Schneider argues that the British Mandatory government supported religious education as a supposed antidote to nationalist passions at the precise moment when the administrative, pedagogic, and curricular transformation of religious schooling rendered it a vital tool for Zionist and Palestinian leaders. This study of their policies and practices illuminates the tensions, similarities, and differences among these diverse educational and political philosophies, revealing the lasting significance of these debates for thinking about religion and political identity in the modern Middle East.Trade Review"Mandatory Separation sheds welcome light on a crucial aspect of the British Mandate for Palestine, education for mass politics among both Jews and Muslims. Through this discussion, Suzanne Schneider exposes some of the essential foundations for the decades of conflict in Palestine and Israel that have followed. An important and timely work."—Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University"Brilliantly weaving together British, Zionist, and Palestinian Arab sources, Suzanne Schneider reveals the roots of national politics in the continuities, disjunctures, and struggles among the educators and reformers who saw the schools of Palestine as ground zero in their efforts to construct the ideal modern citizen. Mandatory Separation shows that the intertwining of religion and national politics in Israel/Palestine today is neither new nor eternal."—Liora R. Halperin, University of Washington"The book's novelty lies in its inclusion of education in [its] analytical framework, seeking to examine how two separate national communities operated under and interacted with the same system. Schneider reveals how, instead of promoting understanding, British colonial educational policy adopted and promoted a mandatory separation between the two communities....The book is articulate, straightforward and fun to read—a must read for scholars of the Palestine Mandate, the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, and British colonial history."—Yoni Furas, Middle East Journal"Schneider's book provides a compelling case study of how "religion" was defined and produced in a semi-colonial context in Palestine, and how those efforts connected with earlier labors concerning Judaism in Europe and Islam in the Levant. She also effectively argues that despite the determined portrayal in archival documents of religions as known, stable, and fixed categories, the reality in Palestine was that "religion," and specifically "Judaism" and "Islam," continued to escape and confound fixity. Her focus on education helps elucidate how "religious education" was produced as a particular category of knowledge, in which direct, unmediated access to scripture for the purpose of understanding its edifying moral lessons was privileged over studying the exegetical traditions."—Andrea Stanton, Reading Religion"In Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine, Suzanne Schneider astutely identifies an underexplored set of questions regarding the nature, political aims, and internal contradictions of British Mandate education policy...Adding to an important body of literature, Mandatory Separation offers new ways of understanding questions of economy, education, and settler colonialism in the study of British Mandate Palestine."—Hanna Alshaikh, Journal of Palestine StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Politics of Denial 1. Religious Education in the Modern Age 2. Educational Modernity in Palestine 3. Education and Community under Sectarian Rule 4. New Schooling for an "Old" Order 5. The Boundaries of Religious Knowledge 6. Border Clashes Conclusion: The Invisible Cross
£21.59
Stanford University Press Hotels and Highways: The Construction of
Book SynopsisThe early decades of the Cold War presented seemingly boundless opportunity for the construction of "laboratories" of American society abroad: microcosms where experts could scale down problems of geopolitics to manageable size, and where locals could be systematically directed toward American visions of capitalist modernity. Among the most critical tools in the U.S.'s ideological arsenal was modernization theory, and Turkey emerged as a vital test case for the construction and validation of developmental thought and practice. With this book, Begüm Adalet reveals how Turkey became both the archetypal model of modernization and an active partner for its enactment. Through her analysis of the flow of aid money and expertise between the U.S. and Turkey, the planning of the American-funded Turkish highway network, and the development of the Turkish tourism industry, Adalet also highlights how "problems of knowledge" are fundamentally entwined with "problems of the political order": social scientific theories are produced in material spaces, through uncertain encounters between transnational actors and policy networks. In tracking the growth and transmission of modernization as a theory and in practice in Turkey, Hotels and Highways offers not only a specific history of a postwar development model that continues to influence our world, but a widely relevant consideration of how theoretical debates take shape in concrete situations.Trade Review"Hotels and Highways tells an absorbing story—from accounts of the modernization theorists' favorite research methods and the significant role Turkish intellectuals played in mutually shaping modernization theory itself, to the physical manifestations of their theories in infrastructures of modern capitalism in Turkey. A rich and fascinating account of how modernization theory came to Turkey." -- Laleh Khalili * University of London *"Hotels and Highways gives a clear understanding how U.S. hegemony was conceived and implemented in the aftermath of World War II and how thorough and decisive was its domination in Turkey and other similar places. Anybody interested in twentieth century experiences of modernity and U.S. power in the Middle East will need to read this book." -- Reşat Kasaba * University of Washington *"A brilliant history of the idea of modernization in the postwar period. By studying the projects and places in which concepts were shaped, Begüm Adalet opens a new perspective on twentieth-century political thought." -- Timothy Mitchell * Columbia University *"Adalet's deeply researched work regards modernization theory...as shaping the "central components" of US Cold War policy in the region. Wide-ranging chapters deal with modernization theory, sociological methods (e.g., survey research), and the role of highways and hotels in shaping modern Turkey. While the term "modernization" seems one more academic theory, Adalet sees it as a tool in the US political tool kit. On multiple levels, this is an important study of how the link of "theory" to "practice" serves key political interests. Must reading across several disciplines." -- H. Steck * Choice *"At first sight,Hotels and Highwaysappears to be a work of architectural history, urban studies, and infrastructural geography. But it goes beyond strict disciplinary fields, presenting important insights from the perspective of political science...[W]hat makesHotels and Highwaysan outstanding work is its critical take on the topic and its focus on knowledge production through the perspective of science and technology studies."––Husik Ghulyan, H-Socialisms"Hotels and Highways is a leap in scholarship on Turkey, with its sound exploration of American imperialism's modernization endeavors in Turkey during the Cold War. In addition to this, Adalet's book is also an exciting call for new study areas in order to understand the second half of the twentieth century in Turkey, and the Middle East."––Ilker Hepkaner, EuropeNow"By scrupulously recognizing the agency of multiple actors and reinstating perspectives that were deliberately erased or omitted from the record, Adalet demonstrates how intersections of theory with conditions on the ground produced myriad consequences that were often unpredictable and, at times, undesirable....[She] writes with lucidity and an economy of language that conveys much subtlety in few words, making this an eminently accessible book for a broad range of audiences." -- Zeynep Kezer * Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review *"[Hotels and Highways] is an empirically rich discussion of the negotiations and translations involved when concepts, ideas and theories travel and/or are translated into different contexts." -- Zeynep Gülşah Çapan * E-International Relations *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter outlines how American scholars, experts, and policy makers treated Turkey as a model and laboratory of modernization theory during the early phases of the Cold War. It introduces the social scientific and infrastructural measures that contributed to the production and enactment of modernization in the postwar Turkish landscape. These measures included large-scale survey research, the extension of a highway network, and the jump-starting of the tourism industry with Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan funds. The chapter discusses the unintended consequences of developmental thought and practice, such as the resistance of recipient subjects and anxieties and hesitations on the part of practitioners. It situates the book in the literature on global histories of development and concludes with a commentary on the archives and methodology employed in the project. It also provides a chapter outline. 1Beastly Politics: Dankwart Rustow and the Turkish Model of Modernization chapter abstractThis chapter traces the emergence of modernization theory and its Turkish archetype by drawing on the published work and private papers of political scientist Dankwart Rustow. Rustow was a seminal but hesitant participant in academic and policy circles during the Cold War. The chapter proceeds by analyzing Rustow's engagements with the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the political science faculty at Ankara University. His travels between these institutions underscore the transnational linkages of American social science and policy making as well as the anxieties of those who benefited from the circuits of funding that joined academic centers, government agencies, and private foundations. 2Questions of Modernization: Empathy and Survey Research chapter abstractThis chapter examines survey research as an experiment that occasioned the enactment of modernization theory, with a focus on the work of sociologist Daniel Lerner, and of other research that was funded by organizations like the Voice of America, the US Agency for International Development, and the Turkish State Planning Organization. These studies, which were conducted to measure and record the attitudes of peasants, students, and administrators in Turkey in the postwar period, were also efforts to create modern subjects; the interview setting in fact was designed to produce the forms of subjectivity and interpersonal relations articulated and idealized by modernization theory. Drawing on responses from the original questionnaires as well as from interviewers' unpublished commentaries, the chapter also shows how the dissemination of survey methodology and attendant theories of modernization were derailed by skeptical respondents and disorderly interviewer behavior. 3Material Encounters: Experts, Reports, and Machines chapter abstractThis chapter examines the American-funded and -planned Turkish highway network in the immediate aftermath of World War II by focusing on the interactions between the US Bureau of Public Roads, the Turkish Directorate of Highways, and the Economic Cooperation Administration. It shows how the arrival of American aid, experts, and machinery was expected to instigate modernization in administrative and mechanical terms by acquainting the new highway organization and its civil engineers with rational methods of record keeping, time management, and machine maintenance. The location of highways, the circulation of reports, and the labeling of roadbuilding equipment were material sites where the agencies competed over the management of the Turkish economy and staked out their claims to authority and visibility. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the personal and intimate dimensions of expertise that are otherwise often occluded by its technical and political aspects. 4"It's Not Yours If You Can't Get There": Modern Roads, Mobile Subjects chapter abstractThis chapter situates the US-funded highway program in a longer history of mobility management in Turkey, including policies of land reform and forced migration and settlement. Turkish and American social scientists, experts, and officials construed the provision of roads to the countryside as a civilizational necessity, one that would cultivate the ability for individual mobility. Developers believed that roads would grant access to remote areas populated by Kurdish minorities and that highways would shrink distances between different parts of the country, allowing its subjects to participate in a shared national space and economy. Although the experts and policy makers aimed to produce the conditions and subjects of individual economic and political rights, their projects in fact ended up enabling new critiques of inequality. 5The Innkeepers of Peace: Hospitality and the Istanbul Hilton chapter abstractThis chapter chronicles the efforts to develop a tourism industry in Turkey in the aftermath of World War II, with a focus on the design and construction of the Istanbul Hilton Hotel, which was financed by the Turkish Pension Funds and the Marshall Plan. The actors involved in the creation of the hotel alternately framed it as a bulwark against the threatening march of Communism and the signifier of a hospitable mindset, an attitude considered to be a necessary corollary to modernization. The chapter examines episodes that undermined the hotel's status as a showcase for American modernism, focusing on how local architects and politicians protested the hotel's role in the proliferation of the corporate International style, the incursion of foreign capital, and the expropriation of a public park. Conclusion chapter abstractThis chapter traces the continuing effects of modernization theory in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent projects for its reconstruction, which once again brought together social scientists and experts who staged ideological and political battles to shape the attitudes and beliefs of their targets. It also discusses the resurgence of the Turkish model of modernization and democracy in the context of the Arab uprisings, highlighting the roots of this failed trope in the projects of social scientists, policy makers, and experts of the early Cold War period.
£86.40
Stanford University Press Twilight Nationalism: Politics of Existence at
Book SynopsisThe city of Jaffa presents a paradox: intimate neighbors who are political foes. The official Jewish national tale proceeds from exile to redemption and nation-building, while the Palestinians' is one of a golden age cut short, followed by dispossession and resistance. The experiences of Jaffa's Jewish and Arab residents, however, reveal lives and nationalist sentiments far more complex. Twilight Nationalism shares the stories of ten of the city's elders—women and men, rich and poor, Muslims, Jews, and Christians—to radically deconstruct these national myths and challenge common understandings of belonging and alienation. Through the stories told at life's end, Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan illuminate how national affiliation ultimately gives way to existential circumstances. Similarities in lives prove to be shaped far more by socioeconomic class, age, and gender than national allegiance, and intersections between stories usher in a politics of existence in place of politics of identity. In offering the real stories individuals tell about themselves, this book reveals shared perspectives too long silenced and new understandings of local community previously lost in nationalist narratives.Trade Review"In Twilight Nationalism, Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan go far beyond standard narratives about Jaffa, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians have long shared the city. The authors break through the thicket of established notions and give us an alternative description. And they do so brilliantly."—Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions"Twilight Nationalism gives voice to ten elderly Palestinian survivors and Jewish immigrants from Jaffa who narrate and, indeed, analyze, how the burden of history and the tyranny of the nation fragmented the rhythms of their lives. Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan produced a multivocal elegy that is as profound as it is imaginative and nothing short of brilliant."—Gershon Shafir, University of California, San Diego, author of A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict"This groundbreaking book exposes the hidden gems of a binational city, that even indigenous Jaffans like myself tend to overlook."—Moussa Abou-Ramadan, University of Strasbourg, coauthor of Treatise of Comparative Islamic Law"InTwilight Nationalism: Politics of Existence at Life's End,authors Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan offer an original and thought-provoking ethnographic study of nationalist identity in the "mixed" city of Jaffa...[W]hat their analysis does amply and sensitively show is the value of a relational and situational approach to the study of nationalist identities and discourses, and the importance of being attentive to different social, spatial, and temporal configurations in analyses of their import upon everyday lives."––Una McGahern, H-Nationalism"One of the strengths of this ethnography is the intimate humanity of the individuals who appear in it...Together, the historical breadth and personal depth of the life histories narrated in this book could offer rich teaching material for students interested in old age, memory, the intersection of identity, politics, and gender, the false dichotomy of collaboration versus resistance, and mixed cities in Israel/ Palestine."––Basma Fahoum, Review of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Toward Twilight Nationalism 1. Besieged Nationalism: Fakhri Jday and the Decline of the Elites 2. Worn-Out Nationalism: Rabbi Avraham Bachar and the Community's Betrayal 3. Surviving Nationalism: Isma'il abu-Shehade and Testimony amid the Ruins 4. Circumventing Nationalism: The Hakim Sisters and the Cosmopolitan Experience 5. Domesticated Nationalism: Nazihah Asis, a Prisoner of Zion 6. Dissolved Nationalism: Subhiya abu-Ramadan and the Critique of the Patriarchal Order 7. Overlooking Nationalism: Talia Seckbach-Monterescu In and Out of Place 8. Suspended Nationalism: Moshe (Mussa) Hermosa and Jewish-Arab Masculinity 9. Masking Nationalism: Amram Ben-Yosef on a Tightrope 10. Speechless Nationalism: Abu-George on the Edge Conclusion: From Identity Politics to Politics of Existence Epilogue: Earth to Earth: Posthumous Nationalism
£86.40
Stanford University Press The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural
Book SynopsisOver the last three decades, a new generation of conceptual artists has come to the fore in the Arab Middle East. As wars, peace treaties, sanctions, and large-scale economic developments have reshaped the region, this cohort of cultural producers has also found themselves at the center of intergenerational debates on the role of art in society. Central to these cultural debates is a steady stream of support from North American and European funding organizations—resources that only increased with the start of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s. The Politics of Art offers an unprecedented look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. Hanan Toukan outlines the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives, and reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counterhegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In so doing, Toukan proposes not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art.Trade Review"There are few books out there that bring together a deep, critical knowledge of the arts in the Middle East with theoretical sophistication and shimmering ethnographic observations. Hanan Toukan's The Politics of Art does this abundantly, and it does so in beautiful, absorbing prose, with great care and tenderness."—Laleh Khalili, Queen Mary University of London"The Politics of Art is a game changer. Hanan Toukan brilliantly reveals a critical, often hidden component of art-making in the Middle East: how powerful political and economic interests have shaped what kinds of art are even possible. A brave intervention and required reading for anyone working in the fields of cultural politics and diplomacy."—Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University"In a detailed, revealing, and thought-provoking sociological account, Hanan Toukan explores how a contemporary art scene in Amman, Beirut, and Ramallah grew under the patronage of Western-funded NGOs alongside rising inequality. In these circumstances, might an idealistic commitment to diversity and decolonization produce a new form of homogeneity and domination?"—Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art"The Politics of Art is a dissonant account of how art, without recognition of its ties with power, upholds the very structures it claims to critique."—Ophelia Lai, ArtAsiaPacific"The Politics of Art is beautifully written and engages the relevant literatures from mainstream debates to more critical thinkers from the Frankfurt School to Rancière and Foucault. Written without jargon, the book is both theoretically sophisticated and accessible.... The book will be of interest not only to larger debates not only on cultural production but also on the diverse effects of neoliberalism, political dissent, the politics of urban space, and foreign development aid."—Jillian Schwedler, Perspectives on Politics"Overall, the book moves with a mocking spirit that tickles the funny bone at the same time that it hurts. As a Palestinian reader, one identifies with many things the author addresses, and one even smiles sometimes when reading specific sentences that make perfect sense, however painful."—Maysoon Shibi, Critical Inquiry"By rendering the implicit explicit, Toukan's text speaks to the quiet anxieties of both artists and academics who navigate international funding regimes, offering an important and highly interdisciplinary contribution to understandings of soft power and the politics of cultural production."—Melissa Scott, H-AMCA"The Politics of Art is, in short, a path-clearing work that should point the way for a new generation of art, performance, and music researchers to propose other formulations of the political by which to read, appreciate, and be in conversation with their performing and multidisciplinary artist contemporaries in the Mashriq."—Rayya El Zein, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: n/a 1. Cultural Wars and the Politics of Diplomacy 2. "An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist" 3. The Dissonance of Dissent: Art and Artists after 1990 4. Beirut: The Rise and Rise of Postwar Art 5. Amman: Uneasy Lie the Arts 6. Ramallah: The Paintbrush Is Mightier than the M16 Conclusion: n/a
£86.40
Stanford University Press When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War
Book SynopsisThe Ottoman Empire was unprepared for the massive conflict of World War I. Lacking the infrastructure and resources necessary to wage a modern war, the empire's statesmen reached beyond the battlefield to sustain their war effort. They placed unprecedented hardships onto the shoulders of the Ottoman people: mass conscription, a state-controlled economy, widespread food shortages, and ethnic cleansing. By war's end, few aspects of Ottoman daily life remained untouched. When the War Came Home reveals the catastrophic impact of this global conflict on ordinary Ottomans. Drawing on a wide range of sources—from petitions, diaries, and newspapers to folk songs and religious texts—Yiğit Akın examines how Ottoman men and women experienced war on the home front as government authorities intervened ever more ruthlessly in their lives. The horrors of war brought home, paired with the empire's growing demands on its people, fundamentally reshaped interactions between Ottoman civilians, the military, and the state writ broadly. Ultimately, Akın argues that even as the empire lost the war on the battlefield, it was the destructiveness of the Ottoman state's wartime policies on the home front that led to the empire's disintegration.Trade Review"When the War Came Home is an authoritative social history among the many recent works on the Ottoman experience of World War I. Based on an imaginative array of sources, Yiğit Akın portrays meticulously and eloquently the upended lives of civilians and soldiers in the morass of the Middle East's fateful war."—Hasan Kayalı, University of California, San Diego"Yiğit Akın's treatment of the Ottoman homefront represents a critical breakthrough in the study of the First World War. Drawing upon highly original and interesting archival sources, as well as previously untapped published material, Akin vividly depicts the many hardships faced by Ottoman civilians during the course of the conflict. The book's artful prose makes it an engaging read for both students and scholars of the war, adding to its critical value for readers well beyond the field of modern Middle Eastern history."—Ryan Gingeras, Naval Postgraduate School"Yiğit Akın has written a pioneering study, examining the long-neglected Ottoman home front during World War I. When the War Came Home illuminates the war's deep social and economic impact on the empire's civilian population."—Mustafa Aksakal, Georgetown University"WW I has long been a topic of interest for Ottoman scholars, but the Ottoman home front has been largely ignored or, at best, unevenly treated. In this book Akın (Tulane Univ.) shows that the length and scale of the war meant that everyone in the Ottoman empire was affected....Akın's research was extensive (he even usedoften-ignored folklore), and it enabled him to provide vivid descriptions ofthose left behind struggling to meet the state's growing material demands, succumbing to starvation and banditry, and becoming increasingly alienated from the state."—R.W. Zens, Choice"Yiğit Akın's book, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire, is a well-researched and sophisticated study of the impact of the Great War on Ottoman politics, society, and culture....Akın's study of the Ottoman civilian experience of the Great War brings to life a rich trove of sources. The book's strong research base, its sophisticated and multidisciplinary analysis, and comparative approach make it a valuable addition to the lively field of Ottoman Great War studies and to the broader scholarship on the history of the Great War."—Najwa Al-Qattan, H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews"Akın's When the War Came Home is an important historical revision that fully portrays the imperial home front for the first time. Moreover, this unique interdisciplinary work reconsiders existing temporal, geographical, and methodological approaches to the study of World War I in the Middle East."––Melanie S. Tanielian, Journal of Interdisciplinary History"Yiğit Akın's fascinating book is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of World War I, the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and is certain to occupy an important place in these fields for many years to come."—Erdem Sönmez, European History QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. From the Balkan Wars to the Great War 2. From the Fields to the Ranks 3. Filling the Ranks, Emptying Homes 4. Feeding the Army, Starving the People 5. In the Home: Wives and Mothers 6. On the Road: Refugees and Deportees Conclusion
£23.39
Stanford University Press Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi
Book SynopsisThe production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation.Trade Review"There are now two distinct eras in the writing of Saudi Arabian history: before Rosie Bsheer's Archive Wars and after." -- Robert Vitalis * University of Pennsylvania, author of Oilcraft *"Archive Wars explores with conceptual brilliance and historical aplomb the various forms of historical erasure central not just to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but to all modern states. In a finely-grained analysis, Rosie Bsheer rethinks the significance of archives, historicism, capital accumulation, and the remaking of the built environment. A must-read for all historians concerned with the materiality of modern state formation." -- Omnia El Shakry * University of California, Davis, author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt *"Archive Wars is an instant classic. With incredible insight, creativity, and courage, Rosie Bsheer peels away the political and institutional barriers that have so long mystified others seeking to understand Saudi Arabia. Bsheer tells us remarkable new things about the exercise and meaning of power in today's Saudi Arabia." -- Toby Jones * Rutgers University, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia *"Rosie Bsheer's Archive Wars is one of those extraordinary projects that explodes fictions of so many kinds about archives and state power. This masterful and meticulous book is testimony to the visceral violences that underwrite legal and archival mandates, the bedrock of the massive inequalities that plague our collective worlds now more than ever. Bsheer offers us a reading of the wars that rage in—and over—modern archives, showing that they are not modern because they are unmarred by the destruction of records, but because they are constituted by ever bolder techniques of erasure." -- Ann Stoler * The New School for Social Research, author of Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times *"Archive Wars is a much-needed and in many ways revelatory addition to our understanding of Saudi history and politics. On a personal level, I found the work to be an absolute delight to read and one that has challenged the way I look at Saudi politics. Despite being a vital country in the Middle East, there are few good texts on the kingdom. Archive Wars will stimulate better and more critical scholarship. It changes the way we think about the relationship between archives, heritage, and political power in the region, and beyond." -- Middle East Monitor"[A] must-read for anybody interested in modern Saudi Arabia. Whether you are looking for insights into the ambitions of kings or into the lives of ordinary people, it is essential to know how historical information is kept and erased. Beyond that, I recommend Bsheer's work to anybody studying the creation of archives and heritage elsewhere in the Middle East and globally." -- Jörg Matthias Determann * Journal of Social History *"By dissecting competing and complicated relationships between and among the Saudi state and elites, Bsheer presents a compelling portrait of the state's forceful consolidation of an acceptable historical narrative, showcasing the Saudi state's attempts to elide any historical documents or physical traces that do not corroborate the sanctioned story of the rise of Al Saud... [T]he book's depictions of urban transformations are essential for understanding the nature of power in Saudi Arabia today." -- Kathryn King * Journal of Arabian Studies *"This book is an intelligent, subtle, and learned treatment of the efforts by the Saudi Arabian monarchy to construct and disseminate a historical narrative that will legitimize its rule. Bsheer precisely and elegantly describes the regime's attempts, across the reigns of several kings, to both collect and suppress documentation about the country's past." -- Lisa Anderson * Foreign Affairs *"We find in Rosie Bsheer's book a skillful combination of topics and a stimulating engagement with the politics of history. Archive Wars deserves close reading, especially as it engages with a notoriously challenging country to frame, thanks to the author's unique access to the kingdom, her use of Saudi academic scholarship, and the books theoretical intervention in the political science of the Middle East and North Africa." -- Idriss Jebari * Canadian Journal of History *"This book substantially reworks existing knowledge of Saudi Arabia—the making of the state, the legitimization of its power, and the centrality of diverse history-making projects in these projects. Drawing on rich ethnographic and archival work, the author convincingly argues that the ruling regime has been engaged in a project of re-writing Saudi history since the 1990s. Central to these history-making projects has been the 'archive wars' and efforts to centralize archival sources, as well as re-making the built environment through urban planning and development.Sophisticated and engaging and politically bold." -- Committee for the Nikki Keddie Book Award * sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association *"Rosie Bsheer'sArchive Warsis a forceful and inspiring reminder of what superb and unflinching scholarship and writing can do. Based on exciting fieldwork,Archive Wars examines the erasing and building of history in Saudi Arabia. It is one of those rare books that focuses our attention – without hesitation – on the broader stakes and processes of modern state formation while detailing the contingencies and tensions of power. It exposes with clarity and precision links between political-economy, state power, and the materiality of documents and the built environment. Attempts to erase and rewrite the past in Saudi Arabia will have to contend with Rosie Bsheer's archive.—Committee for the AGAPS Biennial Book AwardTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Archive Question chapter abstractIn the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, ruling elites in Saudi Arabia adopted measures that aimed to reconfigure state power by pacifying wartime popular opposition, reshaping the politics of subject formation, and diversifying the petroleum economy. The ensuing struggle over state form—what I call archive wars—revolved around the production of history, the reordering of space, and the repurposing of valuable real estate. Historicizing these practices helps us rethink the nature of modern archival formation as well as statecraft while calling into question scholarly assumptions about the cohesiveness of authoritarian states, and of states in general. Approaching the domains of history making and urban planning as mutually constitutive, contested, and ongoing material practices of state formation complicates conventional understandings of the nature of state power and its imbrication with archive formation. 1Occluded Pasts chapter abstractThis chapter takes up one strand of sociopolitical and cultural life in late Ottoman Mecca: the school of Indian religious scholar Muhammad Rahmatullah al-Kairanawi and its relation to the emergence of an intellectually engaged Hijazi middle class during the nahda. The chapter then attends to how the Saudi state occluded and repackaged this history since 1932. Beyond the symbolic power it bestowed upon its rulers, Mecca was a space where intellectual debate flourished, honing the minds of thinkers who became central figures in twentieth-century politics and religion. Yet Mecca's past is absent from histories of the Hijaz and of Saudi Arabia and from histories of intellectual thought, cultural production, and political activism in the late Ottoman period. Unearthing these transregional histories is urgent because the Saudi state has been destroying the city's built environment in lockstep with the logic of historical erasure and state formation. 2A State With No Archive chapter abstractIn 1966, at the height of the struggle between reactionary and progressive forces that pitted Al Saud against Gamal Abdel Nasser and progressive forces inside Saudi Arabia, King Faisal passed the country's first archiving law. The aim was to choreograph a sanitized version of history and to reify elites' political, territorial, economic, and cultural claims. This chapter connects the beginning of archival praxis in Cold War Arabia to the necessity of managing elite power rivalries and fending off threats from regional rivals and domestic political movements. These anxieties shaped archival praxis and subsequently institutionalized a culture of secrecy and rivalry across the bureaucracy, with the push and pull of the archival operation mirroring the rivalries endemic to the Saudi state. Tracing the battles to produce an archive from the mid-1960s until the late 1980s shows how Saudi Arabia complicates conventional thinking about archives and about the authoritarian state itself. 3Assembling History chapter abstractIn the 1990s, Saudi Arabia's top rulers sought to shift the grounds for political legitimation, subject formation, and economic diversification to maintain power following the Gulf War. This required the production of primary source materials for a revised, secular official history, the repositories that would house them, and the spaces that would monumentalize such a discourse. The Darah, along with the Ariyyadh Development Authority, assembled the past and its spaces in Riyadh. With the backing of Salman, who was Riyadh's governor at the time, the low-grade archive fever of the 1970s got a second lease on life. Like Faisal before him, Salman faced challenges to centralizing the archive: from members of the ruling family, politicians and bureaucrats, activists and archivists. Institutional acts of history making and placing put into question the coherence of historical narration and memorialization, and expose archival anxieties and rivalries among the architects of state building. 4Heritage as War chapter abstractIn the aftermath of the Gulf War, an army of urban planners, economists, historians, archeologists, and tourism consultants descended upon Riyadh. Under the aegis of the High Commission for the Development of Arriyadh, they brainstormed ideas for the redevelopment of the capital city, with an eye to the economic, political, and social challenges that the country was facing in the late twentieth century. The Arriyadh Development Authority oversaw the production of a regulatory planning document that would transform Riyadh into the administrative, cultural, economic, touristic, and historical center of Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the production and destruction of historical sites since the 1950s. It shows how the 1990s saw the acceleration of the remaking of historical areas in Riyadh and the creation of a productive heritage industry therein. Memorialization came to constitute a key node in the postwar architectural reformulation of the state. 5Bulldozing the Past chapter abstractSince the early 2000s, the Saudi state summarily dynamited whole mountains around the Grand Mosque, destroying much of Islam's material history and replacing it with commercial megaprojects. The deliberate demolition of historical and religious sites in Mecca starkly contrasts with the preservation of more recent and dilapidated sites associated with Al Saud's heritage in Riyadh. In post–Gulf War Saudi Arabia, Mecca came to serve a different legitimating purpose, one rooted in grandiose infrastructural projects and aesthetics, wherein secular time overwhelmed religious temporality and subjectivity. The regime used Wahhabi iconoclasm and the need to modernize the hajj to justify such destruction. This chapter shows how the city's urban "renewal" was inextricable from archival formation and urban planning in Riyadh. The neoliberal city was at the heart of the twinned postwar process of real estate and heritage development, with Al Saud and the Binladin family reaping billions off its redevelopment. Conclusion: The Violence of History chapter abstractThis chapter centers on how Saudi rulers instrumentalized religion to pacify post–Gulf War popular contestation and shifted the basis of state legitimation to secular historical memorialization, political commemoration, and urban redevelopment. Using these material practices, it shows how statecraft, even in authoritarian regimes, evolves diachronically in response to a multiplicity of challenges, not least of which is popular opposition. The postwar project, however, was transformed at different critical junctures: the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia in the 2000s, the Arab Uprisings, and the ascension of the postwar project's architect, Salman ibn Abdulaziz, to the throne in 2015. With Salman in power, the archival landscape, both institutional and spatial, has for the most part succumbed to his decades-long national vision. Cultural and urban redevelopment reflects the material culture and built environment of Salman's Saudi Arabia, which enshrined his view of the past, present, and future.
£86.40
