You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Hajja Souad, an 80-year old Palestinian woman living on the besieged Gaza Strip, knows about business. She has survived decades of wars and oppression through making shrouds for the dead. A compelling black comedy that delves deep into the intimate life of ordinary Palestinians, the play weaves a highly distinctive path through Palestine's turbulent past and present. The Shroud Maker toured the UK as a one-woman comedy, with one female actress playing all the roles, in the tradition of a Palestinian story-teller. The Shroud Maker was part of @70: Celebration of Contemporary Palestinian Culture, a week-long festival of theatre, dance, films and talks commemorating the Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland. It weaves comic fantasy and satire with true stories told first hand to the writer, and offers a vivid portrait of Palestinian life in Gaza underscored with gallows humour.
None
Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 – a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event – which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes – reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians? Covering a range of approaches – from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce – these stories use the blank canvas of the...
The first biography in a decade of Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the forces of resistance were disparate. Many groups were caught up in fighting each other and competing for Western arms. The exception were those commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military strategist and political operator who solidified the resistance and undermined the Russian occupation, leading resistance members to a series of defensive victories. Sandy Gall followed Massoud during Soviet incursions and reported on the war in Afghanistan, and he draws on this first-hand experience in his biography of this charismatic guerrilla commander. Afghan Napoleon incl...
Based on papers presented at an international three-day conference, sponsored by the British Academy and held at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in April 2009, this collection of essays provides a comprehensive and accessible synthesis of the most advanced specialist and scholarly knowledge to date concerning historical perspectives on relations between Britain and the Muslim World. Ranging from the early-modern period to the present day, the essays collected here represent work by leading writers and scholars from relevant fields—history, international relations, economics, religion, law, art history and design, film studies, and sociology, as well as literary and cultural studies. These essays explore the historical impacts of cross-cultural encounters between Islam and Britain by variously addressing the question of how relations between Britain and the Muslim world in the past have brought us to our current situation and, in some cases, by proposing directions for necessary further consideration and research.
The story based on the real events depicts 40 years of quagmire of corrupt, treacherous, uncouth world created by the world’s top “Intelligence Agencies”, who have been waging war across the globe, to achieve their selfish motives and satisfy their ego. The saga starts with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1980 and ends with the demoralized exit of the US from Afghanistan in 2021. The gripping tale moves swiftly from the deadly mountains of Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan to the dirty crowded lanes of Peshawar to the swanky streets of Paris to Washington DC. From Baghdad to Buenos Aires, and from Damascus to Dubai to Mumbai. Pakistan’s ISI covertly creates a plethora of global te...
The Sea Cloak is a collection of 11 stories by the author, journalist, and women’s rights campaigner, Nayrouz Qarmout. Drawing from her own experiences growing up in a Syrian refugee camp, as well as her current life in Gaza, these stories stitch together a patchwork of different perspectives into what it means to be a woman in Palestine today. Whether following the daily struggles of orphaned children fighting to survive in the rubble of recent bombardments, or mapping the complex, cultural tensions between different generations of refugees in wider Gazan society, these stories offer rare insights into one of the most talked about, but least understood cities in the Middle East. Taken together, the collection affords us a local perspective on a global story, and it does so thanks to a cast of (predominantly female) characters whose vantage point is rooted, firmly, in that most cherished of things, the home.
How do warlords survive and even thrive in contexts that are explicitly set up to undermine them? How do they rise after each fall? Warlord Survival answers these questions. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2018, with ministers, governors, a former vice-president, warlords and their entourages, opposition leaders, diplomats, NGO workers, and local journalists and researchers, Romain Malejacq provides a full investigation of how warlords adapt and explains why weak states like Afghanistan allow it to happen. Malejacq follows the careers of four warlords in Herat, Sheberghan, and Panjshir—Ismail Khan, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Moha...
As a Yemenite Jew born in the United States in 1931, author Sampson Giat had no physical contact with his grandparents, cousins, or other relatives, all of whom were living in Israel. In fact, he first met his maternal grandparents in 1960, when he was twenty-nine years of age. Despite the distance, Giat felt such a strong connection to his heritage that he spent his life in the pursuit of its betterment. Follow him as he shares his experiences with Volunteers for Israel, the Yemenite aliyah to Israel in 1992, and the issue of Yalde Temanthe kidnapping of Yemenite babies in Israel during the years 1948 to 1954 in My Memoir As An Activist For Israel And Yemenite Jews.
This book explains why Islamist parties have dominated the politics of Egypt for the better part of fifty years. Analyzing Islamist electoral performance and behavior before and after the 2011 revolution that unseated former dictator Hosni Mubarak, this book argues that Islamists win elections not because Egyptians are fundamentalists, but because these parties have more organizational resources to call on than their secular rivals.