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Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East
Exploring the contemporary dynamics of sexuality in the Middle East, this volume offers an in-depth and unique insight into this much contested and debated issue. It focuses on the role of sexuality in political and social struggles and the politicization of sexuality and gender in the region. Contributors illustrate the complexity of discourses, debates and issues, focusing in particular on the situation in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey, and explain how they cannot be reduced to a single underlying factor such as religion, or a simple binary opposition between the religious right and feminists. Contributors include renowned academicians, researchers, psychologists, historians, human rights and women's rights advocates and political scientists, from different countries and backgrounds, offering a balanced and contemporary perspective on this important issue, as well as highlighting the implication of these debates in larger socio-political contexts.
Women and Development
His Excellency Prof. Jamal Sanad Al-Suwaidi, Director General of the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, has published a new book titled Women and Development, which addresses, over four chapters, major issues relevant to Arab Islamic thought regarding women and their role in development. His Excellency believes that “women’s problems” are in fact society's problems; and these problems will not be solved without the involvement of government and private organizations and society as a whole. Improving the status of women and promoting their participation in development is the concern of the entire country. The author puts forth arguments proving the unsustainable rhetori...
What Kind of Liberation?
In the run-up to war in Iraq, the Bush administration assured the world that America's interest was in liberation—especially for women. The first book to examine how Iraqi women have fared since the invasion, What Kind of Liberation? reports from the heart of the war zone with dire news of scarce resources, growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion. Moreover, the book exposes the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the "new Iraq." Based on interviews with Iraqi women's rights activists, international policy makers, and NGO workers and illustrated with photographs taken by Iraqi women, What Kind of Liberation? speaks through an astonishing array of voices. Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt correct the widespread view that the country's violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women's rights come from something inherent in Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Iraqi culture. They also demonstrate how in spite of competing political agendas, Iraqi women activists are resolutely pressing to be part of the political transition, reconstruction, and shaping of the new Iraq.
Islamic Masculinities
This innovative book outlines the great complexity, variety and difference of male identities in Islamic societies. From the Taliban orphanages of Afghanistan to the cafés of Morocco, from the experience of couples at infertility clinics in Egypt to that of Iraqi conscripts, it shows how the masculine gender is constructed and negotiated in the Islamic Ummah. It goes far beyond the traditional notion that Islamic masculinities are inseparable from the control of women, and shows how the relationship between spirituality and masculinity is experienced quite differently from the prevailing Western norms. Drawing on sources ranging from modern Arabic literature to discussions of Muhammad‘s virility and Abraham‘s paternity, it portrays ways of being in the world that intertwine with non-Western conceptions of duty to the family, the state and the divine.
Women in the Middle East
Written by a pioneer in the field of Middle Eastern women's history, Women in the Middle East is a concise, comprehensive, and authoritative history of the lives of the region's women since the rise of Islam. Nikki Keddie shows why hostile or apologetic responses are completely inadequate to the diversity and richness of the lives of Middle Eastern women, and she provides a unique overview of their past and rapidly changing present. The book also includes a brief autobiography that recounts Keddie's political activism as one of the first women in Middle East Studies. Positioning women within their individual economic situations, identities, families, and geographies, Women in the Middle East...
Human Adaptive Strategies
This book introduces students to cultural anthropology with an emphasis on environmental and evolutionary approaches, focusing on how humans adapt to their environment and how the environment shapes culture. It shows how cultures evolve within the context of people’s strategies for surviving and thriving in their environments.This approach is widely used among scholars as a cross-disciplinary tool that rewards students with valuable insights into contemporary developments. Drawing on anthropological case studies, the authors address immediate human concerns such as the costs and consequences of human energy requirements, environmental change and degradation, population pressure, social and...
Bridging the Gap
In Bridging the Gap scholar and military officer Cindy R. Jebb asks why the United States, with its considerable diplomatic, economic, and military resources vested in the Middle East, has not been able to successfully implement plans to quell unrest in the region. To find an answer, Jebb specifically focuses on the factors that drive United States' foreign policy decisions in Egypt and Syria in a Cold War and post-Cold War context. The epilogue brings forward the post-Cold War findings to a post 9/11 world, providing insights on the changing legitimacy formulas for both states. Using comparative politics literature to answer the international relations question of why states behave as they do, this searching study builds an important foundation for further research in other critical areas of current scholarly interest, including democratization, consensus-building, multilateral institutions, and ethnic studies. Bridging the Gap will be indispensable to scholars in the international, comparative, and security fields, and Jebb's insights will be of particular value to Middle East regional experts and policy makers.
Freedom and Orthodoxy
This book argues that the clash of civilizations that is supposed to be a feature of the post-Cold War environment is not necessarily caused by the dogma of world religions or cultural incompatibilities but by the inflexible and hegemonic universalisms that have characterized world history since 1492a cultural outlook that Majid terms post-Andalusianism. The all-encompassing worldviews of Euro-American ideologies have resulted in the retreat of Islam and other non-European traditions into dangerous orthodoxies and a growing climate of suspicion, fear, and terror. Freedom and Orthodoxy offers an alternative to perennial discord, suggesting that the world needs a philosophy of the provincial, one that reattaches individuals and societies to their heritages and memories but connects them to the rest of the world in solid, non-alienating, meaningful ways. For this to happen, Majid contends, globalization must be reimagined as a network of human solidarities and rigorous conversations across the worlds multiple cultures, not as a mechanical process of economic expansionism.
Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman North Africa
The studies collected in this volume cover three broad areas of the history of North Africa as part of the Roman Empire. Studies devoted to the history of 'political institutions' are followed by ones that detail aspects of interactions between nomad and sedentarist communities in the African provinces. The book concludes with two studies on African christianity. In all of these, special attention is given to the indigenous institutions, economies and beliefs that informed the confrontation between 'African' and 'Roman'. The studies in general argue for a strongly 'interactionist' approach to historians' reconstruction of the history of the period and the region - a perspective that would emphasise the continuous conflict between the two world of African and Roman.
Cosmopolitan Anxieties
In Cosmopolitan Anxieties, Ruth Mandel explores Germany’s relation to the more than two million Turkish immigrants and their descendants living within its borders. Based on her two decades of ethnographic research in Berlin, she argues that Germany’s reactions to the postwar Turkish diaspora have been charged, inconsistent, and resonant of past problematic encounters with a Jewish “other.” Mandel examines the tensions in Germany between race-based ideologies of blood and belonging on the one hand and ambitions of multicultural tolerance and cosmopolitanism on the other. She does so by juxtaposing the experiences of Turkish immigrants, Jews, and “ethnic Germans” in relation to iss...
