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The women’s movement in Egypt has been heralded as improving the lives of women in Egypt and paving the way for women throughout the Arab world. As seen through the eyes of the university educated elite and middle class, this is no doubt true, yet such a narrow view fails to account for the diversity of women’s experience. In Changing Perspectives, Cathlyn Mariscotti provides a critical re-examination of the women’s movement, framing it within the broader economic and political movements occurring in Egypt and abroad. Her nuanced account unveils a rich, differentiated, and complex history of Egyptian women. Drawing upon published journal reports and newspaper articles, Mariscotti explo...
The complex history of Lebanese Shi‘ites has traditionally been portrayed as rooted in religious and sectarian forces. The Abisaabs uncover a more nuanced account in which colonialism, the modern state, social class, and provincial politics profoundly shaped Shi‘i society. The authors trace the sociopolitical, economic, and intellectual transformation of the Shi‘ites of Lebanon from 1920 during the French colonial period until the late twentieth century. They shed light on the relationship of contemporary Islamic militancy with traditions of religious modernism and leftism in both Lebanon and Iraq. Analyzing the interaction between sacred and secular features of modern Shi‘ite society, the authors clearly follow the group’s turn toward religious revolution and away from secular activism. This book transforms our understanding of twentieth-century Lebanese history and demonstrates how the rise of Hizbullah was conditioned by Shi‘ites’ consistent marginalization and neglect by the Lebanese state.
A history of elite women who were concubines and wives of powerful slave-soldiers, known as Mamluks, who dominated Egypt both politically and militarily in the eighteenth century.
"This monograph explores the relationship between Islam and Marxism in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and Indonesia from the publication of the first Communist periodical in 1915 to the beginning of the anti-communist massacres of 1965-66. It explores various permutations of how Muslim identity and Marxist analytical frameworks coexisted in the minds of Indonesian nationalists, as well as how individuals' Islamic faith and ethics shaped their willingness to employ Marxist ideas. Such confluences have long been obscured by state-driven narratives which demonize Marxism and posit the mutual exclusivity of Islam and Marxism. By examining Indonesian-language print culture, including newspaper...
From the Pharaohs to Fanon, Dictionary of African Biography provides a comprehensive overview of the lives of the men and women who shaped Africa's history. Unprecedented in scale, DAB covers the whole continent from Tunisia to South Africa, from Sierra Leone to Somalia. It also encompasses the full scope of history from Queen Hatsheput of Egypt (1490-1468 BC) and Hannibal, the military commander and strategist of Carthage (243-183 BC), to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909-1972), Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (1918 -).
Most research has accepted stereotypical images of Muslim women, treating their outward manifestations, such as veiling, as passive and oppressive. Muslim women have been depicted as different, and by exoticizing (orientalizing) them—or Islamic society in general—“they” have been dealt with outside of general women’s history and regarded as having little to contribute to the writing of world history or to the life of their sisters worldwide. By approaching widely used sources with different questions and methodologies, and by using new or little-used material (with much primary research), this book redresses these deficiencies. Scholars revisit and reevaluate scripture and scriptural interpretation; church records involving non-Muslim women of the Arab world; archival court records dating from the present back to the Ottoman period; and the oral and material culture and its written record, including oral history, textbooks, sufi practices, and the politics of dress. By deconstructing the past, these scholars offer fresh perspectives on women’s roles and aspirations in Middle East societies.
In Militant Women of a Fragile Nation, Malek Abisaab takes a gendered approach to labor conflicts, anticolonial struggles, and citizenship in modern Lebanon. The author traces the conditions and experiences of women workers at the French Tobacco Monopoly.
The book explores state feminism through a close look at how the Nasser regime took up "the woman question" as part of the attempt to build a modern Egyptian nation-state.
These essays illustrate the various ways in which women fall short of being vested with the rights and privileges that would define them as fully enfranchised citizens. They offer an in-depth examination of national legislation on personal status, penal law, labor law, nationality, and social security law. Others include indicators such as female education and employment, and many comment on the types of mobilization and activism engaged in by Middle Eastern women themselves to press for an expansion of their citizenship rights. Along with its sister volume, Citizenship and State in the Middle East, Applications and Approaches, also by Syracuse University Press, this book represents a pioneering approach to the Middle East from a citizenship perspective. The contributors raise a number of important and controversial issues that merit serious consideration.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.