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Unquestionably, this is one of the most important books about understanding the Middle East written during the last half-century.Jerusalem Post
Afterword: Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge -- Appendix: Producing Knowledge on World Regions: Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, 2000-Present -- About the Contributors -- Index
An innovative and provocative study tackling the main assumptions surrounding Israel's claim to Jewish identity.
In recent years, the geopolitical rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran has dominated the headlines. Many have charted the polarisation between a Saudi-led Sunni camp and an Iranian-led Shia one, assuming that a predominantly Shia state like Iraq would automatically ally with Iran. In this compelling account, Katherine Harvey tells a different story: Iraq’s alignment with Iran was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, Saudi efforts to undermine Iran have paradoxically empowered it. Harvey investigates why the Saudis refused to engage with Iraq’s post-2003 Shia-led government, despite continual outreach by Iraq’s new leaders and considerable pressure from the United States. She finds that ...
This handbook presents precise yet accessible up-to-date information about the geography, history, culture, politics, and economy of 26 Near and Middle East states, ranging from Morocco to Pakistan, from Turkey to South Sudan. The targeted readership consists primarily of scholars, students, teachers, journalists, and other mediators of political education as well as anyone interested in politics. It is a basic work that contributes to comparative assessments of this hugely important and diverse region. Markus Porsche-Ludwig, political scientist and jurist, is a professor in the Department of Public Administration and in the Asia-Pacific Regional Studies PhD Program at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan (ROC). Ying-Yu Chen has a PhD in international business and is an associate professor in the Bachelor Program of Management Science and Finance at National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan (ROC).
Analysing prominent novelists such as Ibrahim al-Kuni and Hisham Matar, alongside lesser-known and emerging voices, this book introduces the themes and genres of the Libyan novel during the al-Qadhafi era. Exploring latent political protest and environmental lament in the writing of novelists in exile and in the Jamahiriyya, Charis Olszok focuses on the prominence of encounters between humans, animals and the land, the poetics of vulnerability that emerge from them, and the vision of humans as creatures (makhluqat) in which they are framed.
This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two “others.” The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the “others” of modern Turkey, to the development of Turkish literature during the late Ottoman and early republican period, focusing on the works of largely forgotten authors. The second part discusses Turkey as the “other” of the West and the way authors writing in Turkish challenged orientalist representations. Thus this book prepares the ground for a history of literature which uncouples language and religion and recreates the spaces of dialogue and exchange that have existed in late Ottoman Turkey between members of various ethno-religious communities.
Amidst ongoing wars and insecurities, female fighters, politicians and activists of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are building a new political system that centres gender equality. Since the Rojava Revolution, the international focus has been especially on female fighters, a gaze that has often been essentialising and objectifying, brushing over a much more complex history of violence and resistance. Going beyond Orientalist tropes of the female freedom fighter, and the movement's own narrative of the 'free woman', Isabel Käser looks at personal trajectories and everyday processes of becoming a militant in this movement. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, with women politicians, martyr mothers and female fighters, she looks at how norms around gender and sexuality have been rewritten and how new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest for Kurdish self-determination. Her book complicates prevailing notions of gender and war and creates a more nuanced understanding of the everyday embodied epistemologies of violence, conflict and resistance.
A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer. Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities su...
Japan's gender roles are in turmoil. Traditional life courses for men and women are still presented as role models, but there is an increasing range of gender choices for those uncomfortable with convention. This collection of studies from the University of Cambridge provides fascinating insights into the diversity of gendered images, identities, and life-styles in contemporary Japan - from manga girls to herbivore boys, from absent fathers to transgender people. (Series: Japanese Studies / Japanologie - Vol. 3)