front cover of Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis
Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis
Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture
Walter Burkert
Harvard University Press, 2007

At the distant beginning of Western civilization, according to European tradition, Greece stands as an insular, isolated, near-miracle of burgeoning culture. This book traverses the ancient world’s three great centers of cultural exchange—Babylonian Nineveh, Egyptian Memphis, and Iranian Persepolis—to situate classical Greece in its proper historical place, at the Western margin of a more comprehensive Near Eastern–Aegean cultural community that emerged in the Bronze Age and expanded westward in the first millennium B.C.

In concise and inviting fashion, Walter Burkert lays out the essential evidence for this ongoing reinterpretation of Greek culture. In particular, he points to the critical role of the development of writing in the ancient Near East, from the achievement of cuneiform in the Bronze Age to the rise of the alphabet after 1000 B.C. From the invention and diffusion of alphabetic writing, a series of cultural encounters between “Oriental” and Greek followed. Burkert details how the Assyrian influences of Phoenician and Anatolian intermediaries, the emerging fascination with Egypt, and the Persian conquests in Ionia make themselves felt in the poetry of Homer and his gods, in the mythic foundations of Greek cults, and in the first steps toward philosophy. A journey through the fluid borderlines of the Near East and Europe, with new and shifting perspectives on the cultural exchanges these produced, this book offers a clear view of the multicultural field upon which the Greek heritage that formed Western civilization first appeared.

[more]

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Bad Girls of the Arab World
Edited by Nadia Yaqub and Rula Quawas
University of Texas Press, 2017

Women’s transgressive behaviors and perspectives are challenging societal norms in the Arab world, giving rise to anxiety and public debate. Simultaneously, however, other Arab women are unwillingly finding themselves labeled “bad” as authority figures attempt to redirect scrutiny from serious social ills such as patriarchy and economic exploitation, or as they impose new restrictions on women’s behavior in response to uncertainty and change in society. Bad Girls of the Arab World elucidates how both intentional and unintentional transgressions make manifest the social and cultural constructs that define proper and improper behavior, as well as the social and political policing of gender, racial, and class divisions.

The works collected here address the experiences of women from a range of ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who live in the Arab world and beyond. They include short pieces in which the women themselves reflect on their experiences with transgression; academic articles about performance, representation, activism, history, and social conditions; an artistic intervention; and afterwords by the acclaimed novelists Laila al-Atrash and Miral al-Tahawy. The book demonstrates that women’s transgression is both an agent and a symptom of change, a site of both resistance and repression. Showing how transnational forces such as media discourses, mobility and confinement, globalization, and neoliberalism, as well as the legacy of colonialism, shape women’s badness, Bad Girls of the Arab World offers a rich portrait of women’s varied experiences at the boundaries of propriety in the twenty-first century.

[more]

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Baghdad Bulletin
Dispatches on the American Occupation
David Enders
University of Michigan Press, 2009
"David Enders has a stunning independent streak and the courage to trust his own perceptions as he reports from outside the bubble Americans have created for themselves in Iraq."
---Joe Sacco, author of Safe Area Gorazde

"Baghdad Bulletin takes us where mainstream news accounts do not go. Disrupting the easy clichés that dominate U.S. journalism, Enders blows away the media fog of war. The result is a book that challenges Americans to see through double speak and reconsider the warfare being conducted in their names."
---Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

"Journalism at its finest and on a shoestring to boot. David Enders shows that courage and honesty can outshine big-budget mainstream media. Wry but self-critical, Baghdad Bulletin tells a story that a few of us experienced but every journalist, nay every citizen, should read."
---Pratap Chatterjee, Managing Editor and Project Director, CorpWatch

"Young and tenacious, Dave Enders went, saw, and wrote it down. Here it is-a well-informed and detailed tale of Iraq's decline under American rule. Baghdad Bulletin offers tragic politics, wacky people, and keen insights about what really matters on the ground in Iraq."
---Christian Parenti

"I wrote my first piece for Baghdad Bulletin after visiting the mass graves at Al-Hilla in 2003. The Baghdad Bulletin was essential reading in the first few months after the end of the war. I handed that particular copy to Prime Minister Tony Blair. I am only sorry that I cannot read it anymore. David Enders and his team were brave, enterprising, and idealistic."
---Rt. Hon. Ann Clwyd, member of the British Parliament


Baghdad Bulletin is a street-level account of the war and turbulent postwar period as seen through the eyes of the young independent journalist David Enders. The book recounts Enders's story of his decision to go to Iraq, where he opened the only English-language newspaper completely written, printed, and distributed there during the war.

Young, courageous, and anti-authoritarian, Enders is the first reporter to cover the war as experienced by ordinary Iraqis. Deprived of the press credentials that gave his embedded colleagues access to press conferences and officially sanitized information, Enders tells the story of a different war, outside the Green Zone. It is a story in which the struggle of everyday life is interspersed with moments of sheer terror and bizarre absurdity: wired American troops train their guns on terrified civilians; Iraqi musicians prepare a recital for Coalition officials who never show; traveling clowns wreak havoc in a Baghdad police station.

Orphans and intellectuals, activists and insurgents: Baghdad Bulletin depicts the unseen complexity of Iraqi society and gives us a powerful glimpse of a new kind of warfare, one that coexists with-and sometimes tragically veers into-the everyday rhythms of life.
[more]

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Baghdad
The City in Verse
Reuven Snir
Harvard University Press, 2013

Baghdad: The City in Verse captures the essence of life lived in one of the world’s great enduring metropolises. In this unusual anthology, Reuven Snir offers original translations of more than 170 Arabic poems—most of them appearing for the first time in English—which represent a cross-section of genres and styles from the time of Baghdad’s founding in the eighth century to the present day. The diversity of the fabled city is reflected in the Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets featured here, including writers of great renown and others whose work has survived but whose names are lost to history.

Through the prism of these poems, readers glimpse many different Baghdads: the city built on ancient Sumerian ruins, the epicenter of Arab culture and Islam’s Golden Age under the enlightened rule of Harun al-Rashid, the bombed-out capital of Saddam Hussein’s fallen regime, the American occupation, and life in a new but unstable Iraq. With poets as our guides, we visit bazaars, gardens, wine parties, love scenes (worldly and mystical), brothels, prisons, and palaces. Startling contrasts emerge as the day-to-day cacophony of urban life is juxtaposed with eternal cycles of the Tigris, and hellish winds, mosquitoes, rain, floods, snow, and earthquakes are accompanied by somber reflections on invasions and other catastrophes.

Documenting the city’s 1,250-year history, Baghdad: The City in Verse shows why poetry has been aptly called the public register of the Arabs.

[more]

front cover of The Balkan Reconquista and Turkey's Forgotten Refugee Crisis
The Balkan Reconquista and Turkey's Forgotten Refugee Crisis
William H. Holt
University of Utah Press, 2019
During the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, Russian troops, Cossack auxiliaries, and local Bulgarians participated in what today would be called ethnic cleansing. Tensions in the Balkans between Christians and Muslims ended in disaster when hundreds of thousands of Muslims were massacred, raped, and forced to flee from Bulgaria to Turkey as their villages were sacked and their homes destroyed.
 
In this book, William H. Holt tells the story of a people and moment in time that has largely been neglected in modern Turkish and Balkan memory. Holt uncovers the reasons for this mass forgetting, finding context both within the development of the modern Turkish state and the workings of collective memory. Bringing together a wide array of eyewitness accounts, the book provides unprecedented detail on the plight of the Muslim refugees in their flight from Bulgaria, in Istanbul, and in their resettlement in Anatolia. In crisp, clear, and engaging prose, Holt offers an insightful analysis of human suffering and social memory.
[more]

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The Ba'thification of Iraq
Saddam Hussein's Totalitarianism
By Aaron M. Faust
University of Texas Press, 2015

Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq as a dictator for nearly a quarter century before the fall of his regime in 2003. Using the Ba’th party as his organ of meta-control, he built a broad base of support throughout Iraqi state and society. Why did millions participate in his government, parrot his propaganda, and otherwise support his regime when doing so often required betraying their families, communities, and beliefs? Why did the “Husseini Ba’thist” system prove so durable through uprisings, two wars, and United Nations sanctions?

Drawing from a wealth of documents discovered at the Ba’th party’s central headquarters in Baghdad following the US-led invasion in 2003, The Ba’thification of Iraq analyzes how Hussein and the party inculcated loyalty in the population. Through a grand strategy of “Ba’thification,” Faust argues that Hussein mixed classic totalitarian means with distinctly Iraqi methods to transform state, social, and cultural institutions into Ba’thist entities, and the public and private choices Iraqis made into tests of their political loyalty. Focusing not only on ways in which Iraqis obeyed, but also how they resisted, and using comparative examples from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, The Ba’thification of Iraq explores fundamental questions about the roles that ideology and culture, institutions and administrative practices, and rewards and punishments play in any political system.

[more]

front cover of Beaches, Ruins, Resorts
Beaches, Ruins, Resorts
The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World
Waleed Hazbun
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

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Becoming American
The Early Arab Immigrant Experience
Alixa Naff
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

A unique study in American immigra­tion and assimilation history that also provides a special view of one of the smaller ethnic groups in American society.

Naff focuses on the pre-World War I pio­neering generation of Arabic-speaking immigrants, the generation that set the patterns for settlement and assimilation. Unlike many immigrants who were drawn to the United States by dreams of industrial jobs or to escape religious or economic persecution, most of these ar­tisans and owners of small, disconnected plots of land came to America to engage in the enterprise of peddling. Most planned to stay two or three years and re­turn to their homelands.

[more]

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Becoming Israeli
National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s
Anat Helman
Brandeis University Press, 2014
With a light touch and many wonderful illustrations, historian Anat Helman investigates "life on the ground" in Israel during the first years of statehood. She looks at how citizens--natives of the land, longtime immigrants, and newcomers--coped with the state's efforts to turn an incredibly diverse group of people into a homogenous whole. She investigates the efforts to make Hebrew the lingua franca of Israel, the uses of humor, and the effects of a constant military presence, along with such familiar aspects of daily life as communal dining on the kibbutz, the nightmare of trying to board a bus, and moviegoing as a form of escapism. In the process Helman shows how ordinary people adapted to the standards and rules of the political and cultural elites and negotiated the chaos of early statehood.
[more]

front cover of Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800
Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800
Khaled El-Rouayheb
University of Chicago Press, 2005

Attitudes toward homosexuality in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as schizophrenic—visible and tolerated on one hand, prohibited by Islam on the other. Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, biographical literature, medicine, dream interpretation, and Islamic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality.

[more]

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Before Orthodoxy
The Satanic Verses in Early Islam
Shahab Ahmed
Harvard University Press, 2017

One of the most controversial episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad concerns an incident in which he allegedly mistook words suggested by Satan as divine revelation. Known as the Satanic verses, these praises to the pagan deities contradict the Islamic belief that Allah is one and absolute. Muslims today—of all sects—deny that the incident of the Satanic verses took place. But as Shahab Ahmed explains, Muslims did not always hold this view.

Before Orthodoxy wrestles with the question of how religions establish truth—especially religions such as Islam that lack a centralized authority to codify beliefs. Taking the now universally rejected incident of the Satanic verses as a case study in the formation of Islamic orthodoxy, Ahmed shows that early Muslims, circa 632 to 800 CE, held the exact opposite belief. For them, the Satanic verses were an established fact in the history of the Prophet. Ahmed offers a detailed account of the attitudes of Muslims to the Satanic verses in the first two centuries of Islam and traces the chains of transmission in the historical reports known as riwāyah.

Touching directly on the nature of Muhammad’s prophetic visions, the interpretation of the Satanic verses incident is a question of profound importance in Islam, one that plays a role in defining the limits of what Muslims may legitimately say and do—issues crucial to understanding the contemporary Islamic world.

[more]

front cover of Before Writing, Vol. I
Before Writing, Vol. I
From Counting to Cuneiform
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
University of Texas Press, 1992

A fascinating book on the origins of writing.

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

[more]

front cover of Before Writing, Vol. II
Before Writing, Vol. II
A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
University of Texas Press, 1992

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

[more]

front cover of Behind the Veil in Arabia
Behind the Veil in Arabia
Women in Oman
Unni Wikan
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Through photographs and detailed case histories, Unni Wikan explores the strict segregation of women, the wearing of the burqa mask, the elaborate nuptial rituals, and the graceful quality of Oman's social relations.

"Wikan does provide insights into the real position of these secluded and segregated women. . . . All this is interesting and valuable."—Ahdaf Soueif, Times Literary Supplement

"The book is detailed, insightful, and . . . engrossing. Anyone interested in the day-to-day triumphs and sorrows of women who live 'behind the veil' will want to read this account."—Arab Book World

"Wikan, a fine ethnographer, has an eye for everything that is distinctive about the culture and . . . builds up a wholly convincing picture. Above all, there is a sustained attempt to penetrate the inner lives of these strangely serene people."—Frank H. Stewart, Wilson Quarterly

"This book will certainly be of interest to all scholars concerned with sexual identity in the Islamic world."—Henry Munson, American Anthropologist
[more]

front cover of Belated Travelers
Belated Travelers
Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution
Ali Behdad
Duke University Press, 1994
In Belated Travelers, Ali Behdad offers a compelling cultural critique of nineteenth-century travel writing and its dynamic function in European colonialism. Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century European travelers to the Middle East experienced a sense of belatedness, of having missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing. Behdad argues that this nostalgic desire for the other contains an implicit critique of Western superiority, a split within European discourses of otherness. Working from these insights and using analyses of power derived from Foucault, Behdad engages in a new critique of orientalism. No longer viewed as a coherent and unified phenomenon or a single developmental tradition, it is seen as a complex and shifting field of practices that has relied upon its own ambivalence and moments of discontinuity to ensure and maintain its power as a discourse of dominance.
Through readings of Flaubert, Nerval, Kipling, Blunt, and Eberhardt, and following the transition in travel literature from travelog to tourist guide, Belated Travelers addresses the specific historical conditions of late nineteenth-century orientalism implicated in the discourses of desire and power. Behdad also views a broad range of issues in addition to nostalgia and tourism, including transvestism and melancholia, to specifically demonstrate the ways in which the heterogeneity of orientalism and the plurality of its practice is an enabling force in the production and transformation of colonial power.
An exceptional work that provides an important critique of issues at the forefront of critical practice today, Belated Travelers will be eagerly awaited by specialists in nineteenth-century British and French literatures, and all concerned with colonial and post-colonial discourse.
[more]

front cover of The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States
The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States
By Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
University of Texas Press, 2011

Like many indigenous groups that have endured centuries of subordination, the Berber/Amazigh peoples of North Africa are demanding linguistic and cultural recognition and the redressing of injustices. Indeed, the movement seeks nothing less than a refashioning of the identity of North African states, a rewriting of their history, and a fundamental change in the basis of collective life. In so doing, it poses a challenge to the existing political and sociocultural orders in Morocco and Algeria, while serving as an important counterpoint to the oppositionist Islamist current.

This is the first book-length study to analyze the rise of the modern ethnocultural Berber/Amazigh movement in North Africa and the Berber diaspora. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman begins by tracing North African history from the perspective of its indigenous Berber inhabitants and their interactions with more powerful societies, from Hellenic and Roman times, through a millennium of Islam, to the era of Western colonialism. He then concentrates on the marginalization and eventual reemergence of the Berber question in independent Algeria and Morocco, against a background of the growing crisis of regime legitimacy in each country. His investigation illuminates many issues, including the fashioning of official national narratives and policies aimed at subordinating Berbers in an Arab nationalist and Islamic-centered universe; the emergence of a counter-movement promoting an expansive Berber "imagining" that emphasizes the rights of minority groups and indigenous peoples; and the international aspects of modern Berberism.

[more]

front cover of The Berlin-Baghdad Express
The Berlin-Baghdad Express
The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power
Sean McMeekin
Harvard University Press, 2010

The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region. As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends.

The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I—Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution—are illuminated as never before.

Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East.

[more]

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The Best School in Jerusalem
Annie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900–1960
Laura S. Schor
Brandeis University Press, 2013
Annie Edith (Hannah Judith) Landau (1873–1945), born in London to immigrant parents and educated as a teacher, moved to Jerusalem in 1899 to teach English at the Anglo-Jewish Association’s Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls. A year later she became its principal, a post she held for forty-five years. As a member of Jerusalem’s educated elite, Landau had considerable influence on the city’s cultural and social life, often hosting parties that included British Mandatory officials, Jewish dignitaries, Arab leaders, and important visitors. Her school, which provided girls of different backgrounds with both a Jewish and a secular education, was immensely popular and often had to reject candidates, for lack of space. A biography of both an extraordinary woman and a thriving institution, this book offers a lens through which to view the struggles of the nascent Zionist movement, World War I, poverty and unemployment in the Yishuv, and the relations between the religious and secular sectors and between Arabs and Jews, as well as Landau’s own dual loyalties to the British and to the evolving Jewish community.
[more]

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Between Banat
Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives
Mejdulene Bernard Shomali
Duke University Press, 2023
In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab women’s futures, she draws on the transliterated term “banat”—the Arabic word for girls—to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the “Arab woman.” By attending to Arab women’s narration of desire and identity, queer Arab critique substantiates queer Arab histories while challenging Orientalist and Arab national paradigms that erase queer subjects. In this way, Shomali frames queerness and Arabness as relational and transnational subject formations and contends that prioritizing transnational collectivity over politics of authenticity, respectability, and inclusion can help lead toward queer freedom.
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Between Home and Homeland
Youth Aliyah from Nazi Germany
Brian Amkraut
University of Alabama Press, 2006
 Between Home and Homeland is a fascinating account of young German Jews who immigrated to Palestine during the 1930s in the Youth Aliya movement.

As Hitler consolidated power, Jews and their allies in Germany began efforts to leave the country. Among them was the organization, Youth Aliyah. Based on abundant archival sources and a thorough use of secondary literature, Brian Amkraut details the story of the organization from its origins through its alliances and antagonisms with other Jewish organizations, and the challenges that vexed its efforts from every side, perhaps the greatest being sheer human naiveté ("surely things will get better").

Amkraut also discusses the identity dilemma for Jews who grew up feeling German, and then had to alter their self-image in the face of growing discrimination. He highlights the internal disagreements of Jewish agencies who wrestled with myriad problems. The author explores how German Jews were ideologically heterogeneous, and details how different groups coped with increasing antagonism in a variety of ways.

To this day, Youth Aliyah is considered by Israelis as a major contributor to the foundation of a Jewish presence leading to the modern state of Israel. Between Home and Homeland is an essential account of an important episode in the history of the Holocaust and the founding of the Isreali state.
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front cover of Between Jew and Arab
Between Jew and Arab
The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz
David N. Myers
Brandeis University Press, 2009
This book brings new attention to Simon Rawidowicz (1897–1957), the wide-ranging Jewish thinker and scholar who taught at Brandeis University in the 1950s. At the heart of Myers’ book is a chapter that Rawidowicz wrote as a coda to his Hebrew tome Babylon and Jerusalem (1957) but never published. In it, Rawidowicz shifted his decades-long preoccupation with the “Jewish Question” to what he called the “Arab Question.” Asserting that the “Arab Question” had become a most urgent political and moral matter for Jews after 1948, Rawidowicz called for an end to discrimination against Arabs resident in Israel—and more provocatively, for the repatriation of Arab refugees from 1948. Myers’ book is divided into two main sections. Part I introduces the life and intellectual development of Rawidowicz. It traces the evolution of his thinking about the “Jewish Question,” namely, the status of Jews as a national minority in the Diaspora. Part II concentrates on the shift occasioned by the creation of the State of Israel, when Jews assumed political sovereignty and entered into a new relationship with the native Arab population. Myers analyzes the structure, content, and context of Rawidowicz’s unpublished chapter on the “Arab Question,” paying particular attention to Rawidowicz’s calls for an end to discrimination against Arabs in Israel, on the one hand, and for the repatriation of those refugees who left Palestine in 1948, on the other. The volume also includes a full English translation of “Between Jew and Arab,” a timeline of significant events, and an appendix of official legal documents from Israel and the international community pertaining to the conflict.
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front cover of Between Ruin and Restoration
Between Ruin and Restoration
An Environmental History of Israel
Daniel E. Orenstein
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
The environmental history of Israel is as intriguing and complex as the nation itself. Situated on a mere 8,630 square miles, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf, varying from desert to forest, Israel’s natural environment presents innumerable challenges to its growing population. The country’s conflicted past and present, diverse religions, and multitude of cultural influences powerfully affect the way Israelis imagine, question, and shape their environment. Zionism, from the late nineteenth onward, has tempered nearly every aspect of human existence. Scarcities of usable land and water coupled with border conflicts and regional hostilities have steeled Israeli’s survival instincts. As this volume demonstrates, these powerful dialectics continue to undergird environmental policy and practice in Israel today.

Between Ruin and Restoration assembles leading experts in policy, history, and activism to address Israel’s continuing environmental transformation from the biblical era to the present and beyond, with a particular focus on the past one hundred and fifty years. The chapters also reflect passionate public debates over meeting the needs of Israel’s population and preserving its natural resources.

The chapters detail the occupations of the Ottoman Empire and British colonialists in eighteenth and nineteenth century Palestine, as well as Fellaheen and pastoralist Bedouin tribes, and how they shaped much of the terrain that greeted early Zionist settlers. Following the rise of the Zionist movement, the rapid influx of immigrants and ensuing population growth put new demands on water supplies, pollution controls, sanitation, animal populations, rangelands and biodiversity, forestry, marine policy, and desertification. Additional chapters view environmental politics nationally and internationally, the environmental impact of Israel’s military, and considerations for present and future sustainability.
[more]

front cover of Between the Middle East and the Americas
Between the Middle East and the Americas
The Cultural Politics of Diaspora
Edited by Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora traces the production and circulation of discourses about "the Middle East" across various cultural sites, against the historical backdrop of cross-Atlantic Mahjar flows. The book highlights the fraught and ambivalent situation of Arabs/Muslims in the Americas, where they are at once celebrated and demonized, integrated and marginalized, simultaneously invisible and spectacularly visible. The essays cover such themes as Arab hip-hop's transnational imaginary; gender/sexuality and the Muslim digital diaspora; patriotic drama and the media's War on Terror; the global negotiation of the Prophet Mohammad cartoons controversy; the Latin American paradoxes of Turcophobia/Turcophilia; the ambiguities of the bellydancing fad; French and American commodification of Rumi spirituality; the reception of Iranian memoirs as cultural domestication; and the politics of translation of Turkish novels into English. Taken together, the essays analyze the hegemonic discourses that position "the Middle East" as a consumable exoticized object, while also developing complex understandings of self-representation in literature, cinema/TV, music, performance, visual culture, and digital spaces. Charting the shifting significations of differing and overlapping forms of Orientalism, the volume addresses Middle Eastern diasporic practices from a transnational perspective that brings postcolonial cultural studies methods to bear on Arab American studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Latin American studies. Between the Middle East and the Americas disentangles the conventional separation of regions, moving beyond the binarist notion of "here" and "there" to imaginatively reveal the thorough interconnectedness of cultural geographies.

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Beyond Babel
A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew and Related Languages
John Kaltner
SBL Press, 2002

Beyond Babel provides a general introduction to and overview of the languages that are significant for the study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel. Included are essays on biblical and inscriptional Hebrew, Akkadian, Northwest Semitic dialects (Ammonite, Edomite, and Moabite), Arabic, Aramaic, Egyptian, Hittite, Phoenician, postbiblical Hebrew, and Ugaritic.

Each chapter in the volume shares a common format, including an overview of the language, a discussion of its significance for the Hebrew Bible, and a list of ancient sources and modern resources for further study of the language. A general introduction by John Huehnergard discusses the importance of the study of Near Eastern languages for biblical scholarship, helping to make the volume an ideal resource for persons beginning an in-depth study of the Hebrew Bible.

[more]

front cover of Beyond Terror and Martyrdom
Beyond Terror and Martyrdom
The Future of the Middle East
Gilles Kepel
Harvard University Press, 2008

Since 2001, two dominant worldviews have clashed in the global arena: a neoconservative nightmare of an insidious Islamic terrorist threat to civilized life, and a jihadist myth of martyrdom through the slaughter of infidels. Across the airwaves and on the ground, an ill-defined and uncontrollable war has raged between these two opposing scenarios. Deadly images and threats—from the televised beheading of Western hostages to graphic pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, from the destruction wrought by suicide bombers in London and Madrid to civilian deaths at the hands of American occupation forces in Iraq—have polarized populations on both sides of this divide.

Yet, as the noted Middle East scholar and commentator Gilles Kepel demonstrates, President Bush’s War on Terror masks a complex political agenda in the Middle East—enforcing democracy, accessing Iraqi oil, securing Israel, and seeking regime change in Iran. Osama bin Laden’s call for martyrs to rise up against the apostate and hasten the dawn of a universal Islamic state papers over a fractured, fragmented Islamic world that is waging war against itself.

Beyond Terror and Martyrdom sounds the alarm to the West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt—neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam. Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West, one for which Europe, with its expanding and restless Muslim populations, may be the proving ground.

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Beyond the Basilica
Christians and Muslims in Nazareth
Chad F. Emmett
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel, is a surprising example of ethnic harmony in a region dominated by conflict. A recent trend toward integration of its historical Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Muslim quarters however, has disrupted the harmony. In Beyond the Basilica: Christians and Muslims in Nazareth, Chad F. Emmett provides penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between the structure of Nazareth’s quarters and the relations between its ethnic communities.

Emmett describes both the positive and negative effects of Nazareth’s residential patterns. He shows that the addition of new and ethnically mixed quarters has promoted mixed schools, joint holiday celebrations, a common political culture, and social networks that cross ethnic boundaries. But he also finds that tensions exist among Christian groups and between Muslims and Christians in regard to intersectarian marriages, religious conversion, attempts to establish a joint Christian cemetery, and the emergence of a local Islamic party.

Extensive interviews with leaders of religious groups, political parties, and residents reveal the way in which members of each ethnic community perceive one another. A survey of 300 families gives a wealth of details about the make-up of Nazareth’s population, including residential histories, religion, level of religious conviction, friendship and shopping patterns, and much more. Fourteen maps trace changes in the distribution of religious groups and political affiliation in Nazareth from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Beyond the Basilica will interest cultural geographers, historians, demographers, political scientists, and anyone who would like to learn more about an ethnically divided community in the residents cooperate more than they fight.
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Biographies in the Global South
Life Stories Embedded in Figurations and Discourses
Edited by Gabriele Rosenthal and Artur Bogner
Campus Verlag, 2017
Research into biography has historically focused almost wholly on the lives of people in the wealthier nations of the Global North. This book corrects that with a focus on the biographical histories of people—seen as part of larger groups or collectives, whether religious or political—from the Global South, with a particular focus on Africa and the Middle East. Taking the perspective of biographical research and figurational sociology, the essays gathered here break new ground in the study of biography.
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Bitter Reckoning
Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators
Dan Porat
Harvard University Press, 2019

Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years.

In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps.

Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated.

Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.

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Black September to Desert Storm
A Journalist in the Middle East
Claude Salhani
University of Missouri Press, 1998

For more than twenty years, Claude Salhani traveled throughout the volatile Middle East as a photojournalist and reporter in search of the region's biggest stories. Wars, terrorist acts, demonstrations by religious extremists, and the flight of refugees were among the events he witnessed. "I have seen much through my lens . . . the most terrible cruelties, the most horrible suffering—and the most improbable and moving acts of love and generosity. I have been warmly received by kings, prime ministers, and secretaries of state. I have been shot at, kidnapped, and rifle-butted," writes Salhani in the prologue of this fascinating account.

From exclusive travels with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to intimate moments with combatants in the battle for Beirut to the forbidden world of drug smugglers in Lebanon, to the Iranian Revolution, and finally to the rise of Desert Storm, Salhani transports readers behind the scenes of many groundbreaking news stories. He proves that behind the front-page story we see, an equally intriguing tale is often hidden—that of the difficult, bizarre, even comical circumstances in which news is obtained.

Offering insight into the potent mixture of journalism and warfare, Black September to Desert Storm shares with readers an extraordinary journey into the headline-grabbing sagas that have plagued the Middle East in the last three decades. Salhani's "behind-the-lens" perspective will appeal to students of journalism and the Middle East, as well as anyone simply fascinated by the trials that many journalists undergo to capture "The Story."

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The Blood of Abraham
Insights into the Middle East
Jimmy Carter
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
In The Blood of Abraham, originally published in 1985 with updates to the afterword in 1993 and 2007, President Carter explains his understanding of the Middle East and seeks to provide an enlightening and reconciling vision for greater peace in the region.
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The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David
The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939–1945
Dina Porat
Harvard University Press, 1990

Since the end of World War II the Israeli public has bitterly debated the guilt-ridden question of whether the Jewish community of Palestine really did everything in its power to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. Dina Porat gives a searching analysis of the record, basing her conclusions on archival material and other primary sources, hitherto mostly unused. She investigates how and when the Zionist leadership in Palestine fully understood that Europe's Jews were facing annihilation; what rescue plans they developed and what resources were allocated to the effort; what help they tried to get from free-world Jewry and from the British and American governments. And she looks at what went wrong—why in the end so little was done.

Porat struggles with these painful questions of accountability in the light of the Zionist enterprise, its ideologies and internal disputes. She describes the ambivalent attitude of the Zionists in Palestine, who first viewed most of the European Jews as lambs led to slaughter, compared the victims of the Holocaust unfavorably with the tough pioneers of Zion and those few in Europe who fought back, and only gradually understood that every daily struggle was a form of fighting back. Above all, the priorities of the Jewish community in Palestine reflected its overriding goal of building an independent Jewish state despite meager resources, crucial dependence on the good will of friendly powers, and a small number of survivors (instead of the millions they hoped to absorb).

The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David is an important chapter in the history of Israel and the history of World War II. And as the story of a leadership that was unable to respond adequately to a tragically urgent situation, this book focuses on questions of wide and abiding concern.

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The Book of Dede Korkut
A Turkish Epic
Translated and edited by Faruk Sümer, Ahmet E. Uysal, and Warren S. Walker
University of Texas Press, 1972

One of the oldest surviving pieces of Turkish literature, The Book of Dede Korkut can be traced to tenth-century origins. Now considered the national epic of Turkey, it is the heritage of the ancient Oghuz Turks and was composed as they migrated westward from their homeland in Central Asia to the Middle East, eventually to settle in Anatolia. Who its primary creator was no one knows, the titular bard, Dede Korkut, being more a symbol of Turkish minstrelsy than a verifiable author. The songs and tales of countless minstrels lay behind The Book of Dede Korkut, and in its oral form the epic was undoubtedly subject to frequent improvisation by individual performers. Partly in prose, partly in verse, these legends were sung or chanted in the courts and camps of political and military leaders. Even after they had been recorded in written form, they remained part of an oral tradition.

The present edition is the first complete text in English. The translators provide an excellent introduction to the language and background of the legends as well as a history of Dede Korkut scholarship. These outstanding tales will be of interest to all students of world mythology and folklore.

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The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction
Edited by Alan Mintz
Brandeis University Press, 1997
A critical introduction to contemporary Israeli literature that places works and writers in their cultural and social context. Five essays explore facets of what Mintz calls the complexity of cultural reverberations in Israeli fiction of the past two decades, a period during which "literature and the institutions of literary culture became the principal mode of encountering and mediating modernity." Among the major concerns addressed are the emergence of female writers, characterization of redefined gender roles, re-imagining the Holocaust, de-marginalization of Sephardic writing, and adoption of innovative techniques like magic realism and experimental narrative strategies. The collection shows how contemporary Israeli literature both chronicles and confronts cultural and societal dichotomies -- collectivism vs. individualism, native Israelis vs. Holocaust survivors, male vs. female, religion vs. secular, Ashkenazic vs. Sephardic -- that characterize a nation whose self-conception has been shaped by its complex and conflicted history. CONTRIBUTORS: Robert Alter, Nancy Berg, Yael S. Feldman, Anne Golomb Hoffman, Alan Mintz, Gilead Morahg
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Bordering on War
A Social and Political History of Khuzestan
Shaherzad Ahmadi
University of Texas Press, 2024

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Borders of Belief
Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey
Gregory J. Goalwin
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Religion and nationalism are two of the most powerful forces in the world. And as powerful as they are separately, humans throughout history have fused religious beliefs and nationalist politics to develop religious nationalism, which uses religious identity to define membership in the national community. But why and how have modern nationalists built religious identity as the foundational signifier of national identity in what sociologists have predicted would be a more secular world? This book takes two cases - nationalism in both Ireland and Turkey in the 20th century - as a foundation to advance a new theory of religious nationalism. By comparing cases, Goalwin emphasizes how modern political actors deploy religious identity as a boundary that differentiates national groups This theory argues that religious nationalism is not a knee-jerk reaction to secular modernization, but a powerful movement developed as a tool that forges new and independent national identities.
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The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967–1976
Farid el Khazen
Harvard University Press, 2000

Straddling the boundaries of politics and history, this discerning book allows the reader to dig through the rubble of Lebanon's wars and learn exactly what has befallen it. With its remarkable open society, its plural political system, its well-educated and sophisticated peoples, and its tolerant confessional outlook, Lebanon is only now recovering the independence it once had, albeit in the face of Syria. In view of recent Lebanese history, can an open and democratic state be recaptured by a people entangled in a largely authoritarian Arab state system?

Farid el Khazen's arresting book shows how Lebanon was led toward its fate by its neighbors, yet ultimately undid itself. The Palestine Liberation Organization's presence was of central importance to the breakdown of the state, while the porousness of the democratic system could not contain the problems and violence. The breakdown was less a civil war in the conventional sense than a series of little wars with outside interference.

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The British Empire and the Hajj
1865–1956
John Slight
Harvard University Press, 2015

The British Empire at its height governed more than half the world’s Muslims. It was a political imperative for the Empire to present itself to Muslims as a friend and protector, to take seriously what one scholar called its role as “the greatest Mohamedan power in the world.” Few tasks were more important than engagement with the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Every year, tens of thousands of Muslims set out for Mecca from imperial territories throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea. Men and women representing all economic classes and scores of ethnic and linguistic groups made extraordinary journeys across waterways, deserts, and savannahs, creating huge challenges for officials charged with the administration of these pilgrims. They had to balance the religious obligation to travel against the desire to control the pilgrims’ movements, and they became responsible for the care of those who ran out of money. John Slight traces the Empire’s complex interactions with the Hajj from the 1860s, when an outbreak of cholera led Britain to engage reluctantly in medical regulation of pilgrims, to the Suez Crisis of 1956. The story draws on a varied cast of characters—Richard Burton, Thomas Cook, the Begums of Bhopal, Lawrence of Arabia, and frontline imperial officials, many of them Muslim—and gives voice throughout to the pilgrims themselves.

The British Empire and the Hajj is a crucial resource for understanding how this episode in imperial history was experienced by rulers and ruled alike.

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Building Special Operations Partnerships in Afghanistan and Beyond
Challenges and Best Practices from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia
Austin Long
RAND Corporation, 2015
Building the capacity of Afghan special operations forces (SOF) is a key goal of the United States and its coalition partners. This report summarizes key partnering practices and presents findings from SOF partnership case studies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia. The goal is to identify best practices to benefit the development of Afghan SOF, as well as for special operations partnerships beyond Afghanistan.
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Building the Cold War
Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture
Annabel Jane Wharton
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In postwar Europe and the Middle East, Hilton hotels were quite literally "little Americas." For American businessmen and tourists, a Hilton Hotel—with the comfortable familiarity of an English-speaking staff, a restaurant that served cheeseburgers and milkshakes, trans-Atlantic telephone lines, and, most important, air-conditioned modernity—offered a respite from the disturbingly alien. For impoverished local populations, these same features lent the Hilton a utopian aura. The Hilton was a space of luxury and desire, a space that realized, permanently and prominently, the new and powerful presence of the United States.

Building the Cold War examines the architectural means by which the Hilton was written into the urban topographies of the major cities of Europe and the Middle East as an effective representation of the United States. Between 1953 and 1966, Hilton International built sixteen luxury hotels abroad. Often the Hilton was the first significant modern structure in the host city, as well as its finest hotel. The Hiltons introduced a striking visual contrast to the traditional architectural forms of such cities as Istanbul, Cairo, Athens, and Jerusalem, where the impact of its new architecture was amplified by the hotel's unprecedented siting and scale. Even in cities familiar with the Modern, the new Hilton often dominated the urban landscape with its height, changing the look of the city. The London Hilton on Park Lane, for example, was the first structure in London that was higher than St. Paul's cathedral.

In his autobiography, Conrad N. Hilton claimed that these hotels were constructed for profit and for political impact: "an integral part of my dream was to show the countries most exposed to Communism the other side of the coin—the fruits of the free world." Exploring everything the carefully drafted contracts for the buildings to the remarkable visual and social impact on their host cities, Wharton offers a theoretically sophisticated critique of one of the Cold War's first international businesses and demonstrates that the Hilton's role in the struggle against Communism was, as Conrad Hilton declared, significant, though in ways that he could not have imagined.

Many of these postwar Hiltons still flourish. Those who stay in them will learn a great deal about their experience from this new assessment of hotel space.
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Bullets in Envelopes
Iraqi Academics in Exile
Louis Yako
Pluto Press, 2021
Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, many Iraqi academics were assassinated. Countless others received bullets in envelopes and instructions to leave their institutions (and in many cases the country) or get killed. Many heeded the warning and fled into exile. Having played such a pivotal role in shaping post-independence Iraqi society, the exile and internal displacement of its academics has had a profound impact. Tracing the academic, political, and social lives of more than 60 academics, Bullets in Envelopes offers a 'genealogy of loss', and a groundbreaking appraisal of the dismantling and restructuring of Iraqi institutions, culture and society. Through extensive fieldwork in the UK, Jordan and Iraqi Kurdistan, Louis Yako shows the human side of the destructive 2003 occupation, how things are today, and how they came to be.
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Burning Country
Syrians in Revolution and War
Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami
Pluto Press, 2018
"Explores how Syria’s peaceful uprising gave way to armed insurgency and sectarian jihad...a sympathetic portrait of a heroic uprising gone wrong, describing in all too painful detail the transformations wrought by armed groups and Assad’s brutality. This is an important, honest, and insightful book, well worth anyone’s time."―Washington Post

"Full of fascinating details about the early protest movements...lets us listen to many voices we aren’t likely to hear on the news."―New York Review of Books


In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. By 2018, Syria had become a warzone. Burning Country explores the complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new firsthand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists.

Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami expertly interweave these stories with an incisive analysis of the militarization of the uprising, the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of Syria's government in exacerbating the brutalization of the conflict. Through these accounts and a broad range of secondary source material, the authors persuasively argue that the international community has failed in its stated commitments to support the Syrian opposition movements.

This edition brings the story up to the present, with a new chapter that covers the internationalization of the conflict, including interventions by the United States, Russia, and Iran; the rollback of ISIS; the fall of Daraya and Aleppo; the crushing of local democracy; sectarian cleansing; and the forced exile of millions of Syrians.
 
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Busayra excavations by Crystal-M. Bennett, 1971-1980
Piotr Bienkowski
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2002
This volume is the long-awaited final report on the late Crystal Bennett's 1971-1980 excavations at Busayra, the major city of the Iron Age kingdom of Edom in southern Jordan. Dr. Bienkowski and specialist contributors describe and illustrate the architecture, stratigraphy, pottery and other finds of this impressive fortified administrative and religious center. The concluding chapter puts the nature and role of Busayra into its proper ancient context in the light of current research on tribal kingdoms.


Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Busayra Site (Bu�sayr�a, Jordan)
Excavations (Archaeology) -- Jordan -- Bu�sayr�a.
Iron age -- Jordan -- Bu�sayr�a.
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By Fire
Writings on the Arab Spring
Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated and with an introduction by Rita Nezami
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s By Fire, the first fictional account published on the Arab Spring, reimagines the true-life self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, an event that has been credited with setting off the Tunisian revolt. The novella depicts the days leading up to Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Ben Jelloun’s deliberate ambiguity about the location of the story, set in an unnamed Islamic country, allows the reader to imagine the experiences and frustrations of other young men who have endured physical violence and persecution in places beyond Tunisia. The tale begins and ends in fire, and the imagery of burning frames the political accounts in The Spark, Ben Jelloun’s nonfiction writings on the Tunisian events that provide insight into the despotic regimes that drove Bouazizi to such despair. Rita S. Nezami’s elegant translations and critical introduction provide the reader with multiple strategies for approaching these potent texts.

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Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World
Youval Rotman
Harvard University Press, 2009

Slavery may no longer exist as a legal institution, but we still find many forms of non-freedom in contemporary societies. It is a troubling paradox, and one this book addresses by considering a period in which the definition of slavery and freedom proved considerably flexible. Between more familiar forms of slavery—those of antiquity and of the Americas—the institution as it was practiced and theorized in the Byzantine Mediterranean was of a different nature.

Looking at the Byzantine concept of slavery within the context of law, the labor market, medieval politics, and religion, Youval Rotman illustrates how these contexts both reshaped and sustained the slave market. By focusing on a period of great change, his historical analysis brings a new perspective to concepts of slavery and freedom. In this period, when Byzantium had to come to terms with the rising power of the Islamic state, and to fight numerous wars over territory and economic interests, Rotman traces a shift in the cultural perception of slaves as individuals: they began to be seen as human beings instead of private property. His book analyzes slavery as a historical process against the background of the political, social, and religious transformation of the Mediterranean world, and demonstrates the flexible and adaptable character of this institution.

Arguing against the use of the term “slavery” for any extreme form of social dependency, Rotman shows instead that slavery and freedom are unrelated concepts. His work offers a radical new understanding of the geopolitical and religious dynamics that have defined and redefined slavery and freedom, in the past and in our own time.

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Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century
Irfan Shahîd
Harvard University Press, 1989

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Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century
Irfan Shahîd
Harvard University Press, 1984
The fourth century, the century of Constantine, witnessed the foundation and rise of a new relationship between the Roman Empire and the Arabs. The warrior Arab groups in Oriens became foederati, allies of Byzantium, the Christian Roman empire, and so they remained until the Arab conquests. In Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, Irfan Shahîd elucidates the birth of the new federation and the rise of its institutional forms and examines the various constituents of federate cultural life: the phylarchate, the episcopate, the beginnings of an Arab Church, an Arabic liturgy, and the earliest attested composition of Arabic poetry. He discusses the participation of the Arab foederati in Byzantium’s wars with her neighbors—the Persians and the Goths—during which those Arab allies, most notably the Tanūkhids, contributed to the welfare of the imperium and the ecclesia. In the reign of Valens, the foederati appeared as the defenders of Nicene Orthodoxy: their soldiers fought for it; their stern and uncompromising saint, Moses, championed it; and their heroic and romantic queen, Mavia, negotiated for it.
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Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century
Irfan Shahîd
Harvard University Press, 1995
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century is devoted to frontier studies and to the structures of the Arab federates of Byzantium. It deals mainly with the Ghassanids of Oriens in the sixth century, a time of transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The focus of this study is on the military, religious, and civil structures of the Ghassanids. The detailed study of these buildings contributes to our understanding of Byzantine provincial art and architecture in Oriens, as they were adopted by the federate Arabs and later adapted to their own use. As monuments of Christian architecture, these federate structures constitute the missing link in the development of Arab architecture in the region—the link between the earlier pagan (Nabataean and Palmyrene) and later Muslim (Umayyad).
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Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century
Irfan Shahîd
Harvard University Press, 1995


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