front cover of The Waiting List
The Waiting List
An Iraqi Woman's Tales of Alienation
By Daisy Al-Amir
University of Texas Press, 1994

Daisy Al-Amir is one of the more visible figures in women's fiction in the Arab world today. This collection of stories, originally published in Lebanon as Ala La'ihat al-Intizar, is the most recent of her five publications. Her stories intimately reflect women's experiences in the chaotic worlds of the Lebanese civil war and the rise of Saadam Hussain as Iraq's leader. Set in Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon, the stories shed light on an unusual Middle East refugee experience—that of a cultural refugee, a divorced woman who is educated, affluent, and alone.

Al-Amir is also a poet and novelist, whose sensual prose grows out of a long tradition of Iraqi poetry. But one also finds existential themes in her works, as Al-Amir tries to balance what seems fated and what seems arbitrary in the turbulent world she inhabits. She deals with time and space in a minimalist, surreal style, while studying the disappointments of life through the subjective lens of memory. Honestly facing the absence of family and the instability of place, Al-Amir gives lifelike qualities to the inanimate objects of her rapidly changing world.

In addition to the stories, two examples of the author's experimental poems are included. In her introduction, Mona Mikhail places these stories and poems in the context of contemporary Islamic literature and gender studies.

[more]

front cover of War and Collapse
War and Collapse
World War I and the Ottoman State
Edited by M. Hakan Yavuz with Feroz Ahmad
University of Utah Press, 2015
War and Collapse is the third and final volume in a series that covers the last years of the Ottoman Empire. This book stems from a three-day international conference held in May 2012 at which scholars examined the causes and consequences of World War I, with a distinctive focus on how these events pertained to the Ottoman state and society. Fifty-three scholars—both new and established—contributed to this collection, with the goal of explaining what happened within the Ottoman Empire before and during WWI and how ethnic and national groups constructed these events to enhance their identities, promote their interests, and situate their collective selves in the international system. The chapters provide insight into the mindset and experiences of Ottoman peoples from the end of the Balkan Wars through the end of World War I, showing how earlier events set in motion the Ottoman response to the war and how continued engagement in conflict had devastating, irreversible effects on Ottoman society. The articles in this volume include a wide variety of ideas and points of view, thus presenting a comprehensive picture of the events. 
[more]

front cover of War and Diplomacy
War and Diplomacy
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and the Treaty of Berlin
M Hakan Yavuz
University of Utah Press, 2011

Combining different disciplinary perspectives, War and Diplomacy argues that the key events that portended the beginning of the end of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire were the The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Treaty of Berlin. The essays in this volume analyze how the war and the treaty permanently transformed the political landscape both in the Balkans and in the Caucasus. The treaty marked the end of Ottoman hegemony in the Balkans by formally recognizing the independence or de facto sovereignty of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, and the autonomy of Bulgaria. 

By introducing the unitary nation-state as the new organizing concept, the treaty planted the seeds of future conflict, from the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and the First World War to the recent civil wars and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. The magnitude of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by Russia—and eventually by the other great powers—and the human, material, and territorial losses that followed proved fatal to the project of Muslim liberal reform and modernization that the Ottoman state had launched in the middle of the 19th century.
War and Diplomacy offers the first comparative examination of the treaty and its socio-political implications for the Balkans and the Caucasus by utilizing the theoretical tools and approaches of political science, sociology, history, and international relations. Representing the latest scholarship in the field of study, this volume documents the proceedings of a conference on the Treaty of Berlin that was held at the University of Utah in 2010. It provides an important contribution to understanding the historical background of these events. 
 

War and Diplomacy documents the proceedings of the first of three conferences:
1878 Treaty of Berlin (in 2010)
Balkan Wars (in 2011)
World War I (in 2012)
Proceedings of the final two conferences will also be published by the University of Utah Press.

[more]

front cover of War and Nationalism
War and Nationalism
The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, and Their Sociopolitical Implications
M Hakan Yavuz
University of Utah Press, 2013
War and Nationalism presents thorough up-to-date scholarship on the often misunderstood and neglected Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The essays contain critical inquiries into the diverse and interconnected processes of social, economic, and political exchange that escalated into conflict. The wars represented a pivotal moment that had a long-lasting impact on the regional state system and fundamentally transformed the beleaguered Ottoman Empire in the process.

This interdisciplinary volume stands as a critique of the standard discourse regarding the Balkan Wars and effectively questions many of the assumptions of prevailing modern nation-state histories, which have long privileged the ethno-religious dimensions present in the Balkans. The authors go to great lengths in demonstrating the fluidity of social, geographical, and cultural boundaries before 1912 and call into question the “nationalist watershed” notion that was artificially imposed by manipulative historiography and political machinations following the end of fighting in 1913.

War and Nationalism
will be of interest to scholars looking to enrich their own understanding of an overshadowed historical event and will serve as a valuable contribution to courses on Ottoman and European history.
[more]

front cover of Warring Souls
Warring Souls
Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran
Roxanne Varzi
Duke University Press, 2006
With the first Fulbright grant for research in Iran to be awarded since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Roxanne Varzi returned to the country her family left before the Iran-Iraq war. Drawing on ethnographic research she conducted in Tehran between 1991 and 2000, she provides an eloquent account of the beliefs and experiences of young, middle-class, urban Iranians. As the first generation to have come of age entirely in the period since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, twenty-something Iranians comprise a vital index of the success of the nation’s Islamic Revolution. Varzi describes how, since 1979, the Iranian state has attempted to produce and enforce an Islamic public sphere by governing behavior and by manipulating images—particularly images related to religious martyrdom and the bloody war with Iraq during the 1980s—through films, murals, and television shows. Yet many of the young Iranians Varzi studied quietly resist the government’s conflation of religious faith and political identity.

Highlighting trends that belie the government’s claim that Islamic values have taken hold—including rising rates of suicide, drug use, and sex outside of marriage—Varzi argues that by concentrating on images and the performance of proper behavior, the government’s campaign to produce model Islamic citizens has affected only the appearance of religious orthodoxy, and that the strictly religious public sphere is partly a mirage masking a profound crisis of faith among many Iranians. Warring Souls is a powerful account of contemporary Iran made more vivid by Varzi’s inclusion of excerpts from the diaries she maintained during her research and from journal entries written by Iranian university students with whom she formed a study group.

[more]

front cover of Water in the Middle East
Water in the Middle East
A Geography of Peace
Edited by Hussein A. Amery and Aaron Wolf
University of Texas Press, 2000

Finding "streams in the desert" has never been more urgent for the peoples of the Middle East. Rapid population growth and a rising standard of living are driving water demand inexorably upward, while the natural supply has not increased since Biblical times. Ensuring a fair and adequate distribution of water in the region is vitally important for building a lasting peace among the nations of the Middle East.

Addressing water needs from a geographical perspective, the contributors to this book analyze and assess the impact of scarce water resources in the Jordan River basin countries and territories (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria) as these long-time antagonists work toward peace. After geographical and historical overviews, the authors envision the future-what the water issues may be when Israel and Syria begin negotiating, the "hydro-security" needs of each nation, and the difficulties of planning for uncertainty. Without proposing any one ideal scheme, they discuss the possibilities for cooperative sharing of water resources, while honestly acknowledging the political constraints that may limit such projects. The final essay speaks to the needs of the one party so rarely represented at the negotiating table—the Jordan River itself.

[more]

front cover of Water Wisdom
Water Wisdom
Preparing the Groundwork for Cooperative and Sustainable Water Management in the Middle East
Abed Rabbo, Alfred
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Israel and Palestine are, by international criteria, water scarce. As the peace process continues amidst ongoing violence, water remains a political and environmental issue. Thirty leading Palestinian and Israeli activists, water scientists, politicians, and others met and worked together to develop a future vision for the sustainable shared management of water resources that is presented in Water Wisdom. Their essays explore the full range of scientific, political, social, and economic issues related to water use in the region; acknowledge areas of continuing controversy, from access rights to the Mountain Aquifer to utilization of waters from the Jordan River; and identify areas of agreement, disagreement, and options for resolution. Water Wisdom is a model for those who believe that water conflict can be an opportunity for cooperation rather than violence.
[more]

front cover of The Ways of the Desert
The Ways of the Desert
By General E. Daumas
University of Texas Press, 1971

The Ways of the Desert, translated from the French, offers an introduction to the North African Arab nomads—their way of life, customs, dress, and religion. The companion to this volume, The Horses of the Sahara, provides a detailed description and history of the great breeds of Arab horses. While part of this book is devoted to descriptions of the various animals that are both hunted and used for hunting, its appeal goes well beyond its attraction for those with a special interest in the lore of desert hunt and chase. General Daumas and his major collaborator-informant, the Emir Abd-el-Kader, together provide sensitive insights into the total culture of the North African desert people of the nineteenth century.

Both spiritual and material aspects of desert life are encompassed in this work, which ranges from translations of Arab poetry to descriptions of the uses of the fat and remains of the ostrich. The patterns of conviction and conduct described form an important part of the rich cultural heritage of the modern Maghreb nations.

The way of life described in this book is often presented from what comes very close to being an inside point of view. Occasionally Daumas feels obliged to disapprove of certain practices or beliefs or to criticize his Arab friends, but in large part his underlying sympathy for the Arab people permits his informants to speak clearly through his pen.

General Melchior Joseph Eugene Daumas took part in the conquest of Algeria by France and, for his distinguished service, was named Director of the Bureau of Algerian Affairs in the French Ministry of War. During the campaigns and the occupation that followed, he studied and attempted to understand the native peoples with an objectivity and sympathy unusual among the colonialists of the period. He recorded a way of life that has changed much since the nineteenth century, and much of what he recorded has since been lost. His account, as well as being an important source for the historian and ethnographer, provides for the general reader a fascinating record of the vanishing ways of the desert.

[more]

front cover of Wedded to the Land?
Wedded to the Land?
Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis
Mary N. Layoun
Duke University Press, 2001
In Wedded to the Land? Mary N. Layoun offers a critical commentary on the idea of nationalism in general and on specific attempts to formulate alternatives to the concept in particular. Narratives surrounding three geographically and temporally different national crises form the center of her study: Greek refugees’ displacement from Asia Minor into Greece in 1922, the 1974 right-wing Cypriot coup and subsequent Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the Palestinian and PLO expulsion from Beirut following the Israeli invasion in 1982.
Drawing on readings of literature and of official documents and decrees, songs, poetry, cinema, public monuments, journalism, and conversations with exiles, refugees, and public officials, Layoun uses each historical incident as a means of highlighting a recurring trope within constructs of nationalism. The displacement of the Greek refugees in the 1920s calls into question the very idea of home, as well as the desire for ethnic homogeneity within nations. She reads the Cypriot coup and invasion as an illustration of the gendering of nation and how the notion of the inviolable woman came to represent sovereignity. In her third example she shows how the Palestinian and PLO expulsion from Beirut highlights the ambiguity of the borders upon which many manifestations of nationalism putatively depend. These chapters are preceded and introduced by a discussion of “culturing the nation” and closed by a consideration of citizenship and silence in which Layoun discusses rights ostensibly possessed by all members of a political community.
This book will be of interest to scholars engaged in cultural and critical theory, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history, literary studies, political science, postcolonial studies, and gender studies.
[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
The Western Bahr Al Ghazal under British Rule, 1898–1956
Mis Af#57
Ahmad Alawad Sikainga
Ohio University Press, 1991
Western Bahr al-Ghazal is perhaps one of the least known places in Africa. Yet this remote part of the Republic of Sudan can be regarded as a historical barometer, registering major developments in the history of the Nile valley. In the nineteenth century the region became one of the most active slave-exporting zones in Africa. The area is distinguished from the rest of southern Sudan by its veneer of Muslim influence and an Arabic pidgin. British officials regarded it as a Muslim enclave and in the twentieth century, western Bahr al-Ghazal became a laboratory in which the British colonial administration applied one of its most controversial policies in the Sudan, the so-called Southern Policy. Several decades of colonial rule failed to establish any significant links between the western Bahr al-Ghazal and the world economy. It is hoped that this book will contribute to the understanding of the general impact of colonialism on rural societies in the southern Sudan and the roots of their underdevelopment.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages
R. W. Southern
Harvard University Press
A distinguished scholar surveys centuries of conflict between Christianity and Islam. Vivid, concrete examples epitomize the characteristics of successive eras. Crusades, conversion, coexistence were the choices; the need for knowledge of Moslem beliefs, R. W. Southern says, competed with “fear of contamination.” Medieval Christians faced “all the problems with which, in a different context, we are familiar.” His book distinguishes three phases: first, four centuries of indifference or distortion; second, a 13th-century attempt to evaluate Islam; finally, the 1450s—when various thinkers achieved unique insight into central issues.
[more]

front cover of Western Window in the Arab World
Western Window in the Arab World
By Leon Borden Blair
University of Texas Press, 1970

Since November 8, 1942, when American troops in Operation Torch first landed on the beaches of North Africa, almost a million Americans—military personnel and their dependents—have lived in Morocco. Their impact on the political and social evolution of Morocco has been significant, but historians and political scientists before this book had made little effort to chart its course or to assess its outcome.

The naval base at Port Lyautey in Morocco was the first foreign base captured by American troops in World War II, and United States objectives in Morocco continued to be primarily military. In 1942, as the price for French support against the Axis, the United States pledged its support for the restoration of the prewar French colonial empire. In 1950, faced with the threat of Soviet aggression, the United States negotiated an agreement with France and built four United States Air Force bases in Morocco without consultation with or notification of the Moroccan government.

In spite of its sterile diplomatic policy and both Communist and Moroccan nationalist demands for evacuation of United States military bases, the United States retained essential military facilities in Morocco for many years. Leon Blair concludes that American military personnel and their dependents favorably conditioned Moroccan public opinion. By their egalitarianism, humanitarianism, and evident interest, they reinforced the idealistic image of the United States that was held by the majority of Moroccans.

These Americans were neither individually nor collectively conscious agents in a campaign to modify Moroccan public opinion; they were simply a Western window in the Arab world, through which two civilizations might view one another. In the long run, they made a greater contribution in peace than in war.

[more]

front cover of WF16
WF16
Excavations at an Early Neolithic Settlement in Southern Jordan
Steven Mithen
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2018
WF16 is located in the spectacular Wadi Faynan area of southern Jordan. Evaluation of the site was undertaken between 1997 and 2006 with a monograph, detailing results of the evaluation, published in 2007 (Finlayson & Mithen 2007). Material remains at the site indicate that settlement occurred during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period, with a suite of radiocarbon dates indicating occupation between 11,600 and 10,200 BP (Before Present–before 1950). Originally defined by Kathleen Kenyon during excavation at Jericho in the 1950s, the PPNA is traditionally seen as the earliest manifestation of an agricultural economy in the world, with villages occupied by sedentary groups practicing some form of cultivation. The PPNA brought to an end more than two million years of hunting and gathering and laid the foundations for the first civilisations. Despite more than 50 years of research, our understanding of PPNA society has remained limited. The excavation of WF16 offers the potential to significantly enhance our understanding of the PPNA and the origins of the Neolithic.
[more]

front cover of What Factors Cause Individuals to Reject Violent Extremism in Yemen?
What Factors Cause Individuals to Reject Violent Extremism in Yemen?
Eric Robinson
RAND Corporation, 2017
Why do some individuals engage in political violence in Yemen, while others do not? We examine the role that social, political, and economic factors play on individual behavior toward violence in the midst of Yemen’s bloody and multiyear civil war. We use a unique national survey conducted in Yemen in 2016 to better understand why Yemenis may reject political violence despite persistent conflict and civil unrest across the country.
[more]

front cover of What Is a Palestinian State Worth?
What Is a Palestinian State Worth?
Sari Nusseibeh
Harvard University Press, 2011

“In a display of rationality uncommon to discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nusseibeh takes an impartial vantage point, trying to sort out a mess largely generated by overblown and hyperactive political identities.”—Boston Review

“[This] philosophical and balanced book is unfailingly sensitive and empathetic to both sides.”—Publishers Weekly


Can a devout Jew be a devout Jew and drop the belief in the rebuilding of the Temple? Can a devout Muslim be a devout Muslim and drop the belief in the sacredness of the Rock? Can one right (the right of return) be given up for another (the right to live in peace)? Can one claim Palestinian identity and still retain Israeli citizenship? What is a Palestinian state worth? For over sixty years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been subjected to many solutions and offered many answers by diverse parties. Yet, answers are only as good as the questions that beget them. It is with this simple, but powerful idea, the idea of asking the basic questions anew, that the renowned Palestinian philosopher and activist Sari Nusseibeh begins his book.

What Is a Palestinian State Worth? poses questions about the history, meaning, future, and resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Deeply informed by political philosophy and based on decades of personal involvement with politics and social activism, Nusseibeh’s moderate voice—global in its outlook, yet truly grounded in his native city of Jerusalem—points us toward a future which, as George Lamming once put it, is colonized by our acts in this moment, but which must always remain open.

[more]

front cover of What Wars Leave Behind
What Wars Leave Behind
The Faceless and the Forgotten
J. Malcolm Garcia
University of Missouri Press, 2014
They bear labels instead of names—noncombatant, unintended victim, collateral damage. Theirs are the blurred faces and forms seen in news footage shot from a moving vehicle. And when soldiers, media, and profiteers move on to the next conflict, they stay behind to cope amid the wreckage. They have stories to tell to anyone who will pause long enough to hear them.
In What Wars Leave Behind, J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.
Garcia describes his travels in some of the world’s hotspots in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In a series of personal travel essays that read like short stories, he exposes the endless messiness of war and the failings of good intentions, and he traces their impact on the lives of natives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Kosovo, Chad, and Syria. He discovers amazing resilience among people who must struggle just to survive each day.
Garcia gives readers the sort of gritty detail learned from immersing himself in other cultures. He eats the food, drinks the tea, and endures the oppressive heat. These are the stories of how a middle-class guy from the Midwest with a social work degree learned to experience and embrace the cultures of Third World countries in conflict—and lived to tell the tale.
[more]

front cover of Whatever Happened to Antara?
Whatever Happened to Antara?
And Other Stories
By Walid Ikhlassi
University of Texas Press, 2004

Walid Ikhlassi evokes the individual's struggle for dignity and significance in the Syrian city of Aleppo during the French mandate of the forties and fifties. His characters' seeking of personal fulfillment parallels the struggle of the nation for self-definition. The changing political and cultural landscape of Syria challenges individuals in their attempts to live lives of integrity, as Ikhlassi provides analytical insights into the civil society of Syria, the axis of his writing.

From the boy Antara who personifies the Arab legend of a half-African slave warrior/hero to everyday middle-aged lovers, Ikhlassi's characters fight colonial oppression and corruption from the newly formed government. Foreign and internal forces challenge the evolution of a modern nation rooted in traditional Arab values. Its strong and determined men and women refuse to accept victimhood. The introduction by author and critic Elizabeth Warnock Fernea places the stories in their historical and literary context.

An avowed experimentalist, Ikhlassi portrays the modern human situation through techniques as widely divergent as realism, surrealism, interior monologue, and stream-of-consciousness. Selections of his work have been translated into English, Russian, French, German, Dutch, Armenian, and other languages.

[more]

front cover of When Peace Is Not Enough
When Peace Is Not Enough
How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice
Atalia Omer
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The state of Israel is often spoken of as a haven for the Jewish people, a place rooted in the story of a nation dispersed, wandering the earth in search of their homeland. Born in adversity but purportedly nurtured by liberal ideals, Israel has never known peace, experiencing instead a state of constant war that has divided its population along the stark and seemingly unbreachable lines of dissent around the relationship between unrestricted citizenship and Jewish identity.
 
By focusing on the perceptions and histories of Israel’s most marginalized stakeholders—Palestinian Israelis, Arab Jews, and non-Israeli Jews—Atalia Omer cuts to the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict, demonstrating how these voices provide urgently needed resources for conflict analysis and peacebuilding. Navigating a complex set of arguments about ethnicity, boundaries, and peace, and offering a different approach to the renegotiation and reimagination of national identity and citizenship, Omer pushes the conversation beyond the bounds of the single narrative and toward a new and dynamic concept of justice—one that offers the prospect of building a lasting peace.

[more]

front cover of When the Gods Were Born
When the Gods Were Born
Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East
Carolina López-Ruiz
Harvard University Press, 2010

Ancient Greece has for too long been studied in isolation from its Near Eastern neighbors. And the ancient Near East itself has for too long been seen as an undifferentiated cultural monolith. Classics and Near Eastern Studies, in our modern universities, continue to be separated by various disciplinary, linguistic, and ideological walls. Yet there is a growing trend to dismantle these divides and look at the Greek world within its fullest geographical and cultural contexts.

This book aims to bring the comparative study of Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies to a new level. It analyzes themes such as succession myths, expressions of poetic inspiration, and claims to cosmic knowledge, as well as the role of itinerant specialists in the transmission of theogonies. Rather than compiling literary parallels from different periods and languages and treating the Near East as a monolithic matrix, the author focuses on the motifs specific to the North-West Semitic tradition with which the Greeks had direct contact in the Archaic period. Focusing on Hesiod’s Theogony, the Orphic texts, and their Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Hebrew counterparts, Carolina López-Ruiz avoids traditional diffusionist assumptions and proposes instead that dynamic cultural interaction led to the oral and intimate transmission of stories and beliefs.

[more]

front cover of When Writing Met Art
When Writing Met Art
From Symbol to Story
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
University of Texas Press, 2007

Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a major new chapter in the history of literacy when she demonstrated that the cuneiform script invented in the ancient Near East in the late fourth millennium BC—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device. Her discovery, which she published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came About, was widely reported in professional journals and the popular press. In 1999, American Scientist chose How Writing Came About as one of the "100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science."

In When Writing Met Art, Schmandt-Besserat expands her history of writing into the visual realm of communication. Using examples of ancient Near Eastern writing and masterpieces of art, she shows that between 3500 and 3000 BC the conventions of writing—everything from its linear organization to its semantic use of the form, size, order, and placement of signs—spread to the making of art, resulting in artworks that presented complex visual narratives in place of the repetitive motifs found on preliterate art objects. Schmandt-Besserat then demonstrates art's reciprocal impact on the development of writing. She shows how, beginning in 2700-2600 BC, the inclusion of inscriptions on funerary and votive art objects emancipated writing from its original accounting function. To fulfill its new role, writing evolved to replicate speech; this in turn made it possible to compile, organize, and synthesize unlimited amounts of information; and to preserve and disseminate information across time and space.

Schmandt-Besserat's pioneering investigation of the interface between writing and art documents a key turning point in human history, when two of our most fundamental information media reciprocally multiplied their capacities to communicate. When writing met art, literate civilization was born.

[more]

front cover of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War
Ashley Gilbertson
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Arriving in Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion, unaffiliated with any newspaper and hoping to pick up assignments along the way, Ashley Gilbertson was one of the first photojournalists to cover the disintegration of America’s military triumph as looting and score settling convulsed Iraqi cities. Just twenty-five years old at the time, Gilbertson soon landed a contract with the New York Times, and his extraordinary images of life in occupied Iraq and of American troops in action began appearing in the paper regularly. Throughout his work, Gilbertson took great risks to document the risks taken by others, whether dodging sniper fire with American infantry, photographing an Iraqi bomb squad as they diffused IEDs, or following marines into the cauldron of urban combat.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gathers the best of Gilbertson’s photographs, chronicling America’s early battles in Iraq, the initial occupation of Baghdad, the insurgency that erupted shortly afterward, the dramatic battle to overtake Falluja, and ultimately, the country’s first national elections. No Western photojournalist has done as much sustained work in occupied Iraq as Gilbertson, and this wide-ranging treatment of the war from the viewpoint of a photographer is the first of its kind. Accompanying each section of the book is a personal account of Gilbertson’s experiences covering the conflict. Throughout, he conveys the exhilaration and terror of photographing war, as well as the challenges of photojournalism in our age of embedded reporting. But ultimately, and just as importantly, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot tells the story of Gilbertson’s own journey from hard-drinking bravado to the grave realism of a scarred survivor. Here he struggles with guilt over the death of a marine escort, tells candidly of his own experience with post-traumatic stress, and grapples with the reality that Iraq—despite the sacrifice in Iraqi and American lives—has descended into a civil war with no end in sight.

A searing account of the American experience in Iraq, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is sure to become one of the classic war photography books of our time.
[more]

front cover of Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?
Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?
By Rashid al-Daif Translated by Paula Haydar and Nadine Sinno
University of Texas Press, 2014

Rashid al-Daif’s provocative novel Who’s Afraid of Meryl Streep? takes an intimate look at the life of a recently married Lebanese man. Rashoud and his wife struggle as they work to negotiate not only their personal differences but also rapidly changing attitudes toward sex and marriage in Lebanese culture. As their fragile bond disintegrates, Rashoud finds television playing a more prominent role in his life; his wife uses the presence of a television at her parents’ house as an excuse to spend time away from her new home. Rashoud purchases a television in the hopes of luring his wife back home, but in a pivotal scene, he instead finds himself alone watching Kramer vs. Kramer. Without the aid of subtitles, he struggles to make sense of the film, projecting his wife’s behavior onto the character played by Meryl Streep, who captivates him but also frightens him in what he sees as an effort to take women’s liberation too far.

Who’s Afraid of Meryl Streep? offers a glimpse at evolving attitudes toward virginity, premarital sex, and abortion in Lebanon and addresses more universal concerns such as the role of love and lust in marriage. The novel has found wide success in Arabic and several European languages and has also been dramatized in both Arabic and French.

[more]

front cover of Why Turkey is Authoritarian
Why Turkey is Authoritarian
Right-Wing Rule from Atatürk to Erdogan
Halil Karaveli
Pluto Press, 2018
For the past century, Turkey has been seen by many as always on the verge of becoming a truly Westernized liberal democracy—only to have democracy lose ground time and again to authoritarianism. Why has that been the pattern, and what role have culture, identity, and religion played in Turkey’s struggle with democracy?
            This book presents a clear analysis and explanation, showing how cultural prejudices about the Muslim world have informed ideological positions in a way that has ultimately disabled the left within Turkey, leaving it unable to transcend artificial cultural categories and promote broad democratic solidarity. As the populist right mounts challenges around the world, the history of “democracy” in Turkey offers instructive lessons for activists there and beyond.
[more]

front cover of Widows
Widows
Vol. I: The Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific
Helena Znaniecka Lopata, ed.
Duke University Press, 1987
This volume analyzes the support systems and lifestyles of widows in Australia, the Philippines, Korea, Iran, China, India, Turkey, and Israel.
[more]

front cover of Widows
Widows
Vol. II: North America
Helena Znaniecka Lopata, ed.
Duke University Press, 1987
The volume examines two communities in Canada, a Florida retirement community, and communities in Ohio, Nebraska, and California, as well as the relative situations of homeowners, blacks, and poor ethnic populations.
[more]

front cover of Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers
Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers
The Concept of Evil in Early Iran
By S. K. Mendoza Forrest
University of Texas Press, 2011

Early Iranians believed evil had to have a source outside of God, which led to the concept of an entity as powerful and utterly evil as God is potent and good. These two forces, good and evil, which have always vied for superiority, needed helpers in this struggle. According to the Zoroastrians, every entity had to take sides, from the cosmic level to the microcosmic self.

One of the results of this battle was that certain humans were thought to side with evil. Who were these allies of that great Evil Spirit? Women were inordinately singled out. Male healers were forbidden to deal with female health disorders because of the fear of the polluting power of feminine blood. Female healers, midwives, and shamans were among those who were accused of collaborating with the Evil Spirit, because they healed women. Men who worked to prepare the dead were also suspected of secret evil. Evil even showed up as animals such as frogs, snakes, and bugs of all sorts, which scuttled to the command of their wicked masters.

This first comprehensive study of the concept of evil in early Iran uncovers details of the Iranian struggle against witchcraft, sorcery, and other "evils," beginning with their earliest texts.

[more]

front cover of Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800
Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800
Edited by Guity Nashat and Lois Beck
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Combining scholarship from a range of disciplines, this collection of essays is a comprehensive examination of the role of women in Iranian society and culture, from pre-Islamic times to 1800. The contributors challenge common assumptions about women in Iran and Islam. Sweeping away modern myths, these essays show that women have had significant influence in almost every area of Iranian life.
 
Focusing on a region wider than today's nation-state of Iran, this book explores developments in the spheres that most affect women: gender constructs, family structure, community roles, education, economic participation, Islamic practices and institutions, politics, and artistic representations.
 
The contributors to this volume are prominent international scholars working in this field, and each draws on decades of research to address the history of Iranian women within the context of his or her area of expertise. This broad framework allows for a thorough and nuanced examination of the history of a complex society.
 
[more]

front cover of Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity
Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity
Nadia Maria El Cheikh
Harvard University Press, 2015

When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad dynasty in 750 CE, an important element in legitimizing their newly won authority involved defining themselves in the eyes of their Islamic subjects. Nadia Maria El Cheikh shows that ideas about women were central to the process by which the Abbasid caliphate, which ushered in Islam’s Golden Age, achieved self-definition.

In most medieval Islamic cultures, Arab Islam stood in opposition to jahl, or the state of impurity and corruption that existed prior to Islam’s founding. Over time, the concept of jahl evolved into a more general term describing a condition of ignorance and barbarism—as well as a condition specifically associated in Abbasid discourse with women. Concepts of womanhood and gender became a major organizing principle for articulating Muslim identity. Groups whose beliefs and behaviors were perceived by the Abbasids as a threat—not only the jahilis who lived before the prophet Muhammad but peoples living beyond the borders of their empire, such as the Byzantines, and heretics who defied the strictures of their rule, such as the Qaramita—were represented in Abbasid texts through gendered metaphors and concepts of sexual difference. These in turn influenced how women were viewed, and thus contributed to the historical construction of Muslim women’s identity.

Through its investigation of how gender and sexuality were used to articulate cultural differences and formulate identities in Abbasid systems of power and thought, Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity demonstrates the importance of women to the writing of early Islamic history.

[more]

front cover of Women, Islam and the State
Women, Islam and the State
Deniz Kandiyoti
Temple University Press, 1991
"The most significant theoretical advance in Muslim-world women's studies for years." --Voice Literary Supplement This collection of original essays examines the relationship between Islam, the nature of state projects, and the position of women in the modern nation states of the Middle East and South Asia. Arguing that Islam is not uniform across Muslim societies and that women's roles in these societies cannot be understood simply by looking at texts and laws. the contributors focus, instead, on the effects of the political projects of states on the lives of women.
[more]

front cover of Women of Assur and Kanesh
Women of Assur and Kanesh
Texts from the Archives of Assyrian Merchants
Cécile Michel
SBL Press, 2020

Vivid sources for reconstructing the lives of Assyrian women

In this collection Cécile Michel translates into English texts related to wives and daughters of merchants and to their activities in nineteenth-century BCE Aššur and Kaneš. Discovered in excavations of the Old Assyrian private archives at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) in Central Anatolia, these letters sent from Aššur reflect the preeminent role of Assyrian women within the family and in the domestic economy, as well as their contribution to long-distance trade. Contracts and other legal texts excavated at Kültepe attest to Assyrian and Anatolian women as parties in marriage and divorce contracts, last wills, loans, and purchase contracts. These unique finds paint a vivid portrait of women who aspire to be socially respected and provide a rare opportunity to reconstruct their daily lives as both businesswomen and housewives.

Features

  • More than three hundred letters and documents transliterated and translated with commentary
  • An overview of the study of women and gender in Assyriology
  • A reconstruction of women's roles as textile producers, investors, and creditors within a long-distance commercial network

Cécile Michel is Senior Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France) and Professor at Hamburg University (Germany). She is a member of the international group of scholars in charge of the decipherment of the 23,000 tablets found at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) and of the Kültepe archaeological team. She is the coeditor of and contributor to The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East (2016), Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD (2017), and Mathematics, Administrative and Economic Activities in Ancient Worlds (2020).

[more]

logo for University of Texas Press
Women on a Journey
Between Baghdad and London
By Haifa Zangana
University of Texas Press, 2006

Exiled, displaced, tortured, and grieving—each of the five Iraqi women whose lives and losses come to us through Haifa Zangana's skillfully wrought novel is searching in her own way for peace with a past that continually threatens to swallow up the present.

Majda, the widow of a former Ba'ath party official who was killed by the government he served. Adiba, a political dissident tortured under Saddam Hussein's regime. Um Mohammed, a Kurdish refugee who fled her home for political asylum. Iqbal, a divorced mother whose family in Iraq is suffering the effects of Western economic sanctions. And Sahira, the wife of a Communist politician, struggling with his disillusionment and her own isolation. Bound to one another by a common Iraqi identity and a common location in 1990s London, these women come together across differences in politics, ethnic and class background, age, and even language. In narrating the friendship that develops among them, Zangana captures their warmth and humor as well as their sadness, their feelings of despair along with their search for hope, their sense of uprootedness, and their yearnings for home.

Weaving between the women's memories of Iraq—nostalgic and nightmarish—and their lives as exiles in London, Zangana's novel gives voice to the richness and complexity of Iraqi women's experiences. Through their stories, the novel represents a powerful critique of the violence done to ordinary people by those who hold power both in Iraq and in the West.

[more]

front cover of Women's Political Activism in Palestine
Women's Political Activism in Palestine
Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival
Sophie Richter-Devroe
University of Illinois Press, 2018
During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism. Sophie Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change.

Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences.

Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.

[more]

front cover of Working Out Egypt
Working Out Egypt
Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940
Wilson Chacko Jacob
Duke University Press, 2011
Working Out Egypt is both a rich cultural history of the formation of an Egyptian national subject in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth and a compelling critique of modern Middle Eastern historiography. Wilson Chacko Jacob describes how Egyptian men of a class akin to the cultural bourgeoisie (the effendiyya) struggled to escape from the long shadow cast by colonial depictions of the East as degenerate, feminine, and temporally behind an active and virile Europe. He argues that during British colonial rule (1882–1936), attempts to create a distinctively modern and Egyptian self free from the colonial gaze led to the formation of an ambivalent, performative subjectivity that he calls “effendi masculinity.” Jacob traces effendi masculinity as it took hold during the interwar years, in realms from scouting and competitive sports to sex talk and fashion, considering its gendered performativity in relation to a late-nineteenth-century British discourse on masculinity and empire and an explicitly nationalist discourse on Egyptian masculinity. He contends that as an assemblage of colonial modernity, effendi masculinity was simultaneously local and global, national and international, and particular and universal. Until recently, modern Egyptian history has not allowed for such paradoxes; instead, Egyptian modernity has been narrated in the temporal and spatial terms of a separate Western modernity.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
World Film Locations
Istanbul
Edited by Özlem Köksal
Intellect Books, 2012
From Head-On to Murder on the Orient Express, World Film Locations: Istanbul offers a compelling look at the many films shot on location in this multicultural metropolis on the Black Sea. Central to this volume are the film industry’s changing representations of Istanbul, which have ranged from progressive cultural center to the authoritarian police state of Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Evident in both in films made in the West and throughout Turkey over time, these divergent accounts are analyzed with regard to their role in continually reshaping our perception of the city. Essays explore this topic and many others, including the significance of Istanbul to the works of critically-acclaimed directors, among them Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
 
Illustrated throughout with film stills as well as photographs of featured locations as they appear today, World Film Locations: Istanbul visits all of the important cinematic landmarks, including the Topkapi Palace and the Haydarpasa train station and offers a vivid picture of this historic and culturally stimulating city.
[more]

front cover of The World of Persian Literary Humanism
The World of Persian Literary Humanism
Hamid Dabashi
Harvard University Press, 2012

What does it mean to be human? Humanism has mostly considered this question from a Western perspective. Through a detailed examination of a vast literary tradition, Hamid Dabashi asks that question anew, from a non-European point of view. The answers are fresh, provocative, and deeply transformative. This groundbreaking study of Persian humanism presents the unfolding of a tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.

Exploring how 1,400 years of Persian literature have taken up the question of what it means to be human, Dabashi proposes that the literary subconscious of a civilization may also be the undoing of its repressive measures. This could account for the masculinist hostility of the early Arab conquest that accused Persian culture of effeminate delicacy and sexual misconduct, and later of scientific and philosophical inaccuracy. As the designated feminine subconscious of a decidedly masculinist civilization, Persian literary humanism speaks from a hidden and defiant vantage point-and this is what inclines it toward creative subversion.

Arising neither despite nor because of Islam, Persian literary humanism was the artistic manifestation of a cosmopolitan urbanism that emerged in the aftermath of the seventh-century Muslim conquest. Removed from the language of scripture and scholasticism, Persian literary humanism occupies a distinct universe of moral obligations in which "a judicious lie," as the thirteenth-century poet Sheykh Mosleh al-Din Sa'di writes, "is better than a seditious truth."

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing
James Uden
Harvard University Press
Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing rediscovers the works of a wide range of authors from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. A stowaway on a voyage circumnavigating the globe; a nineteenth-century visitor to schools in Japan; an Indian activist undertaking a pilgrimage to Iraq—these are some of the women whose experiences come to life in this volume. Worlds of Knowledge explores travel writing as a genre for communicating information about other cultures and for testing assumptions about the nature and extent of women’s expertise. The book challenges the frequent focus in travel studies on English-language texts by exploring works in French and Urdu as well as English and focusing on journeys to France, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, India, Ethiopia, Japan, Australia, and the Falkland Islands. Written by experts in a wide range of fields, this interdisciplinary volume sheds new light on the range, innovation, and erudition of travel narratives by women.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter