BiblioVault - Books about Middle Eastern

A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY

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227 books about Middle Eastern and 6 start with N

227 books about Middle Eastern and 6 227 books about Middle Eastern
6 start with N start with N

The Naked Blogger of Cairo

Creative Insurgency in the Arab World

Marwan M. Kraidy

Harvard University Press, 2016

A Times Higher Education Book of the Year

Uprisings spread like wildfire across the Arab world from 2010 to 2012, fueled by a desire for popular sovereignty. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, protesters flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them. Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, The Naked Blogger of Cairo uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings.

“A deep dive into the cultural politics of the Arab uprisings…Kraidy’s sharp insights and rich descriptions of a new Arab generation’s irrepressible creative urges will amply reward the effort. Reading Kraidy’s accounts of the politically charted cultural gambits of wired Arab youth rekindles some of the seemingly lost spirit of the early days of the Arab uprisings and offers hope for the future.”
—Marc Lynch, Washington Post

“The Naked Blogger of Cairo is a superb and important work not just for scholars but for anyone who cares about the relationships between art, the body, and revolution.”
—Hans Rollman, PopMatters

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Naqqali Trilogy

Azhdahak, Arash, Testament of Bondar Bidakhsh

Bahram Beyzaie

Harvard University Press

Widely regarded as the Shakespeare of Persia, Bahram Beyzaie—playwright, director, screenwriter, and scholar—has made the greatest contribution to modern Persian drama of any individual artist, yet he remains largely unknown to the English-speaking world. In this volume, Richard Saul Chason and Nikta Sabouri have translated for the first time into English Beyzaie’s complete Naqqali Trilogy, one of the dramatist’s greatest masterpieces and a pinnacle work of twentieth-century world drama.

Blending modes of traditional Iranian storytelling and mythological ritual with contemporary dramatic philosophy and technique, the Naqqali Trilogy is a cycle of three works of mythological revisionism. It celebrates a renaissance of Persian cultural tradition while reframing ancient tales into a modern psychodrama of outcasts and oppression in a land of tyranny and injustice. This volume also includes a detailed introduction that provides background information on Beyzaie, the mythological basis of the plays, the nature of the plays in performance, and on the plays’ distinctive employ of the Persian language and the replication of the dramatic prose poetry into an English equivalent.

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The Necklace of the Pleiades

24 Essays on Persian Literature, Culture and Religion

Franklin Lewis

Amsterdam University Press, 2010

The Necklace of the Pleiades is a volume on Persian literature, culture and religion by Persian scholars from around the world. This book reflects the state of the field of Persian literary studies and will be of substantial interest not only to scholars of Iranian culture, history and religions, but of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, as well. The topics of the 24 essays range from the Persian Alexander romance, to Ferdowsi’s Shahnama and other epics, the poetics and imagery of the ghazal and the qasida, Mughal court poetry, Sufism, Ismaili history, Baha’i literature, Iranian linguistics, the modern writer Sadeq Hedayat, and the reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel in Persian translation.

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Negotiating in Civil Conflict

Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in Iraq

Haider Ala Hamoudi

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In 2005, Iraq drafted its first constitution and held the country’s first democratic election in more than fifty years. Even under ideal conditions, drafting a constitution can be a prolonged process marked by contentious debate, and conditions in Iraq are far from ideal: Iraq has long been racked by ethnic and sectarian conflict, which intensified following the American invasion and continues today. This severe division, which often erupted into violence, would not seem to bode well for the fate of democracy. So how is it that Iraq was able to surmount its sectarianism to draft a constitution that speaks to the conflicting and largely incompatible ideological view of the Sunnis, Shi’ah, and Kurds?

Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues here that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main sects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.

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The New Babel

Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises

Leonard Schwartz

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises evokes and investigates—from a Jewish American perspective and in the forms of poetry, essays, and interviews—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America’s involvement as both perpetrator and victim of events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the multiple ways that poetics can respond to political imperatives.

The poems range from the immediately lyrical to the experimental forms of the “Apple Anyone Sonnets” series, which relies heavily on the Arabic but has Shakespeare as its scaffolding.

In the essays, Schwartz calls on the power of poetry—and of some of the great poets in the Arabic, Jewish, and American traditions—to help rethink the battle lines of the contemporary Mid-East, with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber looming large.

The interviews provide Schwartz’s discussions with Israeli poet and activist Aharon Shabtai, political philosopher Michael Hardt, and the late, great American poet Amiri Baraka.

In these creative, analytical, and conversational moments, Leonard Schwartz rethinks the battle lines of the contemporary Middle East and calls on the power of language as the essence of our humanity, endlessly fluid, but also the source of an intentional confusion there is a necessity to counter.

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