The book tells the story of Rusçuk — known today as Ruse, in northern Bulgaria — a cosmopolitan port city on the Danube that, within the span of just fifteen years, passed through three entirely different political systems: a modernized Ottoman provincial administration, a Russian military provisional government, and a newly independent Bulgarian national state. Through this one city, Çelik offers a striking new account of how empires end and nations begin — and how much continuity lies beneath the surface of what looks like rupture.

At the heart of the book is the Tanzimat reform era, when Governor Midhat Pasha turned Rusçuk into a laboratory of Ottoman modernization. The city became home to the first provincial municipality in Ottoman history, the first agricultural credit cooperatives, a bilingual newspaper, secular mixed schools, and elected councils in which Muslim and Bulgarian Christian representatives sat side by side. Çelik shows that the Ottoman Empire, at its most ambitious, offered Bulgarians a genuine political alternative to nationalism — and that many took it, among them the chorbaci, the Bulgarian Christian notables who invested in and co-governed the Ottoman system, and who have been largely written out of Bulgarian national memory ever since.

When Russia invaded in 1877–78, Rusçuk surrendered peacefully — a telling sign of how deeply the city's diverse population had been woven into the Ottoman fabric. What followed was equally surprising: the Russian provisional government preserved the Ottoman institutional framework almost entirely, relabeling its councils and offices rather than dismantling them. The Bulgarian national government that came next did much the same, adopting Ottoman tools of minority management — including the military exemption tax and millet-style community administration — at the very moment it was defining itself in opposition to the Ottoman past.

Çelik also uncovers a remarkable story of religious conversion under Bulgarian rule: while some Muslims and Catholics converted pragmatically to Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity to secure the rights of the dominant group, Protestant conversion driven by the long-standing American Methodist Episcopal mission quietly gained new ground. In one of the book's most unexpected findings, a small community of Orthodox Bulgarians, Muslim Turks, Jews, and Armenians formed a lasting bond through their shared Protestant identity.

Drawing on Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, British, French, and Austrian archives — as well as prison registers, consular reports, missionary records, and the bilingual provincial newspaper Tuna/Dunav — Çelik bridges two historiographies that rarely speak to each other. Ottoman historians tend to stop at 1877; Bulgarian historians tend to start there. Empire and Nation in the City insists on the continuity that both fields have missed.

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Elizabeth Anne Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.

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New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Robin Whelan is Reader in Mediterranean History at the University of Liverpool.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston

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In case studies concerning women's education in 1850s' Beirut, the satirical press in colonial Egypt, colloquial theater in the era of decolonization, street art and graphic novels during and after the 2011 Egyptian protests, Sibley follows the threads of an expressive culture that announces and celebrates its own impropriety. Concluding with analyses of Gaza poetry on the internet as a space where the stakes of incivility are acutely visible, The Poetics of Incivility offers a timely consideration of incivility as an aesthetic resource for authors and artists engaging with some of the most controversial issues of their times—and ours.

Emily Sibley is Senior Research Associate at Whitman College.

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Amihai Mazar is a leading archaeologist of ancient Israel. His research examines the Bronze and Iron Ages, archaeology and biblical history, ancient Near Eastern art and architecture, and historical geography. Tel Reḥov is especially important because it offers a rich archaeological sequence from the Beth-Shean Valley and evidence for the social, economic, and environmental history of northern Israel.

Volume V is particularly revealing because it asks what can be learned from material that might appear secondary beside monumental architecture. Its first part examines clay, bone, stone and gypsum vessels; grinding stones and other stone implements; metal objects and metallurgical evidence; beads; objects connected with textile production; scale weights; and lithics. Together, these finds illuminate household work, craft activity, exchange, measurement, and technology.

The volume also analyzes the spatial distribution of finds in a distinctive group of ninth-century BCE buildings in Area C. Archaeology is also about understanding where objects were found and how groups of finds functioned together. Distribution patterns can help reconstruct activities within buildings and suggest how work, storage, production, and daily routines were organized. It also includes Assyrian-period burials and later Islamic-period material, showing the site's long history.

The second part of Volume V brings natural-science methods directly into the archaeological interpretation. Radiometric dating contributes to chronology. Studies of animal and fish remains, molluscs, and botanical material offer evidence for diet, agriculture, environment, trade, and the use of local and non-local resources. A soil-flotation project recovers small botanical remains that might otherwise disappear from the archaeological record. These studies show how modern archaeology depends on collaboration between excavators and natural-science specialists.

One striking example is the paleomagnetic study of tilted walls in Area C, Stratum V. Instead of treating damaged architecture only as a descriptive feature, the researchers used physical evidence to investigate seismic destruction. This demonstrates a central strength of Volume V: interpretation is built by combining objects, context, chronology, biological remains, geology, and physical-science methods.

Our discussion with Professor Mazar therefore uses Volume V to ask a larger question: how do small finds and scientific analyses change the historical picture created by excavation? The volume shows that understanding an ancient city requires more than identifying buildings or connecting archaeological horizons with historical narratives. It requires reconstructing technologies, food systems, craft production, movement of goods, environmental conditions, patterns of use within buildings, and the events that transformed them.

Željko Stanojević is a host with the New Books Network and President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, Belgrade. He is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, an international Diamond Open Access journal supporting research in Hebrew, biblical, Jewish, linguistic, historical, and related studies. He also coordinates the European Hebrew Journal International Online Conference, New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies. Authors of recent academic books are welcome to contact him regarding possible New Books Network interviews.

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You can browse Frank Scholten’s images here.

Follow the City Sarha Instagram account to be updated on when the app exploring Jerusalem’s modern cultural history will launch.

You can purchase a copy here. The book is also available Open Access here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman, together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion.

The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq; the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct Judeo-Arabic dialect.

Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948, Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory.

Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.

Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth century—a history Yehuda insisted be established on primary evidence rather than inherited assumption.

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Hossam el-Hamalawy is a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organisers of the 2011 uprising. He has been involved in the labour movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt. He holds a PhD in political science from Freie Universität Berlin and is the recipient of the 2011 Anna Politkovskaya Journalism Award. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics at 3arabawy.substack.com.

Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) researching the political economy of nitrogen fertilizer supply chains.

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Younus Y. Mirza is the Founding Director of the Barzinji Institute for Global Virtual Learning at Shenandoah University. He defended his dissertation in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University and has taught at Millsaps and Allegheny Colleges. His research focuses on the relationship between the Bible and the Qur’an and the shared stories between them

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025) provides the first full English translation of Begum Sarbuland's Urdu travel diary from this journey, of which only three original copies remain. Originally intended for circulation among friends and family and later published, her informal entries not only reveal the everyday practices of an Indian woman of her time, but also detail her impressions and reactions as she explored the world alongside her husband. As Begum Sarbuland encountered other women and Muslims during her travels, those encounters shaped her reassessment of her own identity as a Muslim woman. Her observations hold continued significance for readers interested in critical questions about gender, Islam, and identity. Daniel Majchrowicz has thoroughly annotated his translation and paired it with rich appendices, including a biographical sketch of Begum Sarbuland and excerpts from Hamidullah Khan's own accounts of their journey.

Engagingly written and enriched with years of original research, archival work, and family interviews, A Journey to Mecca and London restores the nearly forgotten narrative of one of India's first Muslim women travel writers to its rightful place in Indian and Islamic history.

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Formed in 1944, the JBG saw combat in the final stages of the Italian campaign, where its soldiers fought with distinction against German forces. After the war, many of its members – who often had little or no military training, and included artists, scientists, and farmers – engaged in clandestine efforts to smuggle Holocaust survivors and weapons into Palestine, laying the groundwork for the future Israeli state. Others sought retribution against Nazis and collaborators in acts that revealed both the trauma of genocide and the desire for justice.

Far more than a conventional military history, Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers is both a critical study of the political uses of history and a vivid, passionate narrative that brings to life the men and women of the brigade. Accessible and engaging, this book offers readers a rare lens through which to understand the intersections of war, memory, and politics in twentieth-century Europe.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Bombay sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped ideas cross borders.

At the same time, British censuses and representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia contained the world’s largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were increasingly classified as a political minority within India.

Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world, joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony’s College. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.

His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political destiny. Along the way, we’ll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the nation-state.

Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi, a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University.

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Paulina Banas is an Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches course on Islamic world arts, 19th century European visual culture, and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Middle East.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.

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Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto literary and educational writing, from roughly 1530 to 1830, the period Pelevin identifies as classical in the history of Pashto letters. Moving from the earliest, now-lost administrative "Daftar" of Shaykh Mali through the sectarian mystical poetry of Bayazid Ansari's Roshani movement, the Sunni traditionalist manuals of Akhund Darweza, and the towering figures of Khushhal Khan Khatak and ʿAbd al-Rahman Momand (Rahman Baba). This book reconstructs a written tradition that has been persistently marginal to both regional and Western scholarship. Pelevin frames this history through what he calls the dissolution of the Persophonie and the slow emergence of Pashto as a written language in the shadow of, and eventually alongside with the dominant Persian literary cosmopolis. Rather than reading this as a proto-nationalist story imposed retroactively, he traces a much older and more specific discourse of Pashtun self-identity — descent, language, custom, and religion, articulated by the authors themselves, long before any colonial or nationalist framework existed to name it.

What makes the book distinctive is its insistence on working from the Pashto texts as primary sources in their own right, rather than as illustrations for arguments made in Persian chronicles, in colonial-era administrative writing, or in the historiography of "Pashtun tribal society" that has tended to treat literary production as peripheral to political and military history. Pelevin is explicit about this reversal: he wants to shift attention from the political to the poetical.

Qaseem Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory, historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.

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The contributors show how research in these unique archives challenges previous assumptions about Ba'thist Iraq and the workings of authoritarian regimes. Their chapters provide fresh insights into how Saddam Hussein's regime functioned both at the elite level and through everyday bureaucratic practices, shedding light on state power, social relations, and international politics of the Middle East. The volume also critically reflects on the ethical questions posed by the archives, including their origins, the impact of their removal from Iraq, and access barriers for local scholars. Rich in empirical detail yet framed by cutting-edge theoretical questions, this book demonstrates how the Iraqi archives have reshaped debates about authoritarianism, governance, repression, and state-society relations well beyond the Iraqi case.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman Empire for control of the Middle East. Chastened by their intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara, the British tried to do something unthinkable: Actually learn how local communities operated, and ensure that propaganda was culturally authentic.

It’s the subject of The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit (Hurst, 2026), a new book from Eamonn Gearon which he calls the first in-depth investigation into what this intelligence agency did.

Eamonn is a global historian, specialising in the Middle East and North Africa and the history of intelligence, whose books also include The Arab Revolt. His doctoral research uncovered previously unknown Arabic documents which shed new light on British intelligence work in the region.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Arab Bureau. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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As well as discussing the genocide idea, the book analyses the Gaza genocide in the context of the longer histories of the problem, both globally and in Palestine. Further chapters deal with "forgotten genocides," the attempted Russian elimination of Ukraine, and the history of British complicity.

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In The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt(Yale University Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas Smith tells the gripping story of the crusade for Egypt. Looking at a wide range of Christian and Muslim sources, Dr. Smith sheds new light on the brutal reality of medieval combat on land and water. We see a dramatic beach landing, the invention of a unique floating siege engine, and the conquest of the crucial port city of Damietta—one of the most famous and successful sieges of the crusades. Dr. Smith provides fresh insights into strategy, showing how, despite early victories, foolish decision making meant that the crusaders ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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This extensively researched study highlights a wealth of rarely consulted sources gathered from 14 archives, family collections, medical journals, student newspapers, film and oral interviews. Drawing on these materials, it interrogates the contradictions inherent in state-driven efforts, wherein doctors functioned as agents of reform and subjects of bureaucratic oversight. Through this, Dr. Farhan reveals the nexus between medical pedagogy, professional authority, public health policy and the broader political transformations that continually redefined medicine in Iraq.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Highlights include:

• Crabapple’s personal connection to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort;
• How the Bund built a vibrant youth counterculture amid harsh anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe;
• The significance of “Hereness” to the Bund’s politics and how it distinguished the group from Zionist groups advocating the colonization of Palestine;
• A discussion of “theory-pilled nerds” and how Crabapple’s activism and journalism since Occupy Wall Street shaped her insights into the inner life of the Bund;
• The future of anti-Zionism in the context of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award. She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized – a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detected by the antennas of the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Roy makes a case for such alterity for Romani people and other groups in the region.

Analysing intimate ethnographic scenes through anthropological theories of kinship, psychoanalysis, social theory from the Global South, and more, the book reveals how alterity in the Middle East does not adhere to rigid identitarian categories. Ultimately, Relative Strangers demonstrates the inadequacy of transposing models of pluralism centred on European and American experiences of minoritization onto other contexts.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Istanbul, 1538. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is at the pinnacle of world power, while his family and future are at the mercy of their own dynastic law: whichever of his five sons succeeds him must eventually kill all the others. So why not get a head start?
For the next fifteen years, as Suleyman the Magnificent and his terrifying pirate captain Barbarossa face down imperial enemies across two hemispheres, the self-fulfilling curse of the Ottomans gathers its own unstoppable momentum.
From the burning pyres of Paris to the rain-lashed mountains of Transylvania, from Buda to Basra, from Crimea to the coast of India, Christopher de Bellaigue's The Golden Throne is an intensely gripping yet entirely historical reconstruction of the life and world of the most feared and powerful man of the sixteenth century, revealing the price of succession and the terrible cost of success.

Christopher de Bellaigue is an author, journalist and founder of The Lake District Book Festival. The Golden Throne is the second book in a trilogy.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani is the Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.
Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector.

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Dr. ⁠Alex Boodrookas⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Dr. ⁠Ahmed AlMaazmi⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University.

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Contesting Zion: The Vatican, American Catholics, and the Partition of Palestine (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the Vatican and the Zionist movement from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the first decade of Israeli statehood. Adrian Ciani considers the transnational nature of Catholic responses to Zionism and the creation of Israel, with a focus on the Catholic Church in the United States. From the 1920s through the 1950s, American Catholic leaders became crucial intermediaries between Washington and the Vatican. Speaking as both loyal American citizens and devout Catholics, they were uniquely positioned to articulate the Vatican’s policy objectives to the American government, including on the future of Palestine. American Catholics were also instrumental in advocating the church’s Palestine policy at the United Nations, playing a central role in the Holy See’s attempts to shape the twentieth-century international order.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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At the heart of Ellis’s book is Judeo-Iraqi Arabic—also known as Baghdadi Jewish Arabic or Hakimalna—a language once spoken by the Jews of Iraq. Rich with layers of Hebrew and Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic, it reflects over two millennia of Jewish life in the region. Today, however, it stands on the brink of extinction. As Ellis shared, a language is considered endangered when it is no longer passed on to children, and Judeo-Iraqi Arabic may have only about a thousand speakers remaining worldwide. Within a generation, it could fall silent.

Ellis described a powerful turning point in her own awareness: a casual question from another parent about why she was not sending her son to a nursery that spoke “her language.” Her spontaneous response—“my language is dead”—became the catalyst for the journey that led to this book. That moment captures the quiet grief of linguistic loss, but also the urgency of preservation.

Our conversation traced the long arc of Iraqi Jewish history, beginning with the Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. Iraqi Jews lived in the region long before the arrival of Arabic, shifting over centuries from Hebrew to Aramaic and later to Arabic, while preserving distinctive linguistic features from earlier eras. This layered history lives on in the language itself. Yet the mass departures of Iraqi Jews in the mid-20th century—particularly the 1950–51 airlift—fractured this continuity. Today, only a handful of Jews remain in Iraq.

And yet, as Ellis emphasized, culture does not disappear all at once. Language may fade, but other forms of transmission endure. Food, in particular, becomes a powerful vessel of memory. Ellis initially resisted including recipes in her book, but came to understand that cooking is itself a kind of language—a sensory bridge to the past. The image of her mother carrying three rolling pins from Iraq is emblematic of this continuity: tangible objects that hold intangible heritage. Even the book’s title gesture—“always carry salt”—evokes protective practices familiar across Mizrahi communities, small rituals that encode belief, memory, and identity.

We also discussed the remarkable story of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, discovered in 2003 in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein’s secret police headquarters. The archive contains hundreds of thousands of documents—school records, letters, communal registers—offering an intimate portrait of everyday Jewish life in Iraq. Today, innovative projects are using AI to transcribe and translate these materials across multiple scripts, making them accessible to descendants and scholars alike. Yet the archive’s ultimate fate remains uncertain, raising complex questions about ownership, memory, and cultural restitution.

A particularly resonant theme in our conversation was Ellis’s struggle with authenticity. As a second-generation Iraqi Jew raised in the UK, she grappled with whether she had the “right” to tell this story, especially without having visited Iraq herself. Her resolution—to be “authentic to me”—offers an important model for thinking about diasporic identity. Preservation, she suggests, does not require perfect replication. It allows for adaptation, creativity, even reinvention. One can honor tradition while also “messing with it,” whether by adjusting a recipe or reimagining inherited practices.

Ellis introduces a beautiful concept she calls “milk language”—the language absorbed in early childhood, through intimacy and care, even if it is not the dominant language of one’s environment. This idea invites us to reconsider how language lives within us, not only as a tool of communication but as a carrier of emotional and cultural memory.

As an educator, I was especially struck by Ellis’s closing insight and her implicit call to action: to speak with our elders while we still can. There is a profound difference between hearing fragments of family stories in childhood and sitting down, as an adult, to listen fully and intentionally. These conversations do more than preserve history; they create connection, continuity, and a deeper sense of self.

Always Carry Salt is not only a memoir. It is an invitation—to remember, to document, and to carry forward what might otherwise be lost. In a time when so many cultural threads are at risk of unraveling, Ellis’s work reminds us that preservation begins with attention, with curiosity, and with the willingness to listen.

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Rather than portraying marriage as either oppressive or emancipatory, Dr Risse presents it as a complex social institution shaped by kinship networks, religious values, and community expectations. Risse’s work encourages readers to reconsider familiar ideas about family, marriage, household, intimacy, autonomy, and social life.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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Robert Templer writes about this celebration–and how it presaged the events of the Iranian Revolution of 1979–in his new book The Shah's Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed (Hurst, 2026).

Robert Templer is a writer and former professor at the Central European University, where he also founded a research centre on post-conflict recovery. From 2011-2012, he was director of the Asia Programme at the International Crisis Group and has visited Iran on many occasions. He is the author of four books including the acclaimed Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam and A Basilisk Glance: Poisoners from Plato to Putin.

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Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of No Good Men Among the Living and writes about democracy, inequality, and conflict.

Recommended Books:

• Loubna Mrie, Defiance
• Walter Ang, Orality and Literacy

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Homa Katouzian looks at this history in his latest book Iran and the Revolution: A History (Yale University Press, 2026), where he posits that Iran is a “short-term society,” one that lacks long-term continuity.

We recorded this interview on May 18th, 2026.

Homa is a member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the Department of History, University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books, including Iran: Politics, History and Literature (Routledge: 2012), Iran: A Beginners’ Guide (Oneworld Publications: 2013), and The Persians (Yale University Press: 2009).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Iran and the Revolution. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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In this Nordic Asia Podcast episode, Khaled Ezzelarab, Director of the Middle East Institute Program at the American University in Cairo and a former journalist, discusses how Western media narratives shape public understanding of the Gaza war and the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He argues that mainstream Western outlets such as the BBC, CNN, and The New York Times have gradually changed their coverage over time, although dominant narratives still frame the conflict primarily as a cycle of “mutual violence” rather than addressing the deeper realities of occupation and structural inequality faced by Palestinians.

Ezzelarab explains that media language plays a crucial role in shaping public perception. Terms such as “genocide,” despite being used by international experts and human rights organisations, are often avoided by major Western media outlets. At the same time, emotionally charged language is more frequently used when describing Israeli suffering than Palestinian suffering. According to Ezzelarab, these editorial choices significantly influence how audiences interpret violence and responsibility in the conflict.

The discussion also explores the relationship between journalism, audience expectations, and political power. Media organisations tend to follow dominant political narratives, especially in foreign affairs, while also responding to pressure from audiences and social movements. Ezzelarab notes that pro-Palestinian activism, especially among younger generations and on social media platforms such as TikTok, has increasingly challenged traditional media framing and forced mainstream outlets to adapt.

Finally, the episode highlights how global power structures shape media attention and representation, not only in Gaza but also in conflicts such as Sudan and Iraq. Ezzelarab concludes that younger generations of journalists and audiences may gradually reshape media narratives through more diverse perspectives and alternative digital platforms.

Elo Süld, Head of the University of Tartu Asia Centre and Associate Professor of Islamic Studies She is one of the leading scholars of Islam in Estonia, focusing on Islam and Islamic pluralism, and more broadly on the Middle East within the wider Asian context.

Khaled Ezzelarab, Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and Associate Professor of Practice in Journalism and Mass Communication. He has spent seventeen years as a journalist with international and pan-Arab media, including the BBC World Service, covering major regional events such as the Gaza wars, the Egyptian uprising, and the Syrian conflict. Ezzelarab presented his research at the University of Tartu Asia Centre annual Asia Update conference in April 2026. His session was titled “Beyond Bias: Structural and Cultural Determinants of Western Media Coverage of Gaza”.

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As Dr. Roberts demonstrates, imperial authorities in Washington, DC; Paris; and Algiers rarely collaborated intentionally in institutional partnerships or alliances. Rather, American, French, and Algerian politicians, soldiers, writers, and revolutionaries—often acting at cross purposes and across political and cultural boundaries—sought power by imagining and constructing Algeria as a fissured, dynamic, transimperial space. Focusing on issues of settler colonialism, irregular warfare, racialized citizenship, territorial incorporation, and pan-African identity, After Barbary shows how French Algeria helped make the American and French empires.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Industrial Islamism recently received the best new book in the category of international political economy from the International Studies Association.

Dr. Utku Balaban is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Xavier University. He is the author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh: Urban Space and the Proliferation of Industrial Labor Practices in Istanbul’s Garment Industry (2011) and Social Inclusion Practices in Turkey (2015).

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States.

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In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Dr. Sean Lee, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, discusses the evolving relationship between majority and minority groups in the Middle East. He argues that the minority question is not simply about ethnic or religious groups themselves, but about how political power, history, and institutions shape the categories of majority and minority. These identities are not fixed; they change depending on political and historical circumstances.

Using examples from Syria, Lebanon, Israel–Palestine, and other regional conflicts, Lee explains how civil wars and political violence reshape social boundaries and reinforce divisions between communities. In Syria, for example, the post-war political transition has intensified tensions between Sunni Arab majorities and minority groups such as the Druze, Kurds, and Alawites. Lee also highlights how outside powers increasingly use minority groups as instruments in regional politics.

A major theme of the discussion is the breakdown of the liberal international order after October 2023. According to Lee, this has weakened international law and increased instability in the region. He suggests that unresolved questions about citizenship and equal rights, especially in Israel and Palestine, continue to fuel conflict and resistance.

Drawing comparisons beyond the Middle East, Lee argues that similar dynamics can be observed globally, particularly with the rise of ethnonationalism and populism. He concludes that long-term stability depends on moving away from systems based on ethnic or religious identity and toward citizenship-based political systems in which all individuals enjoy equal rights regardless of background.

Helen Haas is a Middle East researcher at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies and the Middle East Coordinator at the Asia Centre, University of Tartu. Her research focuses on the diversity of Islam. She teaches Turkish and courses on Islamic history and culture, and works as an interpreter and translator of Turkish literature. She is the managing editor of the Usuteaduslik Ajakiri (Journal of Religion).

Sean Lee is an assistant professor of political science at The American University in Cairo. His research focuses on political violence and social movements in the Levant. He is currently completing a book manuscript on minoritized communities during the civil wars in Lebanon and Syria.

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In the podcast we discuss the process that led these intellectuals to this position and the problems it posed for their relevance. We also discuss the contributions Al-Azmeh makes across the sociology of intellectuals, postcolonial theory and the idea of ‘trauma work’. There are also reflections on how one navigates one’s participants also being source of literature and what has changed following the fall of the Assad regime.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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Since October 7th 2023, the story of what was to become the genocide in Gaza was immediately shaped by the mobilisation of a very particular narrative: one of unprovoked terror, of Israel's right to defend itself, of a war between equals. What was not made clear, and what Andersen's book documents in meticulous detail, was the extent to which those attacks would be used by Western elites, the global military industrial complex, and US legacy media to condone a full-scale genocide, including horrors that continue as this book goes to print, despite a ceasefire.

The Complicit Lens is published by OR Books in collaboration with the Institute for Palestine Studies, and features an introduction by the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, who writes: "This book does not make for easy reading. Andersen walks us through the mainstream media's misleading coverage, its bland and unquestioning repetition of lies and distortions by spokespersons for the Israeli and US governments, and its racist defamation of the Palestinians, when it is not ignoring their voices entirely. In analyzing this dereliction of the most basic duties of journalists, she offers detailed alternative and independent media accounts of Israel's massacres, its intentional destruction of the infrastructure necessary for normal life, and its starvation of over two million people, obscured by this almost universal mainstream media malpractice."

About the Author

Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and an award-winning author of a dozen single- and co-authored books. Her work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. She edits the Routledge Focus Book Series on Media and Humanitarian Action, serves as a Project Censored Judge, and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. Andersen is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, where she also writes regularly, and is an Izzy Award Judge for the Park Center for Independent Media.

About the Host

Stuti Roy is currently an editor at Oxford University Press. She has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

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In this conversation, Szanto and I explore specific Muharram practices, including self-flagellation, the wedding of Qasim, and other ritualized forms of mourning, as well as gendered dynamics in who participates and why. We discuss what these practices looked like on the ground—what Muharram in Sayyida Zaynab felt like, how different communities understood and debated these rituals, and what purposes they served for those who participated in them. We talk about the Zaynabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discuss relationships with saints, spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music, and ritual performance mediate piety. Szanto also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences observing and engaging with these rituals.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Islamic studies generally, Shi‘i studies, Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual.

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But who was Imad Nuwayhid? Was he a leftist intellectual? A self-interested hotel worker? A fighter dedicated to Palestinian liberation? A tragic symbol of what happened to those caught in the crosshairs during the war? Through archival and oral history, Beirut Radical finds that Imad was none of these things alone, but all of them together.Beirut Radical: A Global Microhistory from the Sixties to the Lebanese Civil War (I.B. Tauris, 2026) takes up Imad Nuwayhid as a global microhistory-a window into the global sixties, the war, and its aftermath. Baun argues that Imad's beliefs and actions, crystalized during two tumultuous decades of the Cold War, signal a young generation of what he terms “practical radicals.” While much more is known about their politics and support for left-wing ideologies, Imad's life highlights how they pursued them, equally, alongside their career aspirations. Imad's death in the war, then, shows the twisting path by which some young leftists ceded their autonomy to liberation struggles. Lastly, Beirut Radical follows Imad's afterlife, examining how multiple actors to Lebanon's war, some in concert (party and family members), some in resistance (some family), claim individuals and their memory, during and beyond wartime. More than anything perhaps, Beirut Radical is a meditation on the intimate, the personal, the ethics, and the micro-level of history.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Mostafa Hussein is assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim studies at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the editor (with Brahim El Guabli) of Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Craig Perry examined these documents for his new book: Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton University Press, 2026). The book dives into everyday documents, like wills and manumission deeds, to reconstruct how Jewish households in Egypt bought, sold, owned and freed enslaved people—and how they grappled with the morality of owning slaves, given Judaism’s own history.

Craig Perry is assistant professor at Emory University in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Islamic Civilizations Studies Graduate Program. He is the 2024 Andrew W. Mellon Family Foundation Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies and the coeditor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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The book is part of the Springer series Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies and was awarded the Science Award on Religious Freedom 2026 the Freie Theologische Hochschule (FTH) Gießen, Germany.

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The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11 (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nathaniel Greenberg tells the story of American propaganda campaigns in the Middle East after 9/11, drawing on in-depth interviews with key players and previously classified documents. Dr. Greenberg shows how the United States tried to control perceptions of its response to 9/11 through news and entertainment, and reveals that Arab governments and unofficial actors were involved—knowingly or not—in distributing US propaganda. He explores the institutions, strategy, and rhetoric deployed in the war on terror, placing them in the context of American and Soviet influence campaigns during the Cold War. Greenberg argues that US government-backed broadcasting laid the groundwork for global information warfare, such as the rise of competing Russian and Chinese state media operations. Shedding light on the ideological underpinnings of American propaganda in Arabic after 9/11, The Long War of Ideas offers new insight into soft power in the twenty-first century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Foundations of Zionism (Ebb Books, 2025) chronicles this development from Zionism's early origins up to the establishment of the British mandate over Palestine in 1923, refuting many of the movement's own foundational myths - from its early relationship to the Palestinians to its exclusively religious character. Sabri Jiryis delves into Zionism's successive congresses and factional struggles, its early failures to settle in Palestine and the formation of armed militias, and its temporary alliances with the Ottoman Empire before the movement eventually secured support from Western colonial powers such as Britain. In a newly written conclusion, Jiryis reconsiders the Zionist project 100 years on from the Balfour Declaration and amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Christian Henderson is a lecturer at the University of Leiden. His research focuses on the Arab region, with a particular focus on Gulf investment in the states of North Africa and the Levant, rural development and business politics. Alongside his academic work, he has worked as a journalist in Lebanon and with Al Jazeera in Qatar.

Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) researching the political economy of nitrogen fertilizer supply chains.

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We begin this season with Radio ReOrient’ s occasional series The State of the Ummah.

In this episode Shehla Khan, Mona Makinejadbanadaki and Salman Sayyid go beyond the headlines in trying to understand the narratives that shape the War Against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Developing concepts from Critical Muslim Studies, they situate the latest phase of hostilities in a broader historical, ideological and political context, one that conventional analyses, constrained by Orientalist and positivist framings, refuses to grasp.

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The intersection of these two forces—increasing capitalization and moving toward inclusivity—creates a fundamental tension, and that is the subject of Beth Derderian's Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (Stanford UP, 2026). Focusing on the decade between the Louvre Abu Dhabi's announcement and its eventual opening, the book analyzes how major shifts away from the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm of culture-state representation play out in museums' and artists' everyday practices. Derderian traces the emergence of a new logic, wherein the ways that artists represent the state shift, as does the notion of what constitutes 'good art.' In addition, these intersecting forces spur preemptive erasures that neutralize and depoliticize difference for museum publics.

Drawing on ethnographic research with artists, curators, museum staff, gallerists, art teachers, and other arts professionals, this book analyzes the UAE art world as a microcosm of these massive, epistemic changes.

Beth Derderian is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East Studies and Anthropology at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.

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Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives.

The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be.

Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.

Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, 2016, winner, MLA First Book Prize) and serves as editor of the journal Comparative Literature.

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Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia, and the remote interior of China. By the nineteenth century, Islam encompassed a world of great diversity, from Muslim-ruled empires to nations where Muslims lived out their faith among many others. In the twentieth century, while monarchs in the Gulf asserted dynastic privilege and fundamentalists in Egypt and Pakistan preached social morality, revolutionaries from Algeria to Indonesia fought for national self-determination, and activists in North America and Europe campaigned for civil liberties and social justice.

As empires fell and new superpowers rose, Muslims proved to be as adaptable and dynamic as modernity itself. Sweeping and authoritative, Worlds of Islam narrates the epic story of how Muslims emerged as a community, built empires, traversed the globe, came to number in the billions, and became modern.

James McDougall is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. He previously taught at Princeton and at SOAS, London.

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Drawing on the extraordinary archive of the Cairo Geniza, Perry reconstructs a hidden world of enslaved people, merchants, and households in medieval Egypt. These fragments—letters, contracts, and legal questions preserved for centuries in a synagogue—reveal how slavery shaped Jewish and Islamic society at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds.

From global slave trading networks that stretched from Europe and Africa to India, to the intimate spaces of kitchens and courtyards, Perry uncovers how enslaved people lived, labored, resisted, and sometimes entered Jewish communities after gaining their freedom. The story even reframes familiar rituals: medieval Jewish children could look around the Passover table and see slavery embodied in the people serving the meal.

Together, Perry and Katz explore how this overlooked history forces us to rethink medieval Jewish life, the social realities behind religious texts, and the complex entanglements of Jews with the broader Arab-Islamic world.

About the Guest

Craig Perry is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. A specialist in the social and economic history of the medieval Middle East, his research focuses on slavery, law, and everyday life in Jewish and Islamic societies. He also is the editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420.

About the Host

Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud, including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Through his writing, teaching, and podcast conversations with scholars and public thinkers, Katz brings cutting-edge scholarship into dialogue with contemporary Jewish life.

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Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible.

Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice.

Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Our guest is Professor Jeff Knopf, a Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), where he serves as chair of the M.A. program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

Paul Starobin is a former contributing editor of The Atlantic and a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week. His companion Substack newsletter America and Beyond includes transcripts of podcasts.

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Mai Serhan lives in Cairo and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her family was expelled in 1948. She is twenty-four years old when one morning she receives a phone call from her estranged father. His health is failing and he might not have long to live, so he asks her to join him in China where he runs a business empire about which Mai knows nothing. Mai agrees to go in the hopes that they will become close, but this strange new country is as unknowable to her as her father. There, the ghosts of the Nakba come to haunt them both. With this grief comes violence, and a tragic death brings a whole new meaning to the word erasure.

In a narrative made rich by its layers of fragmentation, as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, this courageous memoir spans Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, China and, of course, Palestine. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss and woven through with an understated humor and much grace.

Mai Serhan is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Egypt. She is the author of CAIRO: the undelivered letters, winner of the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Award, and I Have Never Been to the Place Where I am From, But I Will Imagine It For Us, a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize. She holds an MSt in creative writing from Oxford University, and has studied at NYU and AUC. She lives in Cairo.

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Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (U Texas Press, 2025) conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı’s years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world’s largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms.

Host: Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, in Italy. Her research interests include political geography, mobilization, and counterinsurgency in Southwest Asia and North Africa with a special focus on Northern Kurdistan. She is currently working on her book titled “Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan.” Email: ronay.bakan@eui.eu

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David Frankfurter holds the William Goodwin Aurelio Chair of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. He joined the faculty of B.U. in the fall of 2010. A scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions with specialties in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, magical texts, popular religion, and Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods, Frankfurter’s particular interests revolve around theoretical issues like the place of magic in religion, the relationship of religion and violence, the nature of Christianization, and the representation of evil in culture. 

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Employing a relational methodology, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2026) treats photography not merely as visual documentation but as a site of layered cultural encounters shaped by the movements of people, ideas, and ideologies. It interrogates biblical visuality, the performance of indigeneity, intercommunal relations, and the gendered politics of labour and nationalism.
Through interdisciplinary engagement with visual culture, Middle East studies, and gender theory, this book considers how Scholten's positionality offers insights into both the granular details of Palestinian society and broader macro-historical shifts during a period of profound transition.

Rather than framing Palestine as a biblical relic, Scholten's photographs reveal a socially and politically complex society under early British Mandate rule. Ultimately, this book positions Scholten's archive as a vital historical source for understanding the layered and contested narratives that have defined Palestine's modern history.

Access the book here: here

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi (U Texas Press, 2025) brings Sidqi’s incredible life and work to light, wryly narrating his international travels, his work as an activist, and his political dealings at a crucial moment for Palestine and the international fight against fascism. Translated from Arabic into English for the first time, it is a riveting firsthand account of an often-overlooked aspect of the history of the global left. Generous supplementary materials make the memoir accessible to students and non-specialist scholars: a preface by Sidqi’s grandson, a foreword by renowned historian Joel Beinin, a translators’ introduction that presents new research on Sidqi’s family history, a map of his travels, and a timeline, as well as a bibliographic essay offering pointers for further research.
In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Margaret Litvin to talk about The Memoir of Najati Sidqi as a powerful Palestinian life narrative and a groundbreaking collaborative translation project.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East (Princeton UP, 2025), makes a different argument: That the region’s medieval peasants adopted the Arab identity in response to shifting political power, changing land rights, and the spreading Muslim faith.

Professor Yossef Rapoport of Queen Mary University London is a historian of the Islamic, Arabic-speaking Middle East in its Middle Ages, from about 1000 to 1500 CE. Among his publications are books on marriage and divorce in late medieval Cairo and Damascus, on the fourteenth-century religious reformer Ibn Taymiyya, and on medieval Islamic maps.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Becoming Arab. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art (Skira, 2020) is a vivid account of Stein’s experience working on this storied intercultural initiative. In crafting her highly readable narrative, Stein cites a number of previously confidential documents, including private correspondence with artists and dealers. This text explores the relationship between two women united by their shared passion for the arts and the continued legacy of their partnership in today’s art world.

Kirstin L. Ellsworth holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills.

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Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began.

In War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2021), Gershom Gorenberg tells the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.

Gershom Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, as well as an Adjunct Faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Using archival documents, ethnographic research, and literary and autobiographical works, Zainab Saleh shows how citizenship laws can serve as a mechanism to discipline the population. As she argues, these laws enforce commitment to the state's political order and normative values, and eliminate dissenting citizens through charges of betrayal of the homeland. Citizenship in Iraq, thus, has functioned as a privilege closely linked to loyalty to the state, rather than as a right enjoyed unconditionally. With the rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism all over the world, this book offers a timely examination of how citizenship can become a tool to silence opposition and produce precarity through denaturalization.

Zainab Saleh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford, 2020).

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Sean Mathews is a Greek-American journalist who has covered a wide swath of the Middle East. He is a correspondent with Middle East Eye, and has also written for The Economist and Al-Monitor, among others.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Byzantines. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, as alternative figures of cosmopolitanism in the period. By focusing on an archive of plays of Persia staged between 1561 and 1696 in conversation with Shakespeare's works, European peace proposals, legislative acts of toleration, and global traditions of hospitality found in Zoroastrianism, Islam, and the Judeo-Christian traditions, this book pioneers an interdisciplinary methodology, introduces Persianate conceptual lenses for literary analysis of English literature, and constructs capacities to imagine multiple globalities existing in early modernity through a spectrum of imagined and lived experiences on stage and on the ground.

Sheiba Kian Kaufman is an Assistant Professor of English at Saddleback College and Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of articles on Shakespeare, Persia, and early modern English drama. She has received fellowships from the UCLA Center for 17th-and 18th Century Studies, Clark Library, the UCI Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, the UCI Center in Law, Society, and Culture, Somerville College, Oxford, and the American Association of University Women.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Dr. Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the celebrated author of ten monographs and the editor of seven books and several journal issues, with a particular focus on Islam and the Indian Ocean world. He also hosts the excellent podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam.

Dr. Ahmed AlMaazmi is Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University. His research explores the intersections of empire, occult sciences, slavery, law, environmental infrastructures, and material culture in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Indian Ocean world.

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Suraj Milind Yengde tackles this global angle in his latest book: Caste: A Global Story (Hurst, 2025)

Suraj is Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies and a Ford Foundation Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His prior appointments were W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Fellow and postdoc at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and a founding member of the Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He is also the author of Caste Matters (Penguin Random House India: 2019)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Caste. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Drawing on extensive interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017, this book follows an extended Sunni Muslim family as they flee their homes in Damascus’s Eastern Ghouta suburbs and scatter across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and eventually Europe. As these women move through an increasingly hostile landscape of border controls, refugee camps, and human trafficking networks, they must reinvent themselves—from stable middle-class mothers to resourceful survivors, from guardians of tradition to architects of change. Their journeys challenge conventional assumptions about refugee experiences, revealing how displacement reconfigures family networks, religious practices, and gender roles.

Leila Hudson’s intimate portrait of Syrian displacement offers vital insights for researchers and practitioners working in humanitarian assistance, refugee resettlement, and forced migration. It provides essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how ordinary families navigate extraordinary circumstances, and how women in particular bear both the burdens and opportunities of displacement.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Daniel K. Falk is Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Chaiken Family Chair in Jewish Studies at Penn State University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Against this contentious backdrop, this book provides a timely new history of the religion in all its astonishing richness and diversity as it has been practiced by Muslims around the world, from seventh-century Mecca to today. Most popular histories of Islam continue to repeat conventional pietistic accounts. In contrast, John Tolan draws on decades of new historical research that has transformed knowledge of the origins and development of the Muslim faith. He shows how the youngest of the three great monotheisms arose in close contact with Jewish, Christian, and other religious traditions in a mixture of cultures, including Arab, Greek, Persian, and Turkish; how Islam spread across an enormous territory encompassing hundreds of languages and cultures; how Muslims have forged widely different beliefs and practices over fourteen centuries; and how Islamic history provides crucial context for understanding contemporary debates in the Muslim world. At a time when much talk about Islam is filled with misunderstanding, stereotypes, and bias, this book provides a fresh and lucid portrait of the continuous and ongoing transformations of a religion of tremendous variety and complexity.

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 In this beautifully illustrated history The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing (Yale UP, 2025), Ayoush Lazikani reveals the many ways medieval people felt and wrote about the moon. Ranging across the world, from China to South America, Korea to Wales, Lazikani explores how different cultures interacted with the moon. From the idea that the Black Death was caused by a lunar eclipse to the wealth of Persian love poetry inspired by the moon’s beauty, this is a truly global account of our closest celestial neighbour.

Ayoush Lazikani is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. A specialist in medieval literature, she is the author of Cultivating the Heart and Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, and an associate editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford UP, 2025), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world. Bringing a micro-historical study to a "subaltern Mughal author" offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world. Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist "rise of the self" but as alienation.

Ali Anooshahr is a historian of Mughal India as well as the "Persianate World" during the early modern era. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009), Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018), and (edited with Ebba Koch) The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature (The Marg Foundation, March 2019). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundations, among others.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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In Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (U California Press, 2025), Dr. Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians' embrace of the tomato and the emergence of Egypt's modern national identity were both driven by the modernization of the country's food system. Drawing from cookbooks, archival materials, oral histories, and vernacular culture, Dr. Gaul follows this commonplace food into the realms of domestic policy and labor through the hands of Egypt's overwhelmingly female home cooks. As they wrote recipes and cooked meals, these women forged key aspects of public culture that defined how Egyptians recognized themselves and one another as Egyptian.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Griffiths’s sensitive and timely work highlights the myriad ways Palestinians are affected by Israel’s spatial control—whether they travel through the checkpoint or not—demonstrating how colonial infrastructures of inequity extend far beyond their physical boundaries to shape daily life. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, Griffiths examines how colonial power infiltrates family dynamics, enforces gendered mobility restrictions, shapes local economies, and extends into the global exchange of capital and security technologies. He also underscores how Palestinians endure and resist under oppressive conditions and how indigenous forms of life and living are sustained, illuminating how colonial space is contested and countered, unmade and remade.

Blending meticulous research with vivid human stories to show the lived realities of borders, power, and resistance in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 portrays the checkpoint as an entry into the ways that colonial space is formed through security infrastructure that is both the product and producer of wider geographies of oppression, complicity, and control.

Mark Griffiths is reader in political geography at Newcastle University. He is coeditor of Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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The book examines six key junctures in Gaza’s modern history — from the mass refugee influx of 1948 and the Egyptian administration, through decades of Israeli occupation, the First Intifada, the Oslo process, and the rise of Hamas. Irfan also addresses the contemporary crisis, including the 2023–25 assault and the international legal debates surrounding it.

Throughout the conversation, Irfan reflects on the role of historians in documenting ongoing violence, the impact of practically permanent displacement, and the need for historically grounded public understanding. Her work offers a concise but rigorously contextualised account of Gaza, illuminating both the structural forces that have shaped life in the Strip and the human experiences at its centre.

Joe Williams
History PhD researcher at the University of Coimbra and translator (website)
- Censorship and Sacralisation of Politics in the Portuguese Press during the Spanish Civil War
- "Year X of the National Revolution" — Salazarist Palingenetic Myth in the Diário da Manhã

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Fahad Ahmad Bishara talks about this specific 1924 journey in his book Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (U California Press, 2025). As the Crooked travels the waters of the Indian Ocean, Fahad covers topics like international law, the importance of debt, piracy, how information spread from port to port, and the Arab diaspora (among many other topics)

Fahad is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is also the author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Monsoon Voyagers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the historical categories of caste, religion, ecology, and sovereignties in South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific interests, his disciplinary interests revolve around public history, anthropology, literary studies, the digital humanities, and more recently, the history and politics of Artificial Intelligence.

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Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution, in Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Killian Clarke explains both why counterrevolutions emerge and when they are likely to succeed. He forwards a movement-centric argument that emphasizes the strategies revolutionary leaders embrace both during their opposition campaigns and after they seize power.

Movements that wage violent resistance and espouse radical ideologies establish regimes that are very difficult to overthrow. By contrast, democratic revolutions like Egypt's are more vulnerable, though Dr. Clarke also identifies a path by which they too can avoid counterrevolution. By preserving their elite coalitions and broad popular support, these movements can return to mass mobilization to thwart counterrevolutionary threats. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism worldwide, Return of Tyranny sheds light on one particularly violent form of reactionary politics.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Justin tries to dive into this history–sometimes very patchy history–to figure out the full extent of slavery in the Muslim world, from the very start of Muslim society, through the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary Pirates, to abolition and the final decision by Mauritania to abolish slavery in 1981.

Justin Marozzi is a former Financial Times and Economist foreign correspondent. He is also the author of several books, including Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Allen Lane: 2014) and Islamic Empires: The Cities that Shaped the Modern World (Pegasus Books: 2020).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Captives and Companions. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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The Most American King details Abdullah’s efforts to cement an alliance with Washington. Despite leading a small desert country, the Jordanian king was the first Arab leader to meet US Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama. The kingdom has received billions in US assistance, and Abdullah’s intelligence services helped the CIA foil Al-Qaeda terror plots against American targets. Abdullah’s personal ties to the United States have strengthened this relationship. Abdullah trained with the US Army in Kentucky, appeared on a Star Trek episode, and interviewed with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart.

While the Hashemite ruler has frequently been lauded in the West, The Most American King discusses how some of Abdullah’s decisions provoked controversy inside the Hashemite Kingdom. Abdullah approved a $15 billion gas deal with Israel in 2014, but thousands of Jordanians protested the Hashemite Kingdom’s largest-ever deal with the Jewish state. Over a decade earlier, Abdullah agreed to host US troops in Jordan and provide Washington with overflight rights ahead of the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood denounced such military cooperation with the United States as it prepared to topple the government of its neighbor. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Jordanian politics.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Monsoon Voyagers doesn’t just tell a vivid, imaginative narrative—it teaches. Each port-of-call chapter can work as a stand-alone module. And the brief “Inscription” interludes double as turn-key primary-source labs—perfect for document analysis, quick mapping, and mini-quant work with weights, measures, and credit instruments. It invites undergraduates into a connected oceanic world and the big questions of world history, while graduate students get a method—how to read vernacular archives across scales and languages to design their own transregional, archive-driven projects.

A quick heads-up: Traditional local musical interludes (see below for credits and links) will punctuate our voyage as chapter markers you can use to pause and reflect—as we sail from Kuwait to the Shatt al-Arab, then out across the Gulf to Oman, Karachi, Gujarat, Bombay, and the Malabar coast. We’ll return via Muscat and Bahrain, dropping anchor once more in Kuwait.

Music Credits and Links: 
Prologue: The Logbook
1. Kuwait
Inscription: Debts
2. The Shatt Al-ʿArab
Inscription: Freightage
3. The Gulf
Inscription: Passage
4. The Sea of Oman
Inscription: Guides
5. Karachi to Kathiawar
Inscription: Letters
6. Bombay
Inscription: Transfers
7. Malabar
Inscription: Conversions
8. Crossings
Inscription: Maps
9. Muscat
Inscription: Poems
10. Bahrain
Inscription: Accounts
11. Returns
Epilogue: Triumph and Loss

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Resurrecting the Past investigates how heritage politics led to a new form of empire—a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon—and with it a tide of regional and international critique. Against such opposition, the heritage mandate leaned heavily on spectacle and science, generating a sprawling set of sites and objects—Ottoman mansions, crusader castles, Umayyad mosques, Roman arches, buried synagogues, and Sumerian ziggurats.

As Dr. Griswold traces how French heritage efforts cycled through multiple ideal pasts in the Levant from 1918 to 1946, she reveals how each one, though grounded in realities, also complicated those constructs and the work of French heritage-makers. Resurrecting the Past offers a parable of how efforts in heritage politics aimed to construct a union of ideologies and objects deemed the best past for France's uncertain future but struggled as much as they succeeded. Eventually those same heritage politics ironically helped officials justify the end of the "French Levant."

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged through contact with Europe alone, Reading Across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (University of Texas Press, 2024) demonstrates how the cultural forms of Iran and Afghanistan as nation-states arose from their shared Persian heritage and cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century. In this book, Aria Fani charts the individuals, institutions, and conversations that made this exchange possible, detailing the dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through new ideas about literature.

Fani illustrates how voluntary and state-funded associations of readers helped formulate and propagate "literature" as a recognizable notion, adapting and changing Persian concepts to fit this modern idea. Focusing on early twentieth-century periodicals with readers in Afghan and Iranian cities and their diaspora, Fani exposes how nationalism intensified—rather than severed—cultural contact among two Persian-speaking societies amidst the diverging and competing demands of their respective nation-states. This interconnected history was ultimately forgotten, shaping many of the cultural disputes between Iran and Afghanistan today.

Aria Fani is an associate professor and director of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He serves as the current deputy editor of Iranian Studies and is a co-investigator of the Translation Studies Hub at UW.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Empire of Manners proposes a new way of thinking about the history of manners, arguing that violence and war-making, as much as civility and etiquette, have a central role in shaping them. The eighteenth century proved to be a turning point in this paradoxical relationship between violence and manners as war-making turned into a substantially more complex and costly enterprise, leaving a deeper and wider social footprint. The interplay between violence and manners, an unlikely couple, unexpectedly narrates the Ottoman path to the modern age.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Whether that was really the case is still somewhat unknown. But this room is the inspiration behind Moudhy Al-Rashid’s book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton / Hodder, 2025) which dives into the many different aspects of life and society across the many states that governed Mesopotamia.

Moudhy Al-Rashid is an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College, where she specializes in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Between Two Rivers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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After Savagery challenges long-standing traditions of Western thought, arguing that their universal claims often conceal a history of exclusion and erasure. Dabashi calls for readers to reckon with the intellectual foundations that have shaped contemporary understandings of humanity, violence, and colonialism.

At the same time, he finds hope in art, literature, and film — works that, in his view, keep alive the possibility of a shared and liberated imagination. For Dabashi, Palestine becomes both a specific struggle and a universal metaphor for resistance and renewal.
Joe Williams
History PhD researcher at the University of Coimbra and translator website
- Censorship and Sacralisation of Politics in the Portuguese Press during the Spanish Civil War
- "Year X of the National Revolution" — Salazarist Palingenetic Myth in the Diário da Manhã

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The Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran is a poignant and compelling account of one man’s journey through struggle, resilience, and unimaginable suffering. In the early twentieth century, Mahboob Qirvanian recorded his personal experiences of forced migration and enslavement as he navigated his path from captivity in Africa to full citizenship and a reconstructed identity in Iran. Written in Persian and Arabic, this remarkable autobiography serves as a powerful testament to Mahboob’s endurance, suffering, and ultimate transformation. Through insightful analysis, Behnaz A. Mirzai places Mahboob’s narrative – the only known account by a former African slave in Iran – within the context of the political upheavals of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran and the Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire. This book not only sheds light on Mahboob’s personal story and the historical injustices of slavery but also engages with broader themes of displacement, identity, and social justice. In doing so, it invites readers to reflect on the enduring legacies of racial inequality and the ongoing struggles for freedom and dignity in the modern world.

Behnaz A. Mirzai is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Brock University and senior guest researcher at Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at University of Bonn.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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A Rooftop In Jerusalem: When Daniel Jacobs decides to spend his junior year abroad in Israel, he never dreams he'll fall in love with both Jerusalem's Old City and an Israeli woman, Shoshana. It's the year religion becomes a part of his identity, from the heights of a simple rooftop. A year he encounters the tragic complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A year that begins a four-decade-long love affair, as complicated and heartbreaking as the political conflict with which it's intertwined. As Daniel moves through life-through marriage and divorce, career and travel-he returns periodically to Jerusalem, where his heart faithfully remains. A Rooftop in Jerusalem brings the Old City's walls, holy sites, and inhabitants to life, while putting a human face on headlines from the Middle East.

Here There Is No Why: Did Chaim Lerner, acclaimed Israeli author and Holocaust survivor, kill himself in 1983, thirty-eight years after surviving Auschwitz? If so, was it traumatic memories finally catching up to him? Or despair over Holocaust denialism? Or ordinary, difficult health issues-an aching hip, a damaged knee? Or simply a deadly episode of depression? Or was it murder? In 2005, Judah Loeb, Lerner's former student and now a struggling American journalist and single father, travels to Jerusalem to investigate Lerner's death. He drags along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, and they team up with Charlie, Judah's former Hebrew University roommate, now a Jerusalem homicide detective. Their investigation takes them through the darker corners of the Israeli psyche, where they uncover secrets that threaten to destroy Lerner's reputation and alter Jewish history. While probing the mysteries of Israel's past, they encounter personal betrayal, heartbreak, and the fragile possibilities of forgiveness and redemption.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Hannah Pool is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

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Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Contrary to prevailing narratives that portray Islamic law as a monolithic, oppressive system, the book shows how women actively co-produced legal interpretations. They used sophisticated strategies like contract stipulations, exploring plurality in legal opinions, and consulting local scholars to renegotiate marriage terms and expand their rights. These women did not view the legal system as an enemy, but as an instrument for challenging misdeeds and addressing community needs.

Dr. Admiral draws attention to the historical practice and implementation of the Maliki school of Islamic law in an area that remained outside of Ottoman control. She highlights women’s engagement with Islamic law as deeply embedded in support systems encompassing families, communities, and legal structures, and makes visible women’s agency and power.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Drawing on the testimonies of 63 local Sunni Muslim and Yazidi women, Dr. Vale exposes the group's intra-gender stratified system of governance. Eligibility for the group's protection, security, 'citizenship', and entrance into the (semi-)public sphere were not universal, but required convergence with the gender norms of IS, through permanent erasure or at least temporary disguise of certain markers of difference. In some cases, this was directed by a pre-meditated 'divide and conquer' strategy, while in others, it manifested as unregulated violences at the hands of individual group members, including women.

The structure follows the trajectory of IS's increasing control over its 'citizens' and captive populations: its militarization of society; imposition of law and order; provision of goods and services; and intervention in civilians' private lives. Analysis of diverse first-hand accounts and the group's documentation reveals that the presence, exclusion, and victimization of local civilian women were necessary to the functioning and legitimation of IS's 'caliphate' project, and the supremacy of affiliated men - and women. As a fledgling proto-state, IS needed local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. Though far from represented or protected, they were by no means forgotten.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Tiffany Earley-Spadoni challenges traditional views by emphasizing warfare’s role in organizing ancient landscapes, suggesting that Urartu’s strength lay in its strategic optimization of terrain through fortified regional networks. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes GIS-enabled studies and integrates archaeological, historical, and art-historical evidence, she illustrates how warfare was a generative force in structuring space and society in the ancient Middle East. Landscapes of Warfare situates Urartu’s developments within the broader context of regional empires, providing insights into the mechanisms of warfare, governance, and cultural identity formation.

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Elizabeth Imber highlights diverse and sometimes conflicting visions of Jewish political futures, offering detailed case studies of key figures including Chaim Arlosoroff, Moshe Shertok, Helen Bentwich, Rachel Ezra, and Hermann Kallenbach. She explores a "politics of uncertainty" in which Jews engaged with both imperial stability and the rise of anticolonial mobilization, when many were likewise forced to reconsider Palestine as a viable refuge and political solution. Ultimately, this book provides a nuanced understanding of how the British Empire's fate became central to Zionist and broader Jewish political thought, revealing the complex intersections of empire, state power, and Jewish politics during a time marked by profound urgency and exigency.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Papamichos Chronakis draws on previously untapped local archival material to weave a rich narrative of individual portraits, introducing us to revered philanthropists and committed patriots as well as vilified profiteers and victimized Salonicans. Offering a kaleidoscopic view of a city in transition, this book reveals how the collapse of empire shook all the constitutive elements of Jewish and Greek identities, and how Jews and Greeks reinvented themselves amidst these larger political and economic disruptions.

2024: National Jewish Book Awards

Winner of the 2024 National Jewish Book Awards - JDC-Herbert Katzki Award (Writing Based on Archival Material), sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at by email. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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The struggles between Palestinian theater artists and Israeli authorities form the central relationships in this history. Al-Saber juxtaposes the agency of Palestinian theater artists, in their determination to perform against immense challenges, with the power of Israeli authorities to grant or deny permission to theatrical productions. The legal structure of institutionalized censorship prevented Palestinian artists from expressing their chosen message, and the theater movement's search for permission to perform illuminates the disparity in power between the occupier and the occupied. In writing the first history of the Palestinian Theater Movement, Al-Saber amplifies necessary voices in this Palestinian cultural history, told from below.

Samer Al-Saber is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Williams College.

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The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state.

Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change. Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies, and they took an interest in African texts and traditions. The bureaucrats and technocrats who succeeded them, however, disdained such dialogue—for reasons that bear a striking resemblance to the algorithmic antihumanism that is ascendant today.

Drawing on Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire.

Wendell Marsh is Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.

Madina Thiam is Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

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Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced to bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Beyond simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. The comics medium allows readers not only to visualize the lives of refugees but also refocuses the lens on citizen non-refugees—“we who can sleep under warm cover at night”, as Vinh Nguyen writes in his foreword—and interrogates their perceptions, aspirations, and beliefs.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

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Alessandro’s translation conveys not only the urgency of testimony but also the rhythms of protest chants, the tenderness of Syrian idioms, and the weight of memory. 
In this episode, we sit down with translator Alessandro Columbu to discuss the challenges of translating a voice born of crisis, the role of grassroots media in preserving truth, and what it means to convey such words into English at a moment when Syria’s story is still unfolding.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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New books in late antiquity is sponsored by Ancient Jew Review

Christine Shepardson is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at University of Tennessee Knoxville

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War (Stanford UP, 2025) considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present. It demonstrates how writers from both countries have transformed once militarized, officially sanctioned war literatures into literatures of mourning, and eventually, into vehicles of protest that presented powerful counternarratives to the official state narratives. In writing the first comparative study of the literary output of this war, Amir Moosavi presents a new paradigm for the study of modern Middle Eastern literatures. He brings Persian and Arabic fiction into conversation with debates on the political importance of cultural production across the Middle East and North Africa, and he puts an important new canon of works in conversation with comparative literary and cultural studies within the Global South.

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Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots.

In Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop.

In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet.

Dorothy Armstrong is a historian of the material culture of South, Central and West Asia. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Oxford. She was the Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she is now honorary research fellow. Threads of Empire is her first book.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel here

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In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges, and set out to transform their country. Their work, however, posed an existential threat to everything the Taliban believed in. When the United States withdrew in August 2021, the women judges of Afghanistan faced mortal danger.

Journalist Karen Bartlett goes beyond their escape, and talks about the Afghan women judges’ backgrounds, the cases they were tie breakers on, and the importance of the international network of women judges who helped them evacuate in 2021.

Bartlett critiques the abandonment of Afghanistan by the West, and warns people not to normalise or be complacent to the Taliban regime which is still strongly opposed within the country. She also calls for the international community to take accountability for women judges who are still left in limbo or trapped in Afghanistan.

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Dr. Earley-Spadoni challenges traditional views by emphasizing warfare’s role in organizing ancient landscapes, suggesting that Urartu’s strength lay in its strategic optimization of terrain through fortified regional networks. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes GIS-enabled studies and integrates archaeological, historical, and art-historical evidence, she illustrates how warfare was a generative force in structuring space and society in the ancient Middle East. Landscapes of Warfare situates Urartu’s developments within the broader context of regional empires, providing insights into the mechanisms of warfare, governance, and cultural identity formation.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), notes that “British India” once spanned all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the border with Thailand, covering South Arabia, South Asia and Burma. Yet between 1937 and 1971, the region split into various different national entities, creating the countries and borders we see today.

Sam is a historian, filmmaker, and cofounder of Project Dastaan, a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 partition of India.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shattered Lands. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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The database of data is: historyofincarceration.com

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Matthew Larsen is a historian, archaeologist, and storyteller who brings the ancient world to life. A professor at the University of Copenhagen, he specializes in uncovering the real lives of the first Christians—what they built, how they lived, and what history gets wrong about them.

Mark Letteney (he/him) is Assistant Professor, Carol Thomas Endowed Professor of Ancient History at the University of Washington

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Johannes Stephan is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project Kalīlah and Dimnah—AnonymClassic at the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Halle an der Saale, Damascus, and Bern.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Daisy Livingston is Associate Professor of Medieval Islamic History in the Department of History at Durham University. As a historian of the medieval Middle East, in particular Egypt between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, her research focuses on various aspects of documentary culture, especially histories of archiving.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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Rana B. Khoury is assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work explores conflict processes, civil action, and humanitarianism, particularly in the Middle East and Syria. Her book, Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press and available for pre-order here.

Daniel Neep is nonresident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is interested in conflict and state-building, as well as processes of political, institutional, and social transformation in the Middle East, in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. His book A History of Modern Syria is forthcoming with Penguin Books and is available for pre-order here.

Check out their contributions to the Journal of Democracy Special Section, Syria After Assad, can be found here!

Emily K. M. Scott is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and co-host of the Localization in World Politics Podcast. Her most recent publication, “Negotiating for Autonomy: How Humanitarian INGOs Resisted Donors During the Syrian Refugee Response” can be found here.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

Click here for a transcript of this episode

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What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit? It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighbourhoods of a father’s childhood and the deep roots of family who have lived in one place, Jerusalem, for generation upon generation.

Fixing her gaze on moments, places and objects – from the streets of Bethlehem to the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the New Jerusalem – Micaela Sahhar assembles a story of Palestinian diaspora. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family (Newsouth, 2025) is a book about the gaps and blank spaces that cannot be easily recounted, but which insists on the vibrant reality of chance, fragments and memory to reclaim a place called home.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Lucia Sorbera is Associate Professor and Chair of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney.

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Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam’s two holiest cities. It is also one of the world’s only absolute monarchies. How did Saudi Arabia get to where it is today?

In Saudi Arabia: A Modern History (Yale UP, 2025), David Commins narrates the full history of Saudi Arabia from oasis emirate to present-day attempts to leap to a post-petroleum economy. Moving through the ages, Commins traces how the Saud dynasty’s reliance on sectarianism, foreign expertise, and petroleum to stabilize power has unintentionally spawned secular and religious movements seeking accountability and justice. He incorporates the experiences of activists, women, religious minorities, Bedouin, and expatriate workers as the country transformed from subsistence agrarian life to urban consumer society.

This is a perceptive portrait of Saudi Arabia’s complex and evolving story—and a country that is all too easily misunderstood.

David Commins is the Benjamin Rush Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of history at Dickinson College. He is the author of Islam in Saudi Arabia, The Gulf States, and The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia.

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When the region's regimes have strong support from global powers and strong social connections to the industrial elite, they engage in extensive but deceptive trade policy reform. Behind an edifice of neoliberal trade policies, neopatrimonial forms of protectionism like tax evasion and noncompetitive procurement shield the socially connected from international competition and obstruct actual trade liberalization. Industrialists are less trustful of regime promises of neopatrimonial protectionism after reform when they have weak social connections to their regime and their regime has low support from global powers. They are more likely to defend existing protectionist policies under these conditions, resulting in less trade policy reform.

Drawing on interviews, firm- and industry-level data, and evidence from Jordan to Morocco, Mirages of Reform reveals how international and domestic factors interact to shape the Arab world's rugged trade policy terrain. Insightful and well researched, this book imparts important lessons and warnings about the repercussions of economic reform in the region.

Steve L. Monroe is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is a scholar of development, with a primary focus on the Arab world. Monroe's scholarship examines two of the region's most pressing developmental challenges: limited economic integration, and gender inequality.

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In Soul by Soul, journalist Adriana Carranca follows the pilgrimage of a missionary family from Brazil as they move to Afghanistan. Carranca brings us on a harrowing journey through the underground passages of the global evangelical movement as it clashes with the full force of militant Islamic groups in the Middle East and South Asia, where contemporary religious wars are being fought, soul by soul.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Nicholas P. Roberts was formerly Assistant Professor of History at Norwich University and the Howell Fellow for Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is currently earning a JD at Case Western Reserve University.

Ahmed Yaqouob AlMaazmi is an Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University, with interests in the intersections of empire, science, slavery, law, environmental infrastructures, and material culture in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Indian Ocean world.

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Ghazālī’s Epistemology: A Critical Study of Doubt and Certainty (Routledge, 2024) looks at Ghazālī’s attitude to philosophical demonstration and Sufism as a means to certainty. In early scholarship surrounding Ghazālī, he has often been blamed as the one who single-handedly offered the death-blow to philosophy in the Muslim world. In much of contemporary scholarship, Ghazālī is understood to prefer philosophy as the ultimate means to certainty, granting Sufism a secondary status. Hence, much of previous scholarship has either focused on Ghazālī as a Sufi or as a philosopher; this book takes a parallel approach, and acknowledges each discipline in its right place. It analyses Ghazālī’s approach to acquiring certainty, his methodological scepticism, his foundationalism, his attitude to authoritative instruction (taʿlim), and the place of philosophical demonstration and Sufism in his epistemology.

Offering a systematic and comprehensive approach to Ghazālī’s epistemology, this book is a valuable resource for scholars of Islamic philosophy and Sufism in particular, and for educated readers of Islamic studies in general.

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Spanning the early twentieth century through the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the book traces how the cotton economy structured both imperial domination and national aspirations. Shokr examines how British colonial rule fostered monopolistic, extractive economic arrangements—what he terms “concessionary accumulation”—that privileged landlords, foreign financiers, and global markets. In response, Egyptian intellectuals, technocrats, and reformers came to see the rural economy not as peripheral but as central to national liberation.

As economic crises—such as the Great Depression and World War II—disrupted global trade and weakened elite power, Egypt’s nationalist vision shifted. The 1952 revolution ushered in a new model of “governmental accumulation,” where state-led institutions—agricultural cooperatives, land reforms, and price controls—sought to discipline markets and integrate the peasantry into a centralized vision of industrial growth and sovereignty.

By weaving together political economy, environmental history, and postcolonial studies, Harvests of Liberation challenges conventional narratives of Egyptian independence. Shokr reveals how cotton’s journey from Nile Valley fields to global markets was not just a story of economic change but one of contested meanings: about freedom, labor, and the power of the state.

Essential reading for scholars of the Middle East, global capitalism, and decolonization, this book radically rethinks how empires end—and how modern nations are built.

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Written by acclaimed Kurdish-Syrian novelist Jan Dost and translated by Marilyn Booth—winner of the 2019 International Booker Prize—Safe Corridor is a searing, surreal journey through displacement, coming of age, and the cost of war.

Winner of the 2024 Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize.

Jan Dost, born in 1966, is a native of Kobani in the Aleppo region of Syria. A student of natural sciences at the University of Aleppo (1985-89), he embarked on a career in journalism in the roles of reporter and editor, currently for the Kurdistan Chronicle (published in English in Erbil, Iraq) He is editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language magazine Kurdistan.

Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. 

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William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice). We are urged to think about peace and the valence that is given to the word and the ideal—since the moral and the political understandings of peace are often entangled and part of what Idris is doing in his careful and thoughtful research is to tease out the political concept, apart from the often religious and moral ideal. This rich and complex analysis integrates a broad group of theorists—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb)—all of whom were examining the role of peace within politics and political thought. And Idris structures these thinkers into chronological and theoretical groupings, to explore the ways in which they were responding to each other, across time, but also to understand how different thinkers were connecting peace to other concepts. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought may leave the reader anxious but also enlightened in considering this idea and its perplexing place within the history of political thought.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Ünver Rüstem is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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He described how, over time, different versions of Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem reflected shifting political climates—from the Seleucid takeover to Roman conquest. Myths, he explained, were tools to help communities navigate upheaval, envisioning themselves in relation to powerful foreign rulers. 

Pressed for the historical “truth,” Ory smiled and emphasized that the stories’ meaning—how they address the anxieties and hopes of their tellers—outweighs whether Alexander’s visit “really” happened. As he pursues new projects, translating ancient versions of these tales and writing a book on Western civilization, I left inspired by his view that exploring old myths is also about understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, our stories about ourselves.

Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting, if it happened, passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.
The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.
Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history.

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Herman tackles one of the central doctrines of post-biblical Judaism: that God had supplemented the written Hebrew Bible with an Oral Torah. Tracing this idea from Baghdad to Córdoba to Cairo, he shows that the Oral Torah took many new forms in the medieval Islamic world. After Revelation makes plain that medieval Judaism took the shapes that it did largely because of contact with Islam.

You can pre-order this book now, and it will be published on August 5, 2025

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As a sequel of sorts to his first book, Oualdi explores the life and afterlife of one figure, the manumitted slave and Tunisian dignitary Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah, as an aperture through which to understand the financial, intellectual, and kinship networks that mingled with processes of colonialism and Ottoman governance in unexpected ways to produce the modern Maghreb.

A master class in how historians might untangle the relationship between the personal and the political, A Slave between Empires centers Husayn — and North Africa — at the crossroads of competing ambitions, imperial and intimate. Engaging with sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and European languages, and corralling French, Tunisian, and Anglophone historiographies into one conversation, Oualdi’s newest book is not to be missed.

M'hamed Oualdi is full professor at Sciences Po in Paris.

Nancy Ko is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she examines the relationship between Jewish difference and (concepts of) philanthropy and property in the late- and post-Ottoman and Qajar Middle East. She can be reached at [nancy.ko@columbia.edu].

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With this book, Walter reveals how authoritarian governance worked in practice. She follows shifts in mid-century housing and urban development, the impact of the Iran–Iraq and Gulf Wars on city life, and the manipulation of food rations and growth of black markets. Reading citizen petitions to the government, Walter illuminates citizens' self-advocacy and the important role of low-ranking party officials and state bureaucrats embedded within neighborhoods. The US occupation and ensuing sectarian fighting upended Baghdad's neighborhoods through violent displacement and the collapse of basic state services. This power vacuum paved the way for new power brokers, including militias and neighborhood councils, to compete for influence on the local level.

Alissa Walter is Associate Professor of History at Seattle Pacific University.

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Lily Hamourtziadou is Senior Lecturer in Criminology with Security Studies and Deputy Course Director at Birmingham City University, and Principal Researcher of Iraq Body Count, which maintains the largest public database of violent civilian deaths.

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Euphoria at the collapse of a government people never voted for was tempered by fear for the future. The victorious insurgents were supported by outside powers and had a track record of brutality comparable to Assad’s in addition to religious fanaticism. Syrians—whose fragile, cosmopolitan mosaic has been repeatedly shattered by foreign-backed sectarians—faced rule by an avowedly Islamist regime that pledged to break with its past and show tolerance to all religious communities.

In Syria: Civil War to Holy War? (OR Books, 2024), Charles Glass shows how Assad’s misrule, Sunni fundamentalism, and Western deceit combined to create and prolong the Syrian disaster, which since 2011 has claimed more than two hundred thousand lives and driven more than eight million people from their homes.

Glass has reported extensively from the Middle East and travelled frequently in Syria for more than fifty years. Here he melds reportage, analysis, and history to provide an accessible overview of the origins and permutations defining the conflict, situating it clearly in the broader crises of the region.

In this new and thoroughly revised edition of his earlier Syria Burning, Glass brings the story to the present, showing how we got here and what a post-Assad settlement might bring.

About the Author: Charles Glass was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1973, he has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of Syria Burning, Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, The Northern Front, Americans in Paris, The Deserters, They Fought Alone and Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. His website is www.charlesglass.net.

About the Host: Stuti Roy is a recent graduate with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

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When the Shainberg family in Memphis, Tennessee, discovers a box of century-old letters from their deceased uncle David in their attic, a journey begins: not only to learn about the young man who wrote the letters from the holy city of Hebron in British Mandate Palestine, but about the massacre that took his life in 1929. Award-winning journalist Yardena Schwartz draws from these letters, along with extensive research and wide-ranging interviews of Israelis and Palestinians now living in Hebron, to tell a timely, captivating narrative. 

In David’s last letter home, on August 20, 1929 he wrote about a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and said, “as we walked along Jerusalem’s streets, we could almost imagine the streams of Jewish blood flowing at our feet, the horrible scenes of slaughter. Jewish sages, budding youth, tender babes in their mother’s arms, all killed by the barbaric sword of the enemy". He was describing the slaughter from the Roman invasion of Jerusalem - yet just a few days later those same words could have been used to describe the scene in Hebron where David lost his life.

The interview delves into the complexities of Hebron’s past, once a city marked by coexistence, and the forces—propaganda, incitement, and shifting political landscapes—that transformed it into a symbol of division. Schwartz draws connections between the incitement and misinformation that fueled the violence in 1929 and the echoes of these dynamics in more recent events, such as the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. She emphasizes the importance of challenging false narratives and understanding the human stories behind historical tragedies.

Throughout the conversation, Schwartz reflects on the challenges of researching and recounting such a fraught history, the erasure and distortion of memory in both Jewish and Arab communities, and the enduring hope for peace despite a century of conflict. The interview provides listeners with a compelling entry point into the tangled roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, highlighting why the lessons of 1929 remain urgently relevant today.

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Like this episode? Why not check out others on the New Books Network, including Kevin Funk talking about Rooted Globalism: Arab–Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries, or Tahrir Hamdi on Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity.

Looking for something to read? Siri recommendsVibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett.

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The Man of Middling Height (Syracuse University Press, 2025) follows a short dressmaker whose life is upended when she meets Tallan, a man whose middle height places him outside the rigid tall/short binary that governs their society. As their forbidden romance blossoms, they must navigate a world where height determines everything from social status to romantic possibilities. Through their story and those of surrounding characters—including a short person in a polyamorous relationship with two tall partners, and a tall activist who scandalously loves another tall person—Zaghmout deftly reframes contemporary discussions about gender identity and sexuality through the lens of height discrimination.

Fadi Zaghmout is a Jordanian author and sexual freedoms and body rights advocate. He has published five novels, including The Bride of Amman, Heaven on Earth, Laila, and Hope on Earth.

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This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.
After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. It then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the key military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.
At the same time, A History of the Muslim World contains numerous primary-source quotations that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past.

Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (Princeton), A Brief History of the Human Race, and The Koran: A Very Short Introduction.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Himalayas.

And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins and HarperCollins India, 2025) by Sam Dalrymple, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.

Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.

Dalrymple’s stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research, Shayna M. Silverstein shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (Wesleyan UP, 2024) situates dabke politically, economically, and historically in a broader account of expressive culture in Syria's recent (and ongoing) turmoil. Silverstein shows how people imagine the Syrian nation through dabke, how the state has coopted it, how performances of masculinity reveal--and play with--the tensions and complexities of the broader social imaginary, how forces opposed to the state have used it resistively, and how migrants and refugees have reimagined it in their new homes in Europe and the United States. She offers deeply thoughtful reflections on the ethnographer's ethical and political dilemmas on fieldwork in an authoritarian state. Silverstein's study ultimately questions the limits of authoritarian power, considering the pleasure and play intrinsic to dabke circles as evidence for how performance cultures sustain social life and solidify group bonds while reproducing the societal divides endemic to Syrian authoritarianism.

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Through analysis of Said’s seminal works and the debates surrounding them, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) traces the influence of Foucault on Said, and how Said eventually diverged from this influence to arrive at a more pronounced understanding of agency, resistance, and liberation. He consequently affiliated more closely with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and more contemporaneously, with his friends the late Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.

Said held that it is the intellectual’s responsibility to expose lies and deceptions of the holders of power. A passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, his solidarity did not prevent him from launching a sustained critique of the Palestinian leadership. Hovsepian charts both Said’s engagement with the Palestinian national movement and his exchanges with a host of intellectuals over Palestine, arguing that Said’s interventions have succeeded in changing the parameters of the discourse in the humanities, and among younger Jews searching for political affiliation.

Drawing on his diaries, in which he recorded his meetings with Said, as well as access to some of Said’s private letters, Hovsepian illuminates, in rich detail, the trajectory of Said’s political thinking and the depth and breadth of his engagement with peers and critics over issues that continue to resonate to this day.

Nubar Hovsepian is associate professor emeritus of political science at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is the author of Palestinian State Formation: Education and the Construction of National Identity, and he edited and contributed to The War on Lebanon. Hovsepian has devoted enormous time to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and served, from 1982 to 1984, as political affairs officer for the United Nations Conference on the Question of Palestine.

Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

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Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He served as the eighth Dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS between 2012 and 2019  and served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011. He has written a number of books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He has advised senior American policymakers, world leaders, and businesses, including the President, Secretary of State, senior members of the Congress, and presidential campaigns. He has written for New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others. Professor Nasr serves as the co-director of the SAIS Rethinking Iran Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, sits on the board of a number of academic institutions, has won a number of prominent grants, and holds a chair named after Henry Kissinger at the library of Congress.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Book recommendations:

The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra

The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian

Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity

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The Violence Pendulum: Tactical Change in Islamist Groups in Egypt and Indonesia (Oxford UP, 2020).

Ioana Emy Matesan is Assistant Professor of Government and Tutor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.

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This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hillman, S., & Zhao, J. (2025). ‘Panda diplomacy’ and the subtle rise of a Chinese language ecology in Qatar. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 46(1), 45-65.

The conversation delves into the socio-political background that contextualizes the visibility of Mandarin in Qatari public spaces and education. Sara explains the impact of diplomatic relations and economic interactions that impact cultural exchange and accompanying language use. She also tells us about the use of other languages that serve as strategies for intercultural communication.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Since its first publication in 2009, this book has stood as the foremost account of contemporary Arab debates on culture, philosophy, modernity, tradition, identity, and liberation. It is widely used in Middle Eastern studies courses, and it has become a classic in the field of Arab intellectual history. Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia UP, 2025) now features an extensive new introduction that reconsiders post-1967 Arab intellectual history in light of the 2011 uprisings and the upheavals that have occurred over the intervening years. Kassab critically reflects on the book’s arguments and the responses it has provoked, and she surveys the new preoccupations that have emerged in Arab debates since 2011. As crises again overtake the Middle East, this landmark work continues to offer indispensable insight into the richness of contemporary Arab thought.

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is associate professor of philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Her books include Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (Columbia, 2019). The Arabic edition of Contemporary Arab Thought received the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

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This is a story about overcoming grief and what it means to lose not only loved ones, but also a place in the world and a sense of belonging.

Sabrin Hasbun was born in Palestine, spent her childhood in Palestine and Italy, and now lives in the UK. She holds a PHD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and lectures in Creative Writing at Cardiff Met University.

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Set in the early and mid-‘80s in the Middle East, A Simple Carpenter plays out against a backdrop of strife in Lebanon and ethnic/religious tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. This historical backdrop serves as an empathetic and thoughtful commentary on our modern political climate.

Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, A Simple Carpenter follows the epic journey of a ship’s carpenter stranded on a small Mediterranean island and visited by a frightening mysterious creature. He’s lost his memory but has acquired the ability to speak, write and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later in Beirut he’s hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for a group named Black September. On a quest to find his true identity he travels on foot across the hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange and magical communities evoking biblical times along the way.

More about Dave Margoshes:

Dave Margoshes is a Saskatoon-area poet and fiction writer. He began his writing life as a journalist, working as a reporter and editor on a number of daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and has taught journalism​ and creative writing​.
He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies, in Canada and beyond, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes; he’s been nominated for the Journey Prize​ several times and was a finalist in 2009. His Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories won two prizes at the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year. He also won the Poetry Prize in 2010 for Dimensions of an Orchard. His collection of linked short stories, A Book of Great Worth, was named one of Amazon. CA’s Top Hundred Books of 2012. Other prizes include the City of Regina Writing Award, twice; the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry in 1996 and the John V. Hicks Award for fiction in 2001.

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Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and American Foreign policy at California State University, Stanislaus.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in World History from James Madison University, where he currently works as an administrative staff.

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 Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based creator and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context

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In this episode, Jonas Elbousty guides us into the profound world of Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri. Together, we explore Choukri’s intimate portrayal of Tangier’s marginalized voices and the intricate process of translating his evocative prose into English. Elbousty sheds light on Choukri’s lesser-known works, revealing the enduring impact of his storytelling. This conversation offers a deep dive into the complexities of language, identity, and the transformative power of literature.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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Drawing on over a decade’s worth of experience in countries like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Aslan notes that there’s really three “roads”: In addition to the famed Silk Road, there’s also the Wool Road, tied to nomads across Central Asia, and the Cotton Road, a modern-day source of economic growth–and environmental damage.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Unravelling the Silk Road. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, where he was in inaugural holder of the Stanley Lewis Chair in Modern Israel Studies. Penslar has published a dozen books, most recently Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. Penslar is a past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

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The Syriac Peshiṭta Bible: The New Testament (Gorgias Press, 2023) immerses the reader in the biblical texts in order to build confidence reading Classical Syriac as quickly as possible. To achieve this, all uncommon words that occur fewer than 25 times in the Syriac New Testament are glossed as footnotes. This enables the beginner or intermediate student to continue reading every passage unhindered. Therefore, this book complements traditional language grammars and is especially ideal for beginner and intermediate students learning to read Syriac. However, even advanced readers will appreciate the glossing of the occasional rare word.

Other features include:

• Maps from the New Testament period with Syriac place names
• Paradigm charts of Syriac nouns and verbs
• A glossary of all the words not glossed below the text

The base text is the Antioch Bible which includes the Peshitta for the canonical Syriac books, and later translations (probably Philoxenian) for the rest which makes this ideal for readers.

For listeners who are interested in buying this tool for themselves, Gorgias has offered a 10% discount code for listeners of this podcast through the end of May 2025. If you order through the Gorgias website, simply enter the discount code NBNNTR10% at checkout. The book can be purchased from Gorgias here.