Follow Us
From the Editors
Jadaliyya Launches DARS Page: Daily Acts of Resistance and Subversion
Tadween Publishing Blog is here! Check it out
Jadaliyya's first book is now available! Click here.
Want to find out about new books? Visit our expanding NEWTON page. Click here.
Interested in writing a Review for Jadaliyya? Visit our Call for Reviews here.
الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
Jadaliyya Launches Photography Page (click here!)
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
Pedagogy
Sonia M'Barek: A Musical Innovator Rooted in Tradition
![[Sonia M'Barek performing in New York. Photo by Fouad Salloum.]](/content_images/3/sm_sonia.jpg "[Sonia M'Barek performing in New York. Photo by Fouad Salloum.]")
Sonia M’Barek, Proshansky Auditorium, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, 23 March 2012. In traditional Arabic music, a vocalist is not just referred to as a singer, but is instead spoken of as a mutrib/mutribah. Literally translated, they are the people who bring tarab, or musical ecstasy. As such, the craft of a traditional Arabic vocalist is a demanding one. The singer must possess a pleasing voice, have clear diction, and sing impeccably in tune, all while comfortably navigating the Arabic maqam (mode) scales, whose intervals are smaller than the ones in Western music and therefore require particular precision. Additionally, a good singer is ...
Keep Reading »How the PA Enriched an Elite and Normalized Occupation
Khalil Nakhleh, Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-Out of a Homeland. Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, Inc., 2011. Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-Out of a Homeland explores the rise of a new Palestinian elite that works together with international organizations against the will of the majority of its compatriots. The book’s author, Khalil Nakhleh, worked in the development sector as director of the Welfare Association (a Palestinian organization) for more than a decade, as well as a consultant on the expenditure of European Union aid. He witnessed first-hand the marriage of the business class and the international aid organizations in Palestine. Thus, the ...
Keep Reading »Threads of Narrating the Arab Spring
![[Photo by Naira Antoun.]](/content_images/3/sm_IMG_1990.jpg "[Photo by Naira Antoun.]")
“Narrating the Arab Spring,” Cairo University, 18-20 February 2012 Many of us have spoken and thought about those who we wished would have been present to witness—and perhaps participate in—the revolutions. People we have known and loved, and people we have known from a distance. A woman stands up in a plenary at the “Narrating the Arab Spring” conference simply to say she would have loved it if Edward Said were here; she would have loved to hear and read what he had to say “about what is his revolution also.” It is a moving moment; the room breaks into applause. Organized by the English Department at Cairo University, in collaboration with the Center for the Advanced ...
Keep Reading »How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East
![[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]](/content_images/3/sm_large.jpg "[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]")
One: Gender is not the study of what is evident, it is an analysis of how what is evident came to be. Two: Before resolving to write about gender, sexuality, or any other practice or aspect of subjectivity in the Middle East, one must first define what exactly the object of study is. Be specific. What country, region, and time period forms the background picture of your study? Furthermore, the terms “Middle East,” “the Islamic World” and the “Arab world” do not refer to the same place, peoples, or histories, but the linkages between them are crucial. Moreover, the “state” is a relatively new phenomenon in the Middle East. In order to study gendered political economy in ...
Keep Reading »...and Counting
![[Wafaa Bilal. Photo by Brad Farwell.]](/content_images/3/sm_WafaaTattoos_Dots.jpg "[Wafaa Bilal. Photo by Brad Farwell.]")
Sabah Mustapha Ahmad / Ahmed al-Fahel / Ahmed Subhi al-Fahal/ Ahmad Subhi al-Fahl / Waddah Saadi Saleh al-Obeidi / Brothers of dead man / Daugther of dead couple / Wife of Dead man / Daughter of dead couple…and Counting: Failure and Loss in Wafaa Bilal’s Body Modification Work. In Wafaa Bilal’s recent performance, …and Counting, the artist utilizes tattoo art to document the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed since March 2003, which marked the start of the US-led invasion in Iraq. Over a twenty-four-hour period, tattoo artists methodically rendered the names of Iraq’s major cities in Arabic script on Bilal’s back, and embedded 5,000 red ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey
Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Nergis Ertürk (NE): One of my motives was to try to deepen our understanding of the phoneticizing Turkish alphabet reform of 1928, which replaced a Perso-Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, as well the language reforms of the 1930s, which replaced many Arabic and Persian loanwords with Turkish neologisms. Of the effects of these reforms, the Romance philologist Erich Auerbach observed in a letter to Walter Benjamin dated 3 January 1937 that “no one under twenty-five can any longer understand any sort of ...
Keep Reading »The Rhythms of Egypt's Revolutionaries
![[Ramy Essam performing in Tahrir Square in January 2011. Photo by Mark LeVine.]](/content_images/3/sm_Ramy.jpg "[Ramy Essam performing in Tahrir Square in January 2011. Photo by Mark LeVine.]")
Music has been one of the most invigorating and beautiful forms of activism across the Middle East and North Africa during the revolutions and uprisings of 2011. People have rallied around the musicians and their messages, from rappers like Morocco's El Haked or Tunisia's El Général to singers like Syria's Ibrahim Qashoush and Egypt's Ramy Essam. The music is a lasting and emotionally rich record of the demands and sentiments of protesters and revolutionaries. It expresses the decades of suffering, corruption, and oppression under autocratic rule. France24's multimedia documentary, The Songs of Tahrir Square: Music at the Heart of the Revolution, is a welcome ...
Keep Reading »A New Kind of Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation
In October 2011, the newly renovated Sourp Giragos Armenian Apostolic Church reopened in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir. Among the hundreds gathered to celebrate its first mass in over ninety years were local men and women who had chosen the occasion to be baptized into the Armenian Apostolic Church. Raised as Sunni Muslims, these men and women were the children and grandchildren of Armenians who had converted to Islam to escape persecution in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Living in a society that glorified cultural homogeneity and in a country that still bore the scars of its Ottoman past, the first generation of converts often kept their ...
Keep Reading »Struggles That Fueled a Revolution
Bulaq: Among the Ruins of an Unfinished Revolution. Directed by Davide Morandini and Fabio Lucchini. UK/Italy/Egypt, 2011. “Bread, freedom, and social justice” has been one of the most memorable chants from Egypt’s year of mass protests. Although world and Egyptian media have been fixated on the symbolic Tahrir Square, little attention has been directed towards places where many Egyptians converging on the square actually live. Bulaq, only a few hundred meters north of Tahrir Square, is one such neighborhood. The residents of Bulaq represent the essence of why Egyptians erupted in mass protests last year. This is a community that has suffered for nearly forty years ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Pascale Ghazaleh, Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World
Pascale Ghazaleh, editor, Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World. Cairo and New York: American University of Cairo Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book? Pascale Ghazaleh (PG): This book brings together articles written by scholars from different countries, working on different aspects of waqf during different periods. These articles were originally papers submitted to the annual seminar organized by Dr. Nelly Hanna of the American University in Cairo's Arab and Islamic Civilizations Department. In 2005, I helped set up the seminar, and the theme we chose was waqf. One of Dr. Hanna's priorities has been to facilitate contacts ...
Keep Reading »A Changing American Context? Reflections on Two Books on Egyptian History from Cairo
Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Raouf `Abbas Hamid and `Asim el-Dessouky, The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt, 1837-1952. Translated from the Arabic by Amer Mohsen with Mona Zikri. Edited by Peter Gran. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. The publication of Nelly Hanna’s Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800) and Raouf `Abbas Hamid’s and `Asim el-Dessouky’s The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt, 1837-1952 marks something of a departure from the norm for the field of modern Egypt in the United States, ...
Keep Reading »Remapping Palestine and the Politics of Injury
Till Roeskens, Videomappings: Aida, Palestine. Palestine/France, 2009.
The struggle over Palestine
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE
New Texts Out Now: Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800)
Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book, and what particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address? Nelly Hanna (NH): The book is part of a large body of literature that deals with the artisans and guilds of the Ottoman Empire. Scholars have written about artisans in Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo, and Jerusalem (including Suraiya Faroqhi, Abdul Karim Rafeq, Haim ...
Keep Reading »NEWTONs You Might Have Missed
Since we have featured so much remarkable work in New Texts Out Now (NEWTON), we wanted to pause for a second to let you catch up. Here are a few great posts that you might have missed from the past several months: Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, "Between Nationalism and Women's Rights: The Kurdish Women's Movement in Iraq" Paul Amar, “Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of ‘Men in Crisis,’ Industries of Gender in Revolution” James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History, Third ...
Keep Reading »Amman Critical Language Scholarship: Integrating Language and Culture
Following the September 11 attacks, the US government designated a number of languages as “critical need languages”; Arabic was and still is, of course, on top of the list. In order to ensure enough Americans are learning these “critical need languages” and to ensure higher proficiency levels and deeper understandings of target cultures, the US government established the Critical Languages Scholarship (CLS) program. Administered by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs with ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran
Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Winner of the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice, and Honorable Mention in the Biography & Autobiography category in the 2011 PROSE Awards Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Shahla Talebi (ST): I knew since leaving Iran in late 1993 that I wanted to find a way to make whatever sense possible of my experience of imprisonment, and the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Stephen Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen
Stephen W. Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Stephen Day (SD): This book had a long gestation period, so answering this question is a bit complicated. I would say the book has been more than ten years in the making. It originates with my doctoral thesis at Georgetown University. I started field research in Yemen in 1995, five years after the country’s national ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mervat Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Mervat F. Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of `A’sha Taymur. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Mervat Hatem (MH): The modern construction of Egyptian history gives the grand old men of nineteenth-century Egyptian modernity (Khedive Ismail, Sheikh Rifa` Rafi` al-Tahtawi, and judge Qasim Amin) credit for promoting the interests of women by respectively building the first general school for women ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nezar AlSayyad, Cairo: Histories of a City
Nezar AlSayyad, Cairo: Histories of a City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): Why did you write this book? Nezar AlSayyad (NA): Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began to wane by the early 1990s, however, when my appreciation for the city began to be tempered by the realities of its problems. By the time I was asked to write this book, in 2006, I had ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education
Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women's Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent
Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, editors, Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent. Special issue of SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE (December 2011). [SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE is a publication of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University, an advanced study center that promotes innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in global dynamics of power and inequality.] Jadaliyya (J): What made you ...
Keep Reading »Syria Media Roundup (February 16)
Recent articles and analysis on Syria, representing diverse positions: Virtual and on-the-ground changes to Syria’s streets and squares Chatham House on Syria (1) Chatham House on Syria (2) Some tribal history for Syria Syria, Spin and Propaganda on Al-Jazeera’s The Listening Post The real Syrian opposition...? on Syria Comment Nir Rosen on ‘The Battle for Homs’ BBC : US Government positions on Syria, Aleppo bombings BBC’s on-the-ground reporting from Homs Debate and comment on options for ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Joshua Stacher, Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria
Joshua Stacher, Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Joshua Stacher: The central reason for writing this book was to understand the differences in how executive power operates in autocratic political systems. I had been living in Cairo for about four years and, while I had traveled to other Arab countries and noticed differences, I had grown accustomed to the Mubarak regime's variant of ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy
Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy. London: Pluto Press and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Ben White (BW): I wanted to write something that would accessibly describe the policies of segregation and discrimination that Palestinian citizens in Israel have experienced since 1948. Many people—even those who are engaged with Palestine/Israel to some extent—are unaware of the ways in which the Palestinian minority ...
Keep Reading »Hot on Facebook
"The enormous disparity in the “valuation” between Palestinian and Israeli people and prisoners of war needs to end."click | email | tweet
.jpg){kind=small}
From Jadaliyya Reports
Top Jadaliyya Tags
Jadalicious / جدلشس
Noteworthy
Twitter Updates
Jadaliyya Features
.jpg)
Latest Entries
View All Entries »- Reports Roundup (May 25)
- يافا والموسيقى و"فوائد" النكبة
- O.I.L. Media Roundup (24 May)
- Islamists and Transitional Justice
- Maghreb Media Roundup (May 24)
- أوهام ليبرالية
- Tadween Roundup: News and Analysis from the Publishing/Academic World
- Syria Media Roundup (May 23)
- Asfari Institute Inaugural Conference: New Spaces of Civil Society Activism in the Arab World (Beirut, 23-24 May)
- Women's Rights in the Egyptian Constitution: (Neo)Liberalism's Family Values
- مسخ الذاكرة
- New Texts Out Now: Louise Cainkar, Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas
- Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (May 21)
- إعادة الحساب الدائمة: إساءة فهم سوريا بعد سنتين
- From al-Araqib to Susiya: Forced Displacement of Palestinians on Both Sides of the Green Line
- إعجام
- كارل ماركس واليسار في لبنان
- Picturing Algeria
- Egypt Media Roundup (May 20)
- Last Week on Jadaliyya (May 13-19)
Pages/Sections
Archive
©2010-2013 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design