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
New Texts Out Now: Akram Khater, Embracing the Divine: Gender, Passion, and Politics in the Christian Middle East
Akram Fouad Khater, Embracing the Divine: Gender, Passion, and Politics in the Christian Middle East. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Akram Khater (AK): This book was partly a happenstance, and came partly out of a keen awareness of a gaping hole in Middle Eastern scholarship. The happenstance is common enough in scholarly research. Tired of the texts I was reading at the Bibliotheque Nationale for my PhD dissertation, I turned to the Arabic card catalog to browse for interesting manuscripts. I stumbled upon one titled Aghrab imra’a fil ‘alam [The Strangest Woman in the World]. With such an unabashedly over the ...
Keep Reading »Ajamindustry
![[Image collage by author based on book cover and NYT story]](/content_images/3/sm_FANYT2.jpg "[Image collage by author based on book cover and NYT story]")
It is problematic enough that Fouad Ajami repeats much of the reductionist arguments about all things Arab in his new book on Syria's rebellion, but then the New York Times must stumble upon this book, and review it. I will not attempt to review the book itself, for critiquing Mr. Ajami has become like critiquing Fox News: there is no gain. Instead, I will seize the opportunity and examine the review in the Times, as it reproduces not only Ajami's faulty—though always well-written—analysis, but it also represents the intellectual poverty of mainstream media analysis on Syria in the United States. Unfortunately, some of this analysis is also reproduced outside the ...
Keep Reading »The Awan Quartet: Forging New Ground in Palestine
![[The Awan Quartet. Image via Facebook.]](/content_images/3/sm_awan2.jpg "[The Awan Quartet. Image via Facebook.]")
Every two years, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Palestine organizes a nationwide music competition covering many musical categories and age groups. This is the only competition of its kind at the “national” level, and has been attracting new talent and motivating music students since 1999. This year’s competition was held in March 2012 at the conservatory’s campuses in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Gaza (linked via video conferencing). A recently formed ensemble called the “Awan Quartet” snatched the first prize of 2000 dollars in the Group Performance category with an original composition called “Nahawand.” Tareq Abboushi, a Palestinian musician, ...
Keep Reading »The Space Between
The Space Between: A Panorama of Cinema in Turkey. 27 April – 10 May 2012, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY. Introducing “The Space Between: A Panorama of Cinema in Turkey,” a major retrospective of Turkish cinema featuring twenty-nine films from 1958 to the present recently screened in New York City, Richard Peña, the revered director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, noted that he first proposed the idea of a major series on Turkish cinema when he was hired in 1987. It took twenty-five years for this vision to be realized; easily the largest retrospective of Turkish cinema to be held in the United States, “The Space Between” is a fitting example of ...
Keep Reading »Poetry of the Taliban
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, editors. Foreword by Faisal Devji. Poetry of the Taliban. London: Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2012. Since there is already a substantial discussion surrounding this compilation of poetry "of" the Taliban, it seems important to review the work within a series of broader contexts. Writing on Afghanistan has recently enjoyed an upsurge, but this is not the first such spike of western interest in Afghanistan. Amid a major catalog that has emerged over the past decade, there is a slowly growing subset of work that examines representations of Afghanistan from colonial to contemporary times as part of its project. We might ...
Keep Reading »The Melancholia of a Generation
Mohammed Achaari, al-Qaws wa-al-farashah. al-Dar al-Bayda’: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-ʻArabi, 2010. Mohammed Achaari is not new to Morocco’s literary scene; though The Arch and the Butterfly (al-Qaws wa-al-farashah) is only his second novel, he is the author of nine collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and has served as both Minister of Culture and president of the Moroccan Writer’s Union. The brief synopses that accompanied the announcement of his selection as one of two recipients of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (popularly known as the Arabic Booker) for his most recent work inevitably focused on the novel’s connection to terrorism. ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine
Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, editors. Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine. Special Issue of settler colonial studies 2.1 (2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this special issue? Editors (E): This open-access (and therefore freely accessible) special issue emerges out of a conference we organized in early March 2011, convened by the SOAS Palestine Society. The impetus for the conference came from two main directions. First, we all work on one aspect of Palestine or another, and each of us has grown distressed by the tendency to treat Palestine as a series of temporal and spatial set pieces. Second, we were ...
Keep Reading »Image Fever: Arab Photography Now
Rose Issa and Michket Krifa (eds.), Arab Photography Now. Kehrer: Heidelberg & Berlin, 2011. [This review is forthcoming in Goethe Institut's publication Fikrun Wa Fann.] Rose Issa and Michket Krifa, curators of art from the Arab world, recently published a collection of photographs by Arab artists in a major catalogue entitled Arab Photography Now (2011). Anthological publications in general and photography catalogues in particular that include reproductions of art works are often the product of actual, even thematic, exhibitions. Instead this volume is emblematic of bricolage, a genre that is eclectic and reflects a grouping-together of diverse thematic subjects ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb
![[Cover of Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012)]](/content_images/3/sm_asj.jpg "[Cover of Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012)]")
Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What led you to write this article? Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman (MS and RF): The post-revolutionary political scene in Egypt, with at least fourteen Islamist parties vying for power, is a timely historical moment to take a close look at the dynamics of religious authority versus the so-called secular. As the Egyptian people succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak’s dictatorship, the importance of popular discourses asserts itself strongly. Our article came about partly through a desire to show how popular, non-institutional ...
Keep Reading »Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature
Mara Naaman, Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] In January and February of 2011, Egyptians descended upon public squares throughout the country to bring an end to the thirty-year regime of Husni Mubarak. For those eighteen days—and on many other occasions throughout the following year—the people of Egypt wrested control of public space from the physical and discursive grip of Mubarak’s police state and reconfigured the material and symbolic ...
Keep Reading »Outside Looking In
City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982. The Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY, 22 February – 5 May 2012. City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982 is an exhibit of design work produced by world-famous architects and firms for the booming Iraqi capital during the mid-twentieth century. Beginning from the year that the Iraq Development Board was established to channel seventy percent of state oil revenues into modernizing schemes for national development, the exhibit traces a thirty-year timeline of foreign architectural practice in Baghdad. Pedro Azara of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona and his curatorial team selected thirteen ...
Keep Reading »Something of Palestine Emerges
.jpg "[Still image from Tawfik Abu Wael,")
2012 London Palestine Film Festival. 20 April – 3 May 2012. For more information and a complete schedule of films, click here. Each year, for the two weeks of the London Palestine Film Festival, there are a bunch of people whose social life for that fortnight becomes the festival. Others dip in and out, while still others see a Palestinian film or a film about Palestine perhaps for the first time. Each year the program is rich and eclectic, ranging from animations to documentaries to features, from conventional to experimental. Here I consider six films out of the more than fifty works to be screened at the 2012 festival. Each deserves its own review and singular ...
Keep Reading »NEWTONs You Might Have Missed
After taking a brief summer vacation, New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) will return next week. In the meantime, here are a few great posts that you might have missed from the past few months: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, editors, Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education Stephen W. Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and ...
Keep Reading »The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt
Since the overthrow of Tunisia and Egypt’s entrenched dictators, pundits and academics have scrambled to keep up with the surprising and fast-moving events across the region. Much of the journalistic coverage gravitated towards the drama and spectacle of the protests and the immediate concerns and checkered outcomes of these revolutionary moments. Much ink was spilled on notions of twitter revolutions, the leaderless and youth-dominated movements, the potential for Islamist “hijacking the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. London and New York: Zed Books, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Hamid Dabashi (HD): As you well know, a massive set of revolutionary uprisings are sweeping across North Africa and Western Asia, from Morocco to Syria and from Bahrain to Yemen. This is all happening in the aftermath of an equally important uprising code-named the Green Movement in Iran. While the Arab uprisings were under way, the Eurozone crisis and civil ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Maaike Voorhoeve, Family Law in Islam
Maaike Voorhoeve, editor, Family Law in Islam: Divorce, Marriage and Women in the Muslim World. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What led you to edit this book? Maaike Voorhoeve (MV): When I started my PhD on the contemporary application of Tunisian family law by Tunisian judges, my idea was as follows: the Tunisian family code deviates significantly from Islamic law, and therefore it is interesting to examine if judges apply the code, or whether they apply Islamic law instead. ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion
Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Hilal Elver (HE): My experience in Turkey in relation to the headscarf is the main reason for writing the book. Turkey is very much a divided society: ninety-nine percent of the population is Muslim and it is a significantly religious society, yet it has also developed a secular legal order and social structure. I felt this ...
Keep Reading »The Andalus Test: Reflections on the Attempt to Publish Arabic Literature in Hebrew
Should a visitor from another planet happen to arrive here and look around at the reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea without the usual lenses of distortion, she would see that in Israel/Palestine—the land stretching from the river to the sea which has been under one rule for over forty years—almost half the population is Palestinian Arab and Arabic is their mother tongue, as well as that of nearly half of the Israeli Jewish population. Should our guest distinguish—as does the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amy Motlagh (AM): Part of the study of literature is obsessive re-reading. In this case, I became preoccupied with what I felt was a narrow translation of a word in the English edition of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (which is perhaps the only Persian novel to achieve the status of a work of “world literature”), giving rise to an ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life
Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Roger Owen (RO): I was intrigued by news reports from Algeria in the spring of 2009 stating that President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika of Algeria was going to amend the constitutional term limits in order to allow him become, in effect, president life, as Ben Ali and other Arab republican presidents had done before him. This led me on to consider the whole ...
Keep Reading »Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States
Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] What if capitalists in a particular country could draw on a reserve army of semi-skilled labor that includes hundreds of millions of noncitizens whom they could import, hire, fire and expel at will, without worrying about laws, regulations, and ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Gilbert Achcar, Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt
Gilbert Achcar, “Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Gilbert Achcar (GA): The story of this article resembles that of my book The Arabs and the Holocaust, of which it can be seen as a sequel. In both cases, the initial impulse of writing was not the evolution of my ongoing research, but a fortuitous circumstance. The prelude to the book was a request made to me a few years ago to ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Farzaneh Milani (FM): In a way, Words, not Swords is a rebuttal to my first book, Veils and Words. The central argument of Veils and Words revolved around Iranian women's literary output. I claimed that the veil had covered not only Iranian women's bodies, but also their literary voices. Women's self-expression, either ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora
Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Junaid Rana (JR): My book was borne out of ethnographic research I completed on the role of labor migration in the global economy. I started with some basic questions: why do people become labor migrants, how does labor migration become transnational and global, what are the conditions that lead to labor migration, and how are labor migrants ...
Keep Reading »Hot on Facebook
About Reviews
Jadaliyya Reviews offers a place for commentary, debates, and exchanges on books, fims, videos, art, theater, music, new media, conferences, protests, and events. Visit our Call for Reviews page for more information about submitting posts/reviews online! Send your reviews to: reviews@jadaliyya.com
This extraordinary, first-ever seizure of a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) has implications not just for the sanctity of capital mobility but for the political health of the Gulf ruling families.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 »- Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (June 18)
- فرانكشتاين في بغداد
- O.I.L. Media Roundup (17 June)
- هل يمكن تطوير الجدل حول المثلية الجنسية؟
- Resisting Tear Gas Together
- معتقلو موريتانيا في غوانتانامو
- Last Week on Jadaliyya (June 10-16)
- Will the Presidential Elections “Cure the Pain” of the Iranian People?
- الانترنت والعولمة الثقافية
- #resistankara: Notes of a Woman Resisting
- It Is About the Park: A Struggle for Turkey’s Cities
- 'Ottomanalgia' and the Protests in Turkey
- إصلاح بروتوكول باريس في عامه العشرين: أسئلة وأجوبة لإرضاء الإصلاحي العنيد
- Report from Istanbul: Koray Caliskan on Democracy Now
- Syria Media Roundup (June 13)
- Maghreb Media Roundup (June 14)
- Debunking the Myth of the Zionist Left
- Iran’s Presidential Elections: The Live Embers of a Democratic Opposition Glow
- Sultan of Sultans
- On the Margins Roundup (June)
Pages/Sections
Archive
©2010-2013 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design