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  3. Cambridge Middle East Studies

Cambridge Middle East Studies has been established to publish books on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East and North Africa. The aim of the series is to provide new and original interpretations of aspects of Middle Eastern societies and their histories. To achieve disciplinary diversity, books are solicited from authors writing in a wide range of fields, including history, sociology, anthropology, political science and political economy. The emphasis is on producing books that offer an original approach along theoretical and empirical lines.

  • General Editors: Charles Tripp, University of London
  • Editorial Boards: Julia A. Clancy-Smith, F. Gregory Gause, Yezid Sayigh, Avi Shlaim, Judith E. Tucker

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65 results in Cambridge Middle East Studies

Page 2 of 4

Contesting Authoritarianism
  • Labor Challenges to the State in Egypt
  • Dina Bishara
  • Published online:
    08 September 2018
    Print publication:
    30 August 2018
  • Successive authoritarian regimes have maintained tight control over organized labor in Egypt since the 1950s. And yet in 2009, a group of civil servants decided to exit the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), thereby setting a precedent for other groups and threatening the ETUF's monopoly. Dina Bishara examines this relationship between labour organizations and the state to shed light on how political change occurs within an authoritarian government, and to show how ordinary Egyptians perceive the government's rule. In particular, Bishara highlights the agency of dissident unionists in challenging the state even when trade union leaders remain loyal. She reveals that militant sectors are more vulnerable to greater scrutiny and repression and that financial benefits tied to membership in state-backed unions can provide significant disincentives against the exit option. Moving beyond conventional accounts of top-down control, this book explores when and how institutions designed for political control become contested from below.

The Rule of Violence
  • Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria
  • Salwa Ismail
  • Published online:
    08 September 2018
    Print publication:
    23 August 2018
  • Over much of its rule, the regime of Hafez al-Asad and his successor Bashar al-Asad deployed violence on a massive scale to maintain its grip on political power. In this book, Salwa Ismail examines the rationalities and mechanisms of governing through violence. In a detailed and compelling account, Ismail shows how the political prison and the massacre, in particular, developed as apparatuses of government, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities, defining their understanding of the terms of rule and structuring their relations and interactions with the regime and with one another. Examining ordinary citizens' everyday life experiences and memories of violence across diverse sites, from the internment camp and the massacre to the family and school, The Rule of Violence demonstrates how practices of violence, both in their routine and spectacular forms, fashioned Syrians' affective life, inciting in them feelings of humiliation and abjection, and infusing their lived environment with dread and horror. This form of rule is revealed to be constraining of citizens' political engagement, while also demanding of their action.

Women and Gender in Iraq
  • Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation
  • Zahra Ali
  • Published online:
    27 August 2018
    Print publication:
    13 September 2018
  • Since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the challenges of sectarianism and militarism have weighed heavily on the women of Iraq. In this book, Zahra Ali foregrounds a wide-range of interviews with a variety of women involved in women's rights activism, showing how everyday life and intellectual life has developed since the US-led invasion. In addition to this, Ali offers detailed historical research of social, economic and political contexts since the formation of the Iraqi state in the 1920s. Through a transnational and postcolonial feminist approach, this book also considers the ways in which gender norms and practices, Iraqi feminist discourses, and activisms are shaped and developed through state politics, competing nationalisms, religious, tribal and sectarian dynamics, wars, and economic sanctions. The result is a vivid account of the everyday life in today's Iraq and an exceptional analysis of the future of Iraqi feminisms.

Salafism in Lebanon
  • Local and Transnational Movements
  • Zoltan Pall
  • Published online:
    20 March 2018
    Print publication:
    05 April 2018
  • The past two decades have seen an increasing association between Lebanese Salafism and violence, with less attention being paid to Salafis who focus on peaceful proselytization. In reality, it is these Salafis whose influence has dramatically grown since the eruption of the Syrian conflict that profoundly affected Lebanon as well. Based on extensive fieldwork, Zoltan Pall offers insights into the dynamics of non-violent Lebanese Salafi groups and examines the importance of transnational links in shaping the trajectory of the movement. In particular, he shows how the internal transformation of Salafism in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia led to the fragmentation of the Lebanese Salafi community. By analysing Salafism as a network, we see how the movement creates and mobilizes material and symbolic resources, and how it contributes to reshaping the structures of authority within the country's Sunni Muslim community.

Life after Ruin
  • The Struggles over Israel's Depopulated Arab Spaces
  • Noam Leshem
  • Published online:
    10 November 2016
    Print publication:
    27 October 2016
  • Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the landscape of Israel-Palestine was radically transformed. Breaking from conventional focus on explicit sites of violence and devastation, Noam Leshem turns critical attention to 'ordinary' spaces and places where the intricate and often intimate engagements between Jews and myriad Arab spaces takes place to this day. Leshem builds on interdisciplinary studies of space, memory, architecture and history, and exposes a rich archive of ideology, culture, political projects of state-building and identity formation. The result is a fresh look at the conflicted history of Israel-Palestine: a spatial history in which the Arab past isn't in fact separate, but inextricably linked to the Israeli present.

Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance
  • Writing the Lebanese Nation
  • Bashir Saade
  • Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    16 August 2016
  • Born out of the Israeli occupation of the South of Lebanon, the political armed group Hizbullah is a powerful player within both Lebanon and the wider Middle East. Understanding how Hizbullah has, since the 1980s, developed its own reading of the nature of the Lebanese state, national identity and historical narrative is central to grasping the political trajectory of the country. By examining the ideological production of Hizbullah, especially its underground newspaper Al Ahd, Bashir Saade offers an account of the intellectual continuity between the early phases of Hizbullah's emergence onto the political stage and its present day organization. Saade argues here that this early intellectual activity, involving an elaborate understanding of the past and history had a long lasting impact on later cultural production, one in which the notion and practice of Resistance has been central in developing national imaginaries.

The Other Saudis
  • Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism
  • Toby Matthiesen
  • Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    22 December 2014
  • Toby Matthiesen traces the politics of the Shia in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia from the nineteenth century until the present day. This book outlines the difficult experiences of being Shia in a Wahhabi state, and casts new light on how the Shia have mobilised politically to change their position. Shia petitioned the rulers, joined secular opposition parties and founded Islamist movements. Most Saudi Shia opposition activists profited from an amnesty in 1993 and subsequently found a place in civil society and the public sphere. However, since 2011 a new Shia protest movement has again challenged the state. The Other Saudis shows how exclusionary state practices created an internal Other and how sectarian discrimination has strengthened Shia communal identities. The book is based on little-known Arabic sources, extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and interviews with key activists. Of immense geopolitical importance, the oil-rich Eastern Province is a crucial but little known factor in regional politics and Gulf security.

Joyriding in Riyadh
  • Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt
  • Pascal Menoret
  • Published online:
    05 July 2014
    Print publication:
    21 April 2014
  • Why do young Saudis, night after night, joyride and skid cars on Riyadh's avenues? Who are these 'drifters' who defy public order and private property? What drives their revolt? Based on four years of fieldwork in Riyadh, Pascal Menoret's Joyriding in Riyadh explores the social fabric of the city and connects it to Saudi Arabia's recent history. Car drifting emerged after Riyadh was planned, and oil became the main driver of the economy. For young rural migrants, it was a way to reclaim alienating and threatening urban spaces. For the Saudi state, it jeopardized its most basic operations: managing public spaces and enforcing law and order. A police crackdown soon targeted car drifting, feeding a nation-wide moral panic led by religious activists who framed youth culture as a public issue. This book retraces the politicization of Riyadh youth and shows that, far from being a marginal event, car drifting is embedded in the country's social violence and economic inequality.

Political Aid and Arab Activism
  • Democracy Promotion, Justice, and Representation
  • Sheila Carapico
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    18 November 2013
  • What does it mean to promote 'transitions to democracy' in the Middle East? How have North American, European and multilateral projects advanced human rights, authoritarian retrenchment or Western domination? This book examines transnational programs in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, the exceptional cases of Palestine and Iraq, and the Arab region at large during two tumultuous decades. To understand the controversial and contradictory effects of political aid, Sheila Carapico analyzes discursive and professional practices in four key subfields: the rule of law, electoral design and monitoring, women's political empowerment and civil society. From the institutional arrangements for extraordinary undertakings such as Saddam Hussein's trial or Palestinian elections to routine templates for national women's machineries or NGO networks, her research explores the paradoxes and jurisdictional disputes confronted by Arab activists for justice, representation and 'non-governmental' agency.

A Most Masculine State
  • Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia
  • Madawi Al-Rasheed
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 March 2013
  • Women in Saudi Arabia are often described as either victims of patriarchal religion and society or successful survivors of discrimination imposed on them by others. Madawi Al-Rasheed's new book goes beyond these conventional tropes to probe the historical, political and religious forces that have, across the years, delayed and thwarted their emancipation. The book demonstrates how, under the patronage of the state and its religious nationalism, women have become hostage to contradictory political projects that on the one hand demand female piety, and on the other hand encourage modernity. Drawing on state documents, media sources and interviews with women from across Saudi society, the book examines the intersection between gender, religion and politics to explain these contradictions and to show that, despite these restraints, vibrant debates on the question of women are opening up as the struggle for recognition and equality finally gets under way.

Religion and State in Syria
  • The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution
  • Thomas Pierret
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2013
  • While Syria has been dominated since the 1960s by a determinedly secular regime, the 2011 uprising has raised many questions about the role of Islam in the country's politics. This book demonstrates that with the eradication of the Muslim Brothers after the failed insurrection of 1982, Sunni men of religion became the only voice of the Islamic trend in the country. Through educational programs, charitable foundations and their deft handling of tribal and merchant networks, they took advantage of popular disaffection with secular ideologies to increase their influence over society. In recent years, with the Islamic resurgence, the Alawi-dominated Ba'thist regime was compelled to bring the clergy into the political fold. This relationship was exposed in 2011 by the division of the Sunni clergy between regime supporters, bystanders and opponents. This book affords a new perspective on Syrian society as it stands at the crossroads of political and social fragmentation.

Between State and Synagogue
  • The Secularization of Contemporary Israel
  • Guy Ben-Porat
  • Published online:
    05 January 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2013
  • A thriving, yet small, liberal component in Israeli society has frequently taken issue with the constraints imposed by religious orthodoxy, largely with limited success. However, Guy Ben-Porat suggests, in recent years, in part because of demographic changes and in part because of the influence of an increasingly consumer-oriented society, dramatic changes have occurred in secularization of significant parts of public and private lives. Even though these fissures often have more to do with lifestyle choices and economics than with political or religious ideology, the demands and choices of a secular public and a burgeoning religious presence in the government are becoming ever more difficult to reconcile. The evidence, which the author has accrued from numerous interviews and a detailed survey, is nowhere more telling than in areas that demand religious sanction such as marriage, burial, the sale of pork, and the operation of businesses on the Sabbath.

The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran
  • Ali M. Ansari
  • Published online:
    05 November 2012
    Print publication:
    24 September 2012
  • The first full-length study of Iranian nationalism in nearly five decades, this sophisticated and challenging book by the distinguished historian Ali M. Ansari explores the idea of nationalism in the creation of modern Iran. It does so by considering the broader developments in national ideologies that took place following the emergence of the European Enlightenment and showing how these ideas were adopted by a non-European state. Ansari charts a course through twentieth-century Iran, analysing the growth of nationalistic ideas and their impact on the state and demonstrating the connections between historiographical and political developments. In so doing, he shows how Iran's different regimes manipulated ideologies of nationalism and collective historical memory to suit their own ends. Drawing on hitherto untapped sources, the book concludes that it was the revolutionary developments and changes that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century that paved the way for later radicalisation.

Occupying Syria under the French Mandate
  • Insurgency, Space and State Formation
  • Daniel Neep
  • Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    10 September 2012
  • What role does military force play during a colonial occupation? The answer seems obvious: coercion crushes local resistance, quashes political dissent and consolidates the dominance of the occupying power. However, as this discerning and theoretically rigorous study suggests, violence can have much more ambiguous consequences. Set in Syria during the French Mandate from 1920 to 1946, the book explores a turbulent period in which conflict between armed Syrian insurgents and French military forces not only determined the strategic objectives of the colonial state, but also transformed how the colonial state organised, controlled and understood Syrian society, geography and population. In addition to the coercive techniques, the book shows how civilian technologies such as urban planning and engineering were also commandeered in the effort to undermine rebel advances. Colonial violence had a lasting effect in Syria, shaping a peculiar form of social order that endured well after the French occupation.

Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey
  • Faith, Politics, and Education
  • Iren Ozgur
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    13 August 2012
  • In recent years, the Islamization of Turkish politics and public life has been the subject of much debate in Turkey and the West. This book makes an important contribution to those debates by focusing on a group of religious schools, known as Imam-Hatip schools, founded a year after the Turkish Republic, in 1924. At the outset, the main purpose of Imam-Hatip schools was to train religious functionaries. However, in the ensuing years, the curriculum, function and social status of the schools have changed dramatically. Through ethnographic and textual analysis, the book explores how Imam-Hatip school education shapes the political socialization of the schools' students, those students' attitudes and behaviours and the political and civic activities of their graduates. By mapping the schools' connections to Islamist politicians and civic leaders, the book sheds light on the significant, yet often overlooked, role that the schools and their communities play in Turkey's Islamization at the high political and grassroots levels.

Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen
  • A Troubled National Union
  • Stephen W. Day
  • Published online:
    05 July 2012
    Print publication:
    25 June 2012
  • Based on years of in-depth field research, this book unravels the complexities of the Yemeni state and its domestic politics with a particular focus on the post-1990 years. The central thesis is that Yemen continues to suffer from regional fragmentation which has endured for centuries. En route the book discusses the rise of President Salih, his tribal and family connections, Yemen's civil war in 1994, the war's consequences later in the decade, the spread of radical movements after the US military response to 9/11 and finally developments leading to the historic events of 2011. This book sets a new standard for scholarship on Yemeni politics and it is essential reading for anyone interested in the modern Middle East, the 2011 Arab revolts and twenty-first-century Islamic politics.

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
  • 2nd edition
  • Benny Morris
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    11 December 2003
  • Benny Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem was published in 1988. Its startling revelations about how and why 700,000 Palestinians left their homes and became refugees during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 undermined traditional interpretations as to whether they left voluntarily or were expelled as part of a systematic plan. This book represents a revised edition of the earlier work, compiled on the basis of newly-opened Israeli military archives. While the focus remains the 1948 war and the analysis of the Palestinian exodus, the new material contains more information about what happened in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, and how events there led to the collapse of Palestinian urban society. It also sheds light on the battles and atrocities that resulted in the disintegration of rural communities. The story is a harrowing one. The refugees now number four million and their existence remains a major obstacle to peace.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War
  • Origins and Consequences
  • Edited by Wm Roger Louis, Avi Shlaim
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 February 2012
  • The June 1967 war was a watershed in the history of the modern Middle East. In six days, the Israelis defeated the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, seizing large portions of their territories. Two veteran scholars of the Middle East bring together some of the most knowledgeable experts in their fields to reassess the origins and the legacies of the war. Each chapter takes a different perspective from the vantage point of a different participant, those that actually took part in the war and also the world powers that played important roles behind the scenes. Their conclusions make for sober reading. At the heart of the story was the incompetence of the Egyptian leadership and the rivalry between various Arab players who were deeply suspicious of each other's motives. Israel, on the other side, gained a resounding victory for which, despite previous assessments to the contrary, there was no master plan.

Jihad in Saudi Arabia
  • Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979
  • Thomas Hegghammer
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    01 April 2010
  • Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama bin Laden and many 9/11 hijackers, is widely considered to be the heartland of radical Islamism. For decades, the conservative and oil-rich kingdom contributed recruits, ideologues and money to jihadi groups worldwide. Yet Islamism within Saudi Arabia itself remains poorly understood. Why has Saudi Arabia produced so many militants? Has the Saudi government supported violent groups? How strong is al-Qaida's foothold in the kingdom and does it threaten the regime? Why did Bin Laden not launch a campaign there until 2003? This 2010 book presents the first ever history of Saudi jihadism based on extensive fieldwork in the kingdom and primary sources in Arabic. It offers a powerful explanation for the rise of Islamist militancy in Saudi Arabia and sheds crucial new light on the history of the global jihadist movement.

Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey
  • M. Hakan Yavuz
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    19 February 2009
  • In 2002 the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept to power in Turkey. Since then it has shied away from a hard-line ideological stance in favour of a more conservative and democratic approach. In this book, M. Hakan Yavuz negotiates this ambivalence asking whether it is possible for a political party with a deeply religious ideology to liberalise and entertain democracy or whether, as he contends, radical religious groups moderate their practices and ideologies when forced to negotiate a competitive and rule-based political system. The author explores the thesis through an analysis of the rise and evolution of the AKP and its more recent 2007 election victory. The book, which tackles a number of important issues including political participation, economics and internal security, provides a masterful survey of modern Turkish and Islamic politics, which will be of interest to a broad range of readers from students to professionals and policymakers.

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