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  3. The Global Middle East

The Global Middle East is a new book series established by Cambridge University Press that seeks to broaden and deconstruct the geographical boundaries of the 'Middle East' as a concept to include North Africa, Central and South Asia, as well as diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America. The series will feature fresh scholarship that employs theoretically rigorous and innovative methodological frameworks resonating across relevant disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, the general editors welcome approaches that focus on mobility, the erosion of nation-state structures, travelling ideas and theories, transcendental techno-politics, the decentralization of grand narratives, and the dislocation of ideologies inspired by popular movements. The series will also consider translations of works by authors in these regions whose ideas are salient to global scholarly trends but have yet to be introduced to the Anglophone academy.

  • General Editors: Ali Mirsepassi, New York University, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, University of London
  • Advisory Boards: Madawi Al-Rasheed, King's College London, Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, John Hobson, University of Sheffield, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania, Zachary Lockman, New York University, David Ryan, University College Cork

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31 results in The Global Middle East

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Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis
  • State and Politics in the Middle East
  • Yaacov Yadgar
  • Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    30 January 2020
  • An important and topical contribution to the field of Middle East studies, this innovative, provocative, and timely study tackles head-on the main assumptions of the foundation of Israel as a Jewish state. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, Yaacov Yadgar provides a novel analysis of the interplay between Israeli nationalism and Jewish tradition, arriving at a fresh understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its focus on internal questions about Israeli identity. By critiquing and transcending the current discourse on religion and politics in Israel, this study brings to an international audience debates within Israel that have been previously inaccessible to non-Hebrew speaking academics. Featuring discussions on Israeli jurisprudence, nation-state law, and rabbinic courts, Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis will have far-reaching implications, not only within the state of Israel but on politics, society and culture beyond its borders.

Reversing the Colonial Gaze
  • Persian Travelers Abroad
  • Hamid Dabashi
  • Published online:
    19 December 2019
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • Exploring the furthest reaches of the globe, Persian travelers from Iran and India travelled across Russian and Ottoman territories, to Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe and beyond. Remapping the world through their travelogues, Reversing the Colonial Gaze offers a comprehensive and transformative analysis of the journeys of over a dozen of these nineteenth-century Persian travelers. By moving beyond the dominant Eurocentric perspectives on travel narratives, Hamid Dabashi works to reverse the colonial gaze which has thus far been cast upon these rich body of travelogues. His lyrical and engaging re-evaluation of these journeys, complimented by close-readings of seminal travelogues, challenges the systematic neglect of these narratives in scholarly literature. Opening up the entirety of these overlooked or abused travelogues, Dabashi reveals not a mere repetition of cliché accounts of Iranian or Muslim encounters with the West, but a path-breaking introduction to a constellation of revelatory travel narratives that re-imagine and reclaim the world beyond colonial borders.

Creating the Modern Iranian Woman
  • Popular Culture between Two Revolutions
  • Liora Hendelman-Baavur
  • Published online:
    17 October 2019
    Print publication:
    07 November 2019
  • Between the 1963 'White Revolution' and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the position of women in Iran experienced a number of fundamental shifts. Policies and reforms were introduced, including land, suffrage, education and dress reforms which the Pahlavi regime claimed would advance the position of women and would lead to a swift modernisation of the country. In this book, Liora Hendelman-Baavur examines these changes, looking at the interactions between global aspects of modernity and notions of identity in Iranian popular culture. By focusing on the history of Iran's popular print media, with emphasis on women's commercial magazines, Hendelman-Baavur challenges familiar western assumptions about the complexities of Iranian popular culture. Her analysis situates Iranian women's magazines within their broader economic, social, political and cultural context, demonstrating how representations of the modern woman in Iranian popular culture were influenced by the intricate nature of cultural contact and exchange between Iran and the West.

Iran's Quiet Revolution
  • The Downfall of the Pahlavi State
  • Ali Mirsepassi
  • Published online:
    23 August 2019
    Print publication:
    29 August 2019
  • Offering a new perspective on Iran's politics and culture in the 1960s and 1970s, Ali Mirsepassi challenges the prevailing view of pre-Revolution Iran, documenting how the cultural elites of the Pahlavi State promoted a series of striking 'Gharbzadegi' or 'Westoxification' discourses. Intended as ideological alternatives to modern and Western-inspired cultural attitudes, these influenced Persian identity politics, and projected Iranian modernity as a 'mistaken modernity' despite the regime's own ferocious modernisation programme. Focusing on the cultural transformations which defined the period, Mirsepassi sheds new light on the Pahlavi State as an ideological gambler, inadvertently empowering its fundamentalist enemies and spreading a 'quiet revolution' through secular and religious civil society. Proposing a new theoretical framework for understanding the anti-modern discourses of Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Ali Shari'ati, Iran's Quiet Revolution is a radical re-interpretation of twentieth century Iranian political history which makes sense of these events within the creative, yet tragic Iranian nation-making experience.

Revolution and its Discontents
  • Political Thought and Reform in Iran
  • Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
  • Published online:
    18 February 2019
    Print publication:
    21 February 2019
  • The death of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Khomeini, the bitter denouement of the Iran-Iraq War, and the marginalisation of leading factions within the political elite, in tandem with the end of the Cold War, harboured immense intellectual and political repercussions for the Iranian state and society. It was these events which created the conditions for the emergence of Iran's post-revolutionary reform movement, as its intellectuals and political leaders sought to re-evaluate the foundations of the Islamic state's political legitimacy and religious authority. In this monograph, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, examines the rise and evolution of reformist political thought in Iran and analyses the complex network of publications, study circles, and think-tanks that encompassed a range of prominent politicians and intellectuals in the 1990s. In his meticulous account of the relationships between the post-revolutionary political class and intelligentsia, he explores a panoply of political and ideological issues still vital to understanding Iran's revolutionary state, such as the ruling political theology of the 'Guardianship of the Jurist', the political elite's engagement with questions of Islamic statehood, democracy and constitutionalism, and their critiques of revolutionary agency and social transformation.

Iranian Cosmopolitanism
  • A Cinematic History
  • Golbarg Rekabtalaei
  • Published online:
    11 January 2019
    Print publication:
    17 January 2019
  • From popular and 'New Wave' pre-revolutionary films of Fereydoon Goleh and Abbas Kiarostami to post-revolutionary films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the Iranian cinema has produced a range of films and directors that have garnered international fame and earned a global following. Golbarg Rekabtalaei takes a unique look at Iranian cosmopolitanism and how it transformed in the Iranian imagination through the cinematic lens. By examining the development of Iranian cinema from the early twentieth century to the revolution, Rekabtalaei locates discussions of modernity in Iranian cinema as rooted within local experiences, rather than being primarily concerned with Western ideals or industrialisation. Her research further illustrates how the ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of Iran's citizenry shaped a heterogeneous culture and a cosmopolitan cinema that was part and parcel of Iran's experience of modernity. In turn, this cosmopolitanism fed into an assertion of sovereignty and national identity in a modernising Iran in the decades leading up to the revolution.

Iran's Troubled Modernity
  • Debating Ahmad Fardid's Legacy
  • Ali Mirsepassi
  • Published online:
    07 December 2018
    Print publication:
    13 December 2018
  • Ahmad Fardid (1910–94), the 'anti-Western' philosopher known to many as the Iranian Heidegger, became the self-proclaimed philosophical spokesperson for the Islamic Republic, famously coining the term 'Westoxication'. Using new materials about Fardid's intellectual biography and interviews with thirteen individuals, Ali Mirsepassi pieces together the striking story of Fardid's life and intellectual legacy. Each interview in turn sheds light on Iran's twentieth-century intellectual and political self-construction and highlights Fardid's important role and influence in the creation of Iranian modernity. The Fardid phenomenon was unique to the Iranian story, and yet contributed to a broader twentieth-century Heideggerian tradition that marked the political destiny of other countries under a similar ideological sway. Through these accounts, Mirsepassi cuts to the nerve of how deadly political 'authenticity movements' take hold of modern societies and spread their ideology. Combining a sociological framework with the realities of lived experience, he examines Iran's recent and astonishing upheavals, experiments, and mass mobilizations.

Foreign Policy as Nation Making
  • Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War
  • Reem Abou-El-Fadl
  • Published online:
    03 December 2018
    Print publication:
    13 December 2018
  • After the Second World War, Turkey and Egypt were among the most dynamic actors in the Middle East. Their 1950s foreign policies presented a puzzle, however: Turkey's Democrat Party pursued NATO membership and sponsored the pro-Western Baghdad Pact regionally, while Egypt's Free Officers promoted neutralism and pan-Arab alliances. This book asks why: what explains this divergence in a shared historical space? Rethinking foreign policy as an important site for the realisation of nationalist commitments, Abou-El-Fadl finds the answer in the contrasting nation making projects pursued by the two leaderships, each politicised differently through experiences of war, imperialism and underdevelopment. Drawing on untapped Turkish and Arabic sources, and critically engaging with theories of postcolonial nationalism, she emphasises local actors' agency in striving to secure national belonging, sovereignty and progress in the international field. Her analysis sheds light on the contemporary legacies of the decade which cemented Turkey's position in the Western Bloc and Egypt's reputation as Arab leader.

Money, Markets, and Monarchies
  • The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East
  • Adam Hanieh
  • Published online:
    27 August 2018
    Print publication:
    13 September 2018
  • Framed by a critical analysis of global capitalism, this book examines how the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are powerfully shaping the political economy of the wider Middle East. Through unprecedented and fine-grained empirical research - encompassing sectors such as agribusiness, real estate, finance, retail, telecommunications, and urban utilities - Adam Hanieh lays out the pivotal role of the Gulf in the affairs of other Arab states. This vital but little recognised feature of the Middle East's political economy is essential to understanding contemporary regional dynamics, not least of which is the emergence of significant internal tensions within the Gulf itself. Bringing fresh insights and a novel interdisciplinary approach to debates across political economy, critical geography, and Middle East studies, this book fills an important gap in how we understand the region and its place in the global order.

Psycho-nationalism
  • Global Thought, Iranian Imaginations
  • Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
  • Published online:
    07 December 2017
    Print publication:
    07 December 2017
  • States routinely and readily exploit the grey area between sentiments of national affinity and hegemonic emotions geared to nationalist aggression. In this book, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam focuses on the use of Iranian identity to offer a timely exploration into the psychological and political roots of national identity and how these are often utilised by governments from East to West. Examining this trend, both under the Shah as well as by the governments since the 1979 Iranian revolution, Adib-Moghaddam's analysis is driven by what he terms 'psycho-nationalism', a new concept derived from psychological dynamics in the making of nations. Through this, he demonstrates how nationalist ideas evolved in global history and their impact on questions of identity, statecraft and culture. Psycho-nationalism describes how a nation is made, sustained and 'sold' to its citizenry and will interest students and scholars of Iranian culture and politics, world political history, nationalism studies and political philosophy.

Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought
  • The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid
  • Ali Mirsepassi
  • Published online:
    04 July 2017
    Print publication:
    23 February 2017
  • During the Iranian Revolution of 1978/9, the influence of public intellectuals was widespread. Many espoused a vision of Iran freed from the influences of 'Westtoxification', inspired by Heideggerian concepts of anti-Western nativism. By following the intellectual journey of the Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid, Ali Mirsepassi offers in this book an account of the rise of political Islam in modern Iran. Through his controversial persona and numerous public and private appearances before, during and particularly after the Revolution, Fardid popularised an Islamist vision militantly hostile to the modern world that remains a fundamental part of the political philosophy of the Islamic Republic to this day. By also bringing elements of Fardid's post-revolutionary thought, as well as a critical analysis of Foucault's writings on 'the politics of spirituality', Mirsepassi offers an essential read for all those studying the evolution of political thought and philosophy in modern Iran and beyond.

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