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1130 results in Middle East studies

Page 1 of 57

Universalism and Regionalism in the Early Islamic World
  • The Beginnings of Local History-Writing
  • Harry Munt
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    01 October 2026
  • What was the role of local history-writing in the early Islamic World, and why was it such a popular way of thinking about the past? In this innovative study, Harry Munt explores this understudied phenomenon. Examining primary sources in both Arabic and Persian, Munt argues that local history-writing must be situated within its appropriate historical contexts to explain why it was such a popular way of thinking about the past, more popular than most other contemporary forms of history-writing. The period until the end of the eleventh century CE saw many significant developments in ideas about community, about elite groups and about social authority. This study demonstrates how local history-writing played a key role in these developments, forming part of the way that Muslim scholars negotiated the dialogues between more universalist and more particularist approaches to the understanding of communities. Munt further demonstrates that local historians were participating in debates that ranged into disciplines far beyond history-writing.

Poetic Desire and Literary Thievery
  • Economies of Intertextuality in Arabic Literature
  • Muhsin J. al-Musawi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025

Ancient Assyrians
  • Identity and Society in Antiquity and Beyond
  • Jonathan Valk
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • In this book, Jonathan Valk asks a deceptively simple question: What did it mean to be Assyrian in the 2nd millennium BCE? Extraordinary evidence from Assyrian society across this millennium enables an answer to this question. The evidence includes tens of thousands of letters and legal texts from an Assyrian merchant diaspora in what is now modern Turkey, as well as thousands of administrative documents and bombastic royal inscriptions associated with the Assyrian state. Valk develops a new theory of social categories that facilitates an understanding of how collective identities work. Applying this theoretical framework to the so-called Old and Middle Assyrian periods, he pieces together the contours of Assyrian society in each period, as revealed in the abundance of primary evidence, and explores the evolving construction of Assyrian identity as well. Valk's study demonstrates how changing historical circumstances condition identity and society, and that the meaning we assign to identities is ever in flux.

The Rise and Fall of Turkey's Democrat Party
  • The Cold War and Illiberalism, 1945–60
  • Reuben Silverman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • More than sixty years after Turkey's Democrat Party was removed from office by a military coup and three of its leaders hanged, it remains controversial. For some, it was the defender of a more democratic political order and founder of a dominant center-right political coalition; for others, it ushered in an era of corruption, religious reaction, and subordination to American influence. This study moves beyond such stark binaries. Reuben Silverman details the party's establishment, development, rule, and removal from power, showing how its leaders transformed themselves from champions of democracy and liberal economics to advocates of illiberal policies. To understand this change, Silverman draws on periodicals and archival documents to detail the Democrat Party's continuity with Turkey's late Ottoman and early republican past as well as the changing nature of the American-led Cold War order in which it actively participated.

The Conquest of the Mountains
  • State Violence, Technology, and Authoritarianism in the Ottoman East
  • Owen Robert Miller
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • In the late summer of 1894, Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered several battalions of Ottoman soldiers to destroy Armenian 'bandits' operating in the remote mountains of Sasun. Over a three-week period, these soldiers systematically murdered men, women, and children, beginning a chain of events which led directly to the Hamidian massacres of 1895 to 1897 and prefigured many patterns of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917. Taking a microhistorical approach, Owen Robert Miller examines how the Ottoman State harnessed three nascent technologies (modern firearms, steamboats, and telegraphs) to centralize authority and envisage new methods of conquest. Alongside developing an understanding of how the violence took place, this study explores how competing narratives of the massacre unfolded and were both disseminated and repressed. Emphasizing the pivotal significance of geography and new technologies, The Conquest of the Mountains reveals how the tragic history of these massacres underscores the development of Ottoman State authoritarianism.

Salafi Political Theology
  • Daniel Lav
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Salafism is a theological movement whose radical wing is today affiliated with al-Qaʿida and the Islamic State, but which draws on precedents stretching back to the medieval theology of Ibn Taymiyya. This innovative study focuses on the concept of theonomy in salafi thought: the tenet that rule by God's law is an essential component of faith, and the corresponding notion that other forms of rule based on human legislation are inherently polytheistic and thereby illegitimate. It is this tenet which furnishes radical militants with their principal casus belli against ruling regimes in the Muslim world. In this book, Daniel Lav details the intellectual grounding for modern salafi theonomy in Ibn Taymiyya's doctrine of tawhid and the writings of the early Wahhabi movement, in addition to the twentieth-century thought of Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi and Sayyid Quṭb, while drawing on insights from comparative political theology to analyze this key school of thought.

Return of Tyranny
  • Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed
  • Killian Clarke
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution, 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 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.

Gateway to the Mediterranean
  • An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir
  • Onur İnal
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • This in-depth exploration of Ottoman Izmir is the first book to study a Mediterranean port city through an environmental historical lens. Onur İnal documents the development of this major Eastern Mediterranean port-city from small coastal town, to transport hub, to a gateway linking the river valleys of Western Anatolia to worldwide markets. Key to this evolution, he argues, was the relationship between a city and countryside which not only shared a common past, but fundamentally reshaped each other during the years of the late Ottoman Empire. Introducing a cast of both human and non-human historical actors, including camels, horses and micro-organisms, İnal demonstrates the transformative impact of their interaction on the city and its hinterlands. By proposing the 'gateway city' model, this rich analysis provides an alternative way to understand the creation of an integrated economic and ecological space in Western Anatolia.

Palestinian Doctors
  • Medical Practice and the Transformation of Palestine, 1900–1948
  • Yoni Furas, Liat Kozma
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • Palestinian doctors became a dynamic, vocal, influential, and fascinating professional community over the first half of the twentieth century, growing from roughly a dozen on the eve of WWI to 300 in 1948. This study examines the social history of this group during the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, examining their social and geographic origins, their professional academic training outside Palestine and their role and agency in the country's medical market. Yoni Furas and Liat Kozma examine doctors' interactions with the rural and urban society and their entangled relationship with the British colonial administration and Jewish doctors. This book also provides an in-depth description on how Palestinian doctors thought and wrote about themselves and their personal, professional, and collective ambitions, underlining the challenges they faced while attempting to unionize. Furas and Kozma tell Palestine's story through the acts and challenges of these doctors, writing them back into the local and regional history.

Love, Class and Empire
  • An English Family Saga in the Middle East
  • A. James Hammerton
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Early twentieth-century Persia and the Persian Gulf presented a largely blank slate to the British, best known only as a vital conduit to India and a site of contest – the 'great game' – with the Russian Empire. As oil discoveries and increasing trade brought new attention, the expanding telegraph and river shipping industries attracted resourceful men into junior positions in remote outposts. Love, Class and Empire explores the experiences of two of these men and their families. Drawing on a wealth of personal letters and diaries, A. James Hammerton examines the complexities of expatriate life in Iran and Iraq, in particular the impact of rapid social mobility on ordinary Britons and their families in the late imperial era. Uniquely, the study blends histories of empire with histories of marriage and family, closely exploring the nature of expatriate love and sexuality. In the process, Hammerton discloses a tender expatriate love story and offers a moving account of transient life in a corner of the informal empire.

The Archaeology of Pastoralism, Mobility, and Society
  • Beyond the Grass Paradigm
  • Emily Hammer
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Though mobile pastoralists were long a significant component of many societies in Eurasia and Africa, scholars have long considered them to be materially and documentarily 'invisible.' The archaeological study of pastoralism across these regions has relied on ethnographic analogies and environmentally deterministic models, often with little or no data on historically specific herding communities. This approach has yielded a static picture of pastoralism through time that has only recently been challenged. In this book, Emily Hammer articulates a new framework for investigating variability in past pastoral practices. She proposes ways to develop a more rigorous relationship with pastoralist ethnographies and illustrates new archaeological and scientific methodologies for collecting direct data on herding, mobility, and social complexity in the past. Hammer's approach to the archaeology of pastoralism promotes efforts to dismantle the legacy of evolutionary classifications of human societies, which have drawn sharp distinctions between farmers and herders, and to investigate how diverse non-agricultural and mobile groups have shaped complex society and environment.

Tied Up in Tehran
  • Women, Social Change, and the Politics of Daily Life in Postrevolutionary Iran
  • Norma Claire Moruzzi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Tied Up in Tehran offers a richly interdisciplinary study of ordinary life in Iran since the 1979 revolution and a critical intervention in political theory debates on knowledge and method. Drawing from over ten years of field work in Iran since the 1990s, and originating in the author's surreal experience of being served tangerines during a home invasion in Tehran, Norma Claire Moruzzi examines the experiences of women, young people, artists, and activists: at home, at work, and in the street. These stories - of food and family, film and politics, shopping and crime-reckon with the past, demonstrate resilient democratization in the present, and provide glimpses of a plausible future while offering a refreshing model to ethically engaged modes of study. Moruzzi's lucid and engaging writing explores Iranian daily life as unexpected, contradictory, and full of political promise.

Occupier and Occupied
  • Israel, Palestine, and Masculinities across the Divide
  • Chloe Skinner
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • Working from the premise that gender and violence are cyclically related, masculinities' connection to power and violence are frequently simplistically assumed. Yet, amid ongoing colonisation and military occupation, there are other more complex dynamics simultaneously at play across Israel and Palestine. In this book, Chloe Skinner explores this, untangling the gendered politics of settler colonialism to shed specific light on the ways in which masculinities shift and morph in this context of colonial violence. Oscillating between analysis of Israeli militarism and military occupation in Palestine, each chapter examines the constitutive performance and negotiation of masculinised ideals across these colonial hierarchies. Masculinities are thus analysed across these settings in connection, rather than in isolation – illustrating that gendered identities, practices, and performances here are intertwined by that which simultaneously divides and separates them: the apartheid politics of the Israeli state.

Insularity and Identity
  • Prehistoric Britain and the Archaeology of Europe
  • Richard Bradley
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    01 October 2026
  • The Element considers historiography – the extent to which insular prehistorians have integrated their findings with the archaeology of mainland Europe; and the ways in which Continental scholars have drawn on British material. An important theme is the cultural and political relationship between this island and the mainland. The other component is an up-to-date account of prehistoric Britain and her neighbours from the Mesolithic period to the Iron Age, organised around the seaways that connected these regions. It emphasises the links between separate parts of this island and different parts of the Continent. It considers the links across the Irish Sea as only one manifestation of a wider process and treats Ireland on the same terms as other accessible regions, from France to the Low Countries. It shows how different parts of Britain were separate from one another and how they can be studied in a European framework.

The Nature of the Ottoman City
  • Water and Urban Space in Sofia, 1380s–1910s
  • Stefan Peychev
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • In this innovative interdisciplinary work, Stefan Peychev problematizes the dominant narrative of decline and stagnation in Ottoman Sofia. Drawing on a range of sources and perspectives, including environmental and urban history, archaeology and anthropology, he examines the creation and experience of urban space and place. By employing a longue durée framework and considering empire-wide developments, this work challenges the epistemological boundaries that have traditionally separated Ottoman from post-Ottoman space and the Middle East from Southeast Europe. Peychev argues instead for an integrated understanding of Sofia's water infrastructure, in which Ottoman ideas of the built environment fused with local cultural and technological traditions to create an efficient and long-lasting system.

New Hebrews
  • Making National Culture in Zion
  • Yaron Peleg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    22 May 2025
  • The literature on Zionism as a political ideology is extensive, but this book takes a different approach by focusing on the cultural dimensions of the movement and their profound impact on the history of Israel and the Jewish people. New Hebrews explores the cultural history of Zionism, starting from the meeting of the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, and culminating with the establishment of the State of Israel fifty-one years later in 1948. Yaron Peleg explores how innovative approaches in language, literature, architecture, art, music, and body culture transformed modern Jewish culture. His study delves into the contentious facets of early Zionist culture, such as colonialism, social engineering, minority discourse, and Jewish-Arab relations. New Hebrews presents an interdisciplinary examination of nationalism, drawing from a diverse array of primary sources to uncover the psychology of modern Israel. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran
  • Power, Institutions, and the Limits of Reform
  • Edited by Hadi Enayat, Mirjam Künkler
  • Published online:
    10 April 2025
    Print publication:
    17 April 2025
  • After Iran's 1979 Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini denounced the secular legal system of the Pahlavis and pledged his commitment to distinctly Islamic conceptions of law and justice: the application of both the shariʿa and the rule of law (hākemiyat-e qānun) became major ideological pillars of the Islamic Republic. This precipitated the Islamization of the legal system, the judiciary and the courts, a process which still continues today and is the subject of intense ideological and political contestation. The Rule of Law in Iran is the first comprehensive analysis of judicial and legal institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran in their social, political and historical contexts. Scholars and practitioners of law, many with experience of working in Iran, shed light on how the rule of law has fared across a variety of areas, from criminal law to labour law, family law, minority rights, policing, the legal profession, the visual and performing arts, trade law, and medicine.

Moshe Dayan
  • The Making of a Strategist
  • Eitan Shamir
  • Published online:
    03 April 2025
    Print publication:
    10 April 2025
  • In this major re-evaluation of Moshe Dayan's life and career, Eitan Shamir examines one of the most influential individuals in the history of modern Israel. As IDF Chief of Staff, theatre commander during the Sinai campaign and defence minister during the Six Days and Yom Kippur Wars, Dayan shaped Israeli history as well as the principles of Israel's security and foreign affairs. Eitan Shamir explores the basis and justification for Dayan's reputation as a strategist and what made his command and leadership unique. He reveals the ways in which Moshe Dayan led and planned his campaigns, how he made his decisions and his style as a general and a strategist. His findings shed important new light on broader issues of military command and culture, political-military relations, insurgency and counterinsurgency and the relations between small states and large powers, drawing lasting lessons for strategy today.

Nostalgia in Late Pahlavi Iran
  • Zhand Shakibi
  • Published online:
    20 March 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
  • Using the prism of nostalgia, this innovative work provides a new dimension to the study of late Pahlavi Iran. Set apart from dominant scholarly discussions of the period concerned solely with the causes of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Nostalgia in Late Pahlavi Iran offers the first study of the expressions and narratives of nostalgia from the state and wider society between 1960 and 1978. Zhand Shakibi offers both fresh understandings of the confrontation of Iranian society with rapid socio-economic, cultural, and moral changes, and the first examination of the state narratives of nostalgia that responded to these shifts. Shakibi draws comparisons with forms of nostalgia in the West, exploring how late Pahlavi Iran reflects global historical patterns during moments of social change. Through close examination of sources ranging across mass media, literature, court proceedings and state policy, Nostalgia in Late Pahlavi Iran provides a new social and political history of this period.

The Umayyad Empire
  • Andrew Marsham
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    15 March 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2024
  • The Umayyad Empire (644-750 CE) was the first Islamic empire and one of the largest empires of ancient and medieval times, extending over 5,000 miles between the Atlantic Ocean in the West and the Indian Ocean in the East. This book traces the empire's origins to the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Steppe in the centuries before Islam. It explores the dynamics that shaped this formative era for the history of the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. The century of Umayyad rule witnessed war with the Eastern Roman Empire, against whom the Umayyads defined their claims to rule as God's deputies on Earth. This was the period in which the Qur'an was compiled, monuments such as the Dome of the Rock were built, and new Islamic and Arab identities developed.

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