Middle East Centre Booktalk

Professor Marilyn Booth (Magdalen College) discusses her new translation of ‘Sa'iba’ by Alis al-Bustani (1891) with Samir al-Boustany and Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony’s College). ABOUT THE BOOK Alis al-Bustani's 'Sa'iba' (1891) is one of the earliest known novels authored in Arabic by a female writer. Written when the Arabic novel was only in its third or fourth decade, it takes up the leading fictional theme of the era: the question of young people's choices in marriage in a society where their elders traditionally made these decisions. In 'Sa'iba', the focus is on what happens after the wedding, as the eponymous heroine has to fend off a jealous cousin who believes he has a right to her. Drawing on motifs of Victorian Gothic writing, brought into an Arab-Turkish fictional context, the novel powerfully shows the continuing hold of old ideas about women's sexual susceptibility and moral 'weakness', as such ideas were slowly giving way among educated Arab and other Ottoman middle classes to new ideals of companionship in marriage. Marilyn Booth's translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the themes and social context of the novel, a time of modernizing efforts and pushback against European and American power and culture in the Arabic and Ottoman worlds. Published by Oxford University Press in 2026: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saiba-9780198921684?cc=gb&lang=en& ABOUT THE SERIES For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHY Marilyn Booth is Professor Emerita at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. She was holder through 2023 of an endowed chair in contemporary Arab studies, and previously held a chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her published work focuses on nineteenth-century Arabophonewomen's writing and ideologies of gender debate, including the role of translation. Recent research fellowships include the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; l'Institut d'études avancées, Paris; Neubauer Collegium for Society and Culture, Chicago. She was visiting professor, l'EHESS, Paris, in 2024. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English.

Author, Dr Orçun Can Okan (St Antony’s College) introduces his new book 'Needs That Bind: Materializing Nationality in Post-Ottoman Regimes', chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony’s College). ‘Needs That Bind’ reconsiders the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the construction of new regimes in the decade after World War I, to understand the consequential connections that remained among the new republican regime in Turkey and neighboring French and British Mandates in Syria-Lebanon and Iraq. Orçun Can Okan examines how these new states and their people managed problems of state succession through diplomatic, administrative, and legal interactions with and between bureaucracies. He foregrounds pressing questions of nationality as they were experienced by a diverse group of social actors, men and women, rich and poor. Okan tracks previously untapped Ottoman records, now spread across multiple regimes, to investigate claims to retirement pensions, alimony cases between former spouses who became nationals of different states, and disputes over land, property, and assets held in pious endowments. It is through these types of interactions and connections, he argues, that newly emerged post-Ottoman regimes materialized basic norms and understandings about nationality—an understanding more similar to subjecthood to state authority than rights-based citizenship. With an engaging, grounded historical narrative, this book contributes to thinking historically and critically about the tangible stakes and practical significance of nationality in times of profound political change and institutional instability.  Published by Stanford University Press in 2026: https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/needs-bind

Author, Joost Hiltermann discusses his debut novel 'The Resurrected' with Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony’s College). They were meant to be dead, buried under the sand. But they survived. Two young Kurds manage to miraculously escape Saddam Hussein’s killing grounds to eventually find their way to America. A story of luck, nerve and perseverance, with many setbacks along the way. Partially based on true events, this novel tells the story of a genocide as remembered by some who lived through it – as victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. By weaving together their testimonies – some true, some false, others imagined – the author paints an enthralling portrait of survival and destiny under the worst of circumstances, the 1988 Anfal campaign in Iraq, and what happened afterwards. In America the survivors build protected but split-soul lives typical of first-generation immigrants – until one day the past comes calling. Published by Asfana Press in 2026: https://www.afsana-press.com/the-resurrected AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Joost Hiltermann is a Dutch researcher and writer. He was the Programme Director for the Middle East & North Africa at the International Crisis Group and was previously at Human Rights Watch. Joost holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs and other publications.  Joost has published two books: A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge, 2007) and Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 1991). The Resurrected is his debut novel. Joost was one of the main researchers of the genocide against the Kurds for Human Rights Watch in the 1990s, culminating in his fictionized retelling of the case. He has remained in close contact with the two (real) survivors and their families to this day.

Dr Chihab El Khachab (Wolfson College) discusses his new book ‘Constructing the Achievement State: Cultural Administration in Postrevolutionary Egypt’. Chaired by Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony’s College). After the 1952 revolution, the Egyptian state became an ideological project promoted by national cultural and media institutions. Focusing particularly on the years under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–1970), Chihab El Khachab uses official written and visual sources produced by different governmental departments to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats represented and embodied the Egyptian state through a praxis of 'achievement' (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). This study demonstrates how a successful anti-colonial nationalist movement built its own state apparatus. El Khachab argues that the state's 'achievements' are neither the tangible outcome of governmental work nor the self-evident metrics needed to evaluate national progress, but an ideological category deployed by bureaucrats. Conceiving achievements in this way allows us to understand how everyday bureaucratic work represents and embodies 'the state', and why this idea remains an important force in contemporary Egypt. Published by Cambridge University Press in 2026: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/constructing-the-achievement-state/BAB7ED73973C065D2CDE64C9D266FFAE

In this joint Refugee Studies Centre and Middle East Centre seminar, Dr Houman Oliaei discusses his new book. Chaired by Professor Pascal Menoret (Magdalen College). After ISIS's 2014 genocide, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis fled Sinjar, their ancestral homeland in northern Iraq. Most stayed within Iraq's borders, settling in camps and informal settlements in the Kurdistan Region. While global attention often focuses on refugees who cross international borders, the Yazidis' experience exemplifies a far more common but less visible form of displacement: people forced from their homes yet remaining inside their own country as internally displaced persons (IDPs). Drawing on research among displaced Yazidis in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity traces how they navigate the contradictions of internal displacement. Author Houman Oliaei shows how this produces a paradox of protection: international actors treat IDPs as too much like citizens to merit intervention, while governments deem them too displaced to be recognized as full citizens. In this interstitial space, Yazidis become hypervisible as victims but erased as political subjects. They are caught between formal citizenship and humanitarian aid, suspended between a traumatic past and a future they cannot securely claim, and confined to camps that weaponize impermanence to manage and eventually expel their residents. Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity argues that internal displacement today is not just a humanitarian problem but a political project of dispossession. States maintain sovereignty over populations they have effectively abandoned, while humanitarian institutions transform citizens into objects of care stripped of their political rights. Published by Indiana University Press in 2026: https://iupress.org/9780253075604/yazidis-on-the-margins-of-humanity/ AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Houman Oliaei is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Babson College. His first book, Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity: Internally Displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan (Indiana University Press, 2026), offers an ethnographic account of Yazidi displacement in post-conflict Iraq, examining humanitarian governance, political recognition, and belonging in the aftermath of the 2014 ISIS genocide. His broader research engages questions of humanitarianism, citizenship, forced migration, and mobility across the Middle East and beyond.

Dr Katharina Galor (Brown University) discusses her new book 'Out of Gaza: A Tale of Love, Exile, and Friendship'. Chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony’s College). Out of Gaza tells the story of Dima Mansour, a young Palestinian who suffers hardship growing up in Jordan and Gaza during the Gaza War of 2014, later escaping to be with the man she loves in Belgium, where she is held in a detention center for illegal immigrants. Her harrowing story is told by Katharina Galor, an Israeli Jewish scholar who forms a close and unexpected friendship with Mansour. Despite the profound asymmetry that defines the geopolitical context of their lives—one marked by Palestinian loss and exile, the other by Jewish trauma and persecution—their bond uncovers surprising parallels in their shared experiences of displacement and survival. As their friendship unfolds, Galor and Mansour come to intimately understand the lasting impact of ethnic cleansing from the Holocaust and the Nakba, and how these pivotal events have shaped their families, identities, and ties to the region. Out of Gaza delves into themes of identity, belonging, and the enduring effects of historical trauma, showing how empathy and resilience can bridge even the deepest divides. Published by University of Nebraska Press in 2025: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/potomac-books/9781640126510/out-of-gaza/ AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Katharina Galor is Associate Teaching Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University. Born in Germany, where her parents had fled from communist Romania, Galor was educated in Germany, France, Israel, and the United States. She is the author or coauthor of four books, including The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (with Sa’ed Atshan), and writes for or appears in various media outlets, including the Forward, Die Zeit, NPR, Israeli TV, National Geographic, and the Discovery Channel.

In this lecture, Saeb Eigner offers a journey through more than a century of modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa, as documented in ‘Artists of the Middle East: 1900 to Now’. Spanning from 1900 to the present, the book brings together over 250 major artists — from early modernists to today’s leading contemporary voices — across a vast geographic area stretching from Morocco to Iran. Eigner will highlight how cultural heritage, linguistic and literary traditions, and regional socio-political realities have shaped different art movements and individual practices. By examining landmark artists such as those active in the mid-20th century alongside contemporary figures, the lecture will trace continuities and ruptures: how earlier modernist expressions gave way to new forms; how political upheaval, migration, globalization and cultural exchange influenced artistic production; and how art from the region today speaks to global audiences while remaining rooted in local histories. Saeb Eigner –Biography Saeb Eigner, Austrian by birth, spent his early years traveling the Middle East before settling in London, where he was educated. Fluent in several languages, including Arabic, he began his career in international banking and later founded a private investment firm. A founding member in 2004 of the Dubai Financial Services Authority, he played a key role in establishing one of the world’s leading financial centres, serving as Chairman of the DFSA (2011 - 2021). A former Governor of his Alma Mata London Business School and Chair of its Audit and Risk Committee. Eigner serves on boards related to finance, education, and the arts. A speaker on global business and economic issues, across major media platforms. He is committed to the arts and education as tools for cultural connection and social advancement. He authored Sand to Silicon (2002, 2008) and Art of The Middle East (2010, 2015), co- curated the British Museum’s Word into Art exhibitions in London and Dubai (2006, 2008), and recently authored Artists of the Middle East: 1900 to Now (2025). To view a copy of the slides in this talk, please use this link: https://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/sant/middle_east_studies/booktalk/2026-03-25-sant-mec-booktalk-eigner-SLIDES.pdf

This seminar was delivered at the Middle East Centre on Tuesday 3 March 2026 by Dr Alfonso Casani (Complutense University of Madrid) and was chaired by Professor Michael Willis (St Antony’s College). Alfonso Casani is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). He is Research associate of the Group of Studies on the Arab and Muslim Societies (GRESAM) at the University of Castilla-la Mancha and the Complutense Research Group on the Maghreb and Middle East (GICMOM) at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research interests focus on the study of political Islam, opposition dynamics and social movements in North Africa. He is co-editor of El impacto de la Guerra de Ucrania en el norte de África y Oriente Medio (Dyckinson). His articles have recently been published in journals such as Democratization, Contemporary Politics and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.   Contemporary Islamist Opposition in Morocco: Resisting Inclusion and Moderation (2025) Edinburgh University Press https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-contemporary-islamist-opposition-in- morocco.html   Contemporary Islamist Opposition in Morocco: Resisting Inclusion and Moderation offers an in-depth and yet- unexplored analysis of the evolution and actions of Moroccan Islamist association Justice and Spirituality (al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane). By examining its mobilisation structure, the book enhances the understanding of Islamism as an oppositional force in non-democratic regimes, with a particular focus on Morocco. Contrary to the common premises of inclusion–moderation theory, al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane has undergone a politicisation process but rejects political inclusion; it promotes street mobilisation but refuses to resort to violence. Despite its illegal status and disregard for the regime’s red lines, al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane remains highly relevant as an anti-establishment actor.   Addressing these apparent contradictions broadens our understanding of inclusion–moderation approaches by introducing novel explanatory factors into the relationship between authoritarian regimes and Islamist opposition actors, including responses to shifts in opportunity structures and the effects of internal dynamics and learning mechanisms. It also deepens our knowledge of al-Adl wa-l-Ihsane, Morocco’s largest opposition actor, which nevertheless remains largely understudied.

This book talk was delivered at the Middle East Centre on Tuesday 10 February 2026 by author, Dr Daniel Neep (Brandeis University), and chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony’s College). A Modern History of Syria (2026) https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/213366/a-history-of-modern-syria-by-neep-daniel/9780241003299 Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was then brutally ruled by France. This French ‘mandate’ carved out new borders with equally provisional neighbours in a process that pulled apart families, trade networks and political assumptions that had already been ravaged by the war. Syria's subsequent history has been a series of attempts to make sense of its borders, including a failed attempt in the late 1950s to unite with Egypt and several humiliations at the hands of Israel's armed forces. The civil war that broke out in 2011 plunged Syria into a nightmarish series of disasters, including the terrible years of Islamic State, ultimately resulting in the reimposition of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, which came to an end in 2024. Daniel Neep’s remarkable book creates a gripping, intelligent narrative of how Syrians have lived through these events, never losing sight either of the fates of ordinary people or of Syria’s rich, complex and diverse society, unwillingly or willingly brought together in such a highly contested space.

This book talk was delivered at the Middle East Centre on Thursday 24 February 2026 by Tareq Baconi (author) in conversation with Dr Ammar Azzouz (Somerville College). Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award, and Fire in Every Direction. Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir (2026) https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/tareq-baconi/fire-in-every-direction/9781399739634/ Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humour and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness – desire and resistance – is passed down through generations. In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life – still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi. After relocating to London, Tareq hopes to put aside his past. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him. Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home.

This seminar was delivered at the Middle East Centre on Thursday 19 February 2026 by Professor Simon Mabon (Lancaster University), and was chaired by Professor Raihan Ismail (St Antony’s College).

This book talk was delivered at the Middle East Centre on Thursday 12 February 2026 by Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen (Rice University) and was chaired by Professor Raihan Ismail (St Antony’s College). Kingdom of Football: Saudi Arabia and the Remaking of World Soccer (Hurst & Co, 2025) www.hurstpublishers.com/book/kingdom-of-football This talk explores how and why Saudi Arabia burst onto the landscape of world football in 2023 and examines what the speed and scale of Saudi engagement, as investor, owner, sponsor, host, and participant, means for the Kingdom and for football more broadly. Analysis will place Saudi Arabia’s startling emergence as one of the hubs in world football in the 2020s in historical and comparative perspective, set against previous periods of Saudi investment in football, in the 1970s, and attempts elsewhere to rapidly kickstart the domestic game, in the United States, Japan, and China. Going beyond labels such as ‘sportswashing,’ which have gained media currency in recent years, Kingdom of Football examines what drives Saudi policymaking and connects the move into football with domestic economic and social developments and external and foreign policy considerations. The talk also examines how the Saudi foray into football builds upon but differs from the approaches taken by other Gulf States, such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and assesses the factors that will determine the sustainability and durability of the Kingdom’s engagement with football in the decade-long runup to the 2034 World Cup.

In this seminar, Ambassador Nabeela Al Mulla, author, is in conversation with Professor Eugene Rogan, MEC Director, about her new book ‘Breaking New Ground on the Global Stage: Memoirs of Kuwait’s First Woman Ambassador’. In this Gender and Sexuality Series seminar, Ambassador Nabeela Al Mulla, author, is in conversation with Professor Eugene Rogan, MEC Director, about her new book ‘Breaking New Ground on the Global Stage: Memoirs of Kuwait’s First Woman Ambassador’. This seminar was held at the MEC on 25th November 2025.

Seminar in English and Arabic. Professor Said Laouadi, winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2025, discusses his book ‘Food and Language: Rhetorical-Cultural Excavations in Arab Heritage’ (2023), with Professor Eugene Rogan. Seminar in English and Arabic. Professor Said Laouadi, winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2025 for Literary and Art Criticism, discusses his book ‘الطعام والكلام: حفريات بلاغية ثقافية في التراث العربي’ / ‘Food and Language: Cultural Excavations in Arab Heritage’ (2023), with Professor Eugene Rogan, Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College. Introduced by Professor Michael Willis, HM King Mohammed VI Fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean Studies. About the book: Published in 2023, this work offers a critique of the complex relation between rhetoric and food in Arab heritage, analysing literary texts from poetry to proverbs and stories from a broad cultural perspective. With its in-depth analysis and broad scope, his research enriches rhetorical studies with new, unconventional approaches. About the author: Said Laouadi is a Moroccan academic and professor of rhetoric and discourse analysis at the Faculty of Arabic Language at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech, where he also serves as Vice Dean for Scientific Research and International Cooperation and heads the Laboratory for Methodological Integration in Discourse Analysis. Laouadi oversees the ‘Academic Picks’ programme, which hosts leading Arab researchers in critical and linguistic studies. Laouadi serves as a member of judging panels for several Arab and Moroccan literary awards, while also contributing to various specialised academic journals as an editor and reviewer. His research explores the intersection of rhetoric and culture, with notable publications such as ‘The Kitchen of the Novel: Food in Fiction from Visuality to Weaving’ (2024) and ‘Food and Language: Cultural Excavations in Arab Heritage’ (2023), along with studies on literature, imagery, and aesthetics in poetic discourse”.

This seminar discusses the inaugural Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize winner, ‘Safe Corridor’; a bold, unforgettable novel of war, imagination, and survival. Kurdish-Syrian novelist, Jan Dost; translator, Professor Marilyn Booth; Director of the Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize, Ali Al Mujaini; and Founder and Director of DarArab for Publishing & Translation, Nasser Al Badri, all discuss Dost’s novel ‘Safe Corridor’, with Professor of Turkish Literature and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Laurent Mignon, as Chair.

In this Contemporary Islamic Studies seminar, Dr Haroon Bashir discusses his new book ‘Slavery, Abolition and Islam: Debating Freedom in the Islamic Tradition’ published in January 2025 by Oxford University Press Bio: Dr Haroon Bashir is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education. He also serves as the Director of the Markfield Centre for Contemporary Islam. His research focuses on Islam's conversation with modernity and contemporary Islamic thought. His recent book, which he will be discussing today, was published in January 2025 by Oxford University Press and is entitled ‘Slavery, Abolition and Islam: Debating Freedom in the Islamic Tradition’. Abstract: The abolition of slavery remains a relatively new concept in human history and scholars from all religious traditions have attempted to navigate the religious and ethical questions raised by the historical acceptance of the practice. In this seminar, Haroon Bashir explores how scholars promoting abolition in the name of Islam transformed the debate around Islam and slavery. The seminar explores how abolitionism became the hegemonic position within contemporary Islamic thought and provides a genealogy of ‘Islamic abolitionist’ thought. Abolitionist arguments were not simply accepted when originally articulated, with defenders of the slave trade using the weight of historical tradition to emphasise the legitimacy of slavery. The strongly contested debates that ensued had huge ramifications for understandings of authority, tradition, and modernity within Islamic thought that are as present as they are past.

In this joint seminar with the Asian Studies Centre, Dr Erin MB O’Halloran, University of Cambridge, presents her new book 'East of Empire' (2025 Stanford University Press). Chaired by Professor Faisal Devji (St Antony’s College). For many years, scholars, politicians and activists have drawn comparisons between the partitions of India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine, two seismic events which took place mere months apart. Yet they were far more than comparable: the two partitions were in fact deeply interconnected, and share origins in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. In ‘East of Empire’, Erin O’Halloran reveals how the crisis in British Mandate Palestine created a crucial bridge between the Indian Khilafat movement of the early 1920s and Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s demand, from March 1940 onward, that Muslims of the subcontinent be given a state of their own.

In this joint seminar with Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, Wendy Pearlman, Professor at Northwestern University, shares personal testimonies collected from displaced Syrians around the world. Abstract: Over 13 years, Northwestern University Professor Wendy Pearlman has interviewed more than 500 displaced Syrians around the world about their lives under a brutal authoritarian regime, the popular uprising against it, and the subsequent war and refugee crisis. In this presentation, she shares and explores their stories collected in her two books, ‘We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria’ (2017) and ‘The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora’ (2024). These personal testimonials offer a human lens on the stunning recent collapse of the Assad regime, while also offering broader lessons about migration, belonging, and the search for dignity. Biography: Wendy Pearlman is the Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of political science at Northwestern University, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘Perspectives on Politics’. A scholar of Middle East politics, social movements, conflict processes, and forced migration, she is the author of six books and more than 40 journal articles or book chapters. This is a joint seminar with Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre. Chaired by Dawn Chatty, Emerita Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, 2011-2014.

In this Friday seminar, Jérôme Drevon discusses his book ‘From Jihad to Politics: How Syrian Jihadis Embraced Politics’ (OUP 2024). Bio Jérôme Drevon is senior analyst on Jihad and Modern Conflict at the International Crisis Group (ICG). Jerome studies the evolution of non-state armed groups with a special emphasis on Jihadis, especially how they can become more pragmatic overtime. For the past few years, he has also focused more thoroughly on how other actors - including states and humanitarians - can engage some of these groups, who now rule millions of civilians worldwide. Jerome has conducted extensive field research in conflict zones, including Syria, where he interviewed hundreds of Jihadi militants and foreign fighters from their military, political, and religious leaders to their foot soldiers – to gain a deeper understanding of their changing political views in armed conflicts. Abstract The Syrian regime unleashed unprecedented violence to suppress large-scale non-violent protests amid the Arab uprisings. Hundreds of armed groups formed throughout the country to defend the protesters and fight back. However, in contrast to other conflicts previously dominated by al-Qaeda and Islamic State, the two largest Syrian Jihadi groups, Ahrar al-Sham and then Jabhat al-Nusra, rejected global jihad and began to cultivate new ties with the population, other armed opposition groups, and even foreign states. This strategic shift is a response to the Jihadi paradox--a realization that while Jihadis excel at leading insurgencies, they fail to achieve political victories. In From Jihad to Politics, Jérôme Drevon offers an examination of the Syrian armed opposition, tracing the emergence of Jihadi groups in the conflict, their dominance, and their political transformation. Drawing upon field research and interviews with Syrian insurgents in northwestern Syria and Turkey, Drevon demonstrates how the context of a local conflict can shape armed groups' behavior in unexpected ways. Further, he marshals unique evidence from the Arab world's most intense conflict to explain why the trajectory of the transnational Jihadi movement has altered course in recent years.

On Tuesday 18 February 2025, the Middle East Centre hosted the launch for St Antony’s Emeritus Fellow, Professor Avi Shlaim’s, new book ‘Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine’ (Irish Pages Press, 2025). On Tuesday 18 February 2025, the Middle East Centre hosted the launch for St Antony’s Emeritus Fellow, Professor Avi Shlaim’s, new book ‘Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine’ (Irish Pages Press, 2025). This is a recording of Avi Shlaim’s talk, chaired by MEC Director, Professor Eugene Rogan, and featuring the Founder and Editor of Irish Pages, Chris Agee. The book is a Times Literary Supplement book of the year 2024. Copies are available to purchase directly from the publisher, The Irish Pages Press here: irishpages.org/product/genocide-in-gaza Book Abstract: The brutal assault launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip in in response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was a major landmark in the blood-soaked history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was the eighth Israeli military offensive in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead of December 2008. But it was the most lethal and destructive, making the enclave uninhabitable. In this book Avi Shlaim places Israel’s policy towards the Gaza Strip under an uncompromising lens. He argues that these recurrent attacks — what Israeli generals chillingly call “mowing the lawn” — are the inevitable result of Zionist settler colonialism whose basic objective is the elimination of the native population. In this war, however, Israel has gone beyond land-grabbing and ethnic cleansing to commit the crime of all crimes — genocide. Providing Israel with arms as well as diplomatic protection at the UN, make America, Britain, and European Union not only complicit but partners in Israel’s war crimes. Noam Chomsky observed that “Settler colonialism is the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism”. There is no better illustration of this fundamental truth than Israel’s long and savage war against the Palestinian people. “Clear, forthright and cogent, Genocide in Gaza is essential reading for both those who understand little of Palestine-Israel and those who have followed the unfolding horrors for decades. As a historian, Shlaim is meticulous, thoughtful and robust. As a person who has lived in three worlds – Iraqi, Israeli and British, with a Jewish religion and an Arab ethnicity – few understand it as well on a personal level. His political vision is clear- sighted, his ideal humane.” Selma Dabbagh, novelist and human rights lawyer

A launch event for ‘The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey’ (OUP), jointly convened by the MEC and SEESOX, with panellists Caroline Tee, Fabio Vicini, Sertaç Sehlikoğlu, and Stefan Williamson Fa. A launch event for ‘The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey’ (OUP), jointly convened by the Middle East Centre and South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX), with a panel from the Handbook’s editors and contributors: Professor Caroline Tee (University of Chester), Professor Fabio Vicini (University of Verona),Dr Sertaç Sehlikoğlu (University College London), and Dr Stefan Williamson Fa (University of Cambridge). This comprehensive volume delves into the multifaceted landscape of religion in Turkey, examining its historical evolution, contemporary manifestations, and the complex interplay between religion, politics, and society. The handbook brings together contributions from leading scholars, offering diverse perspectives on topics such as secularism, religious movements, minority religions, and the role of religion in public life. By providing an in-depth analysis of Turkey’s religious dynamics, this work serves as an essential resource for understanding the country’s unique position at the crossroads of East and West, tradition and modernity. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197624883.001.0001

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, author of ‘An Impossible Friendship’, Marilyn Booth, author of ‘The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz’, and Peter Hill, author of ‘Prophet of Reason’, discuss the writing of biography in modern Middle Eastern history. Book abstracts: ‘An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948’ – In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba? Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical post-war period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, ‘An Impossible Friendship’ unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice. ‘The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt’ – Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi’I community of Jabal ‘Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women’s and girls’ aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arabic by a female writer. This book assesses her unusual life history and political engagements—including her work late in life as an informant for the Egyptian khedive. A series of thematically focused chapters takes up her views on social justice, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the ‘gender-nature’ debate in the context of local understandings of Darwinism, education, and imperialism and Islamophobia, attending also to works by those to whom Fawwaz was responding. Her role in the first Arabic women’s magazine, and her contributions to later women’s magazines, are part of the story, too. Further chapters consider her uses of history in fiction to criticize patriarchal control of young women’s lives, and her play as an intervention into reformist theatre, and the question of women’s access to public culture in 1890s Egypt. Questions of desirable masculinities are central to all of these. Fawwaz was also known for her massive biographical dictionary of world women. In that work as in her essays, Fawwaz articulated an ethics of social belonging and sociality predicated on Islamic precepts of gender justice, and critical of the ways male intellectuals had used ‘tradition’ to silence women and deny their aspirations. ‘Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East’ – In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together. By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.

In this talk, Dr Elham Fakhro, a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, launches her new book ‘The Abraham Accords: The Gulf States, Israel, and the Limits of Normalization’ Elham Fakhro is a Research Fellow at the Middle East Initiative, Belfer Center, at the Harvard Kennedy School. She previously acted as Senior Analyst with the International Crisis Group and held teaching and research roles at NYU Abu Dhabi and Exeter University. She holds an LLM from Harvard Law School and DPhil from St Antony's College, Oxford University. ‘The Abraham Accords: The Gulf States, Israel, and the Limits of Normalization’ book abstract: In August 2020, Donald Trump announced that his administration had brokered a ground-breaking treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the first normalization agreement between Israel and an Arab state in more than twenty years. Soon afterward, Bahrain joined the agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. How were these treaties achieved, and why did the parties involved see normalization as in their interest? In what ways have the accords altered the Middle East’s political landscape, and how have they affected the question of Palestine? This book is a ground-breaking in-depth analysis of the Abraham Accords, shedding new light on their causes and consequences. Elham Fakhro demonstrates how shared security concerns, economic interests, and regional political shockwaves led to a surprising strategic convergence between the Gulf states and Israel, setting the stage for covert relations to come out into the open. She examines the role of the Trump administration in negotiating the agreements and shows how the UAE and Bahrain have instrumentalized the accords to burnish their reputations in Western capitals. Fakhro underscores how Washington’s Middle East policy shifted toward expanding the agreements at the expense of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with profound costs. Offering a critical lens on a much-hailed agreement, this book argues that the pursuit of normalization in isolation from a lasting solution to the conflict has entrenched the conditions that continually plunge the Middle East into crisis.

In this talk, Iraqi political analyst, Sajad Jiyad, discusses his new book ‘God’s Man in Iraq: The Life and Leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’. In his new book, ‘God’s Man in Iraq: The Life and Leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’, Century International fellow Sajad Jiyad draws on original sources and hundreds of interviews during decades of fieldwork inside Iraq to show how Sistani, as the revered senior Shia cleric in a Shia-majority country, commands the loyalty of millions of faithful. With quiet authority, Sistani has tried from behind the scenes to steer Iraq through a series of existential crises since the U.S. invasion and fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. During decades of turmoil, war, and regime change in Iraq, Sistani has loomed above every other cleric and politician. In the summer of 2014, as the Islamic State stormed across Iraq, an ascetic Shia cleric raised his voice and rallied the country to stop the extremists’ bloody march. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, at the time eighty-five years old, delivered a decree through a Friday prayer sermon on June 13, 2014: “Citizens who are able to bear arms and fight terrorists in defense of their country, people, and sanctities,” he said, “must volunteer to join the security forces.” The decree, which came to be known as the jihad fatwa, successfully rallied Iraqis—across ethnic and sectarian backgrounds—to repel the Islamic State. The moment is but one of the starkest examples of Sistani’s decisive influence, not just in Iraq but in the wider world of Shia Islam. Sistani has done more to stabilize Iraq than any other figure, and has appealed to perhaps a majority of the world’s Shia Muslims with his indirect model of clerical authority—a stark contrast to the competing model of direct clerical rule advanced by his rivals in Iran. Sistani is now ninety-four, and contenders have already begun positioning themselves to succeed him. Jiyad assesses the players and the complex selection process for Najaf’s leadership. Observers of Iraq and of Shia power will find God’s Man in Iraq an incomparable appraisal of Sistani’s legacy—and an invaluable guide to the perilous transition that will follow his tenure. Bio: Sajad Jiyad is a fellow at Century International and director of the Shia Politics Working Group. An Iraqi political analyst based in Baghdad, he is the managing director of Bridge, an Iraqi nongovernmental organization and consultancy focused on development projects for young people. Sajad’s main focus is on public policy and governance in Iraq. He is frequently published and cited as an expert commentator on Iraqi affairs. Sajad’s educational background is in economics, politics, and Islamic studies.

Researcher and writer, Rusha Latif, gives a talk based on her new book ‘Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution’ Abstract: In this talk based on her new book ‘Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution’, Rusha Latif will challenge the commonly held belief that the 2011 Egyptian revolution was spontaneous and leaderless, through a provocative new account of the revolutionaries—one that foregrounds their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a key catalyst behind their revolt. In fact, much like the war on Gaza is radicalizing legions of young people around the world today, it was the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000 that first radicalized many of the Egyptian youth who drove the uprising ten years later, in the hope of emancipating themselves as well as their neighbours. Speaking to these interconnections, the presentation will follow the trajectory of the movement through its successes and defeats from the perspective of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition (RYC), the first and arguably most significant front born of the nationwide revolt. Timely and necessary, this talk will not only illuminate the Egyptian uprising’s leadership and organizing dynamics but also impart urgent lessons from the protagonists behind this historic movement—lessons for everyone hoping to achieve liberation and revolutionary change in the 21st century. Bio: Rusha Latif is a researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A first-generation Egyptian American, she travelled to Cairo in 2011 to conduct ethnographic research on the uprising. Her interests include social movements and revolutions; the study of gender, class, and race/ethnicity; Islamic studies; and Middle Eastern studies. She is the author of ‘Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution’ (AUC Press, 2022), an activist ethnography that explores the themes of leadership and organization in the Egyptian revolution.

Dr Ibrahim Al-Marashi reflects on the process of researching and writing the latest edition of his book, ‘A Concise History of the Middle East’. This book talk on ‘A Concise History of the Middle East’ will discuss history-in-the-making. Close to a year after 7 October 2023, the reverberations of these events will be felt for generations to come, yet are uncertain. Nevertheless, this ‘History’ textbook has documented the region’s past for more than four decades for thousands of students, the 13th edition’s conclusions do reveal a troubling future in terms of political conflicts and climate insecurity. The region has witnessed seismic events, literally, from earthquakes in Turkey and Syria to unprecedented Mediterranean hurricanes, and finally heat waves in the Gulf resulting in the highest temperatures in recorded history. This history demonstrates environmental changes and the conflicts in the Middle East, particularly in Gaza, are interconnected. Despite these political and environmental challenges, there are individuals in the ‘Concise History’ whose resilience and endurance deserves attention and discussion.

Journalist and scholar, Dr Ezgi Başaran, presents her book which traces the links between the AKP, Tunisia’s Ennahda, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood after the Arab Spring. Since the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Ben Ali, delegations from Turkey’s Justice and Development Party – the AKP, including parliamentarians and ministers, visited Cairo and Tunis. Similarly, representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda visited Istanbul and Ankara, engaging in activities and meetings with government officials. What were the goals of these meetings, kept from the public eye? What discussions took place among these Islamist actors after the Arab Uprisings? These questions intrigued Dr Ezgi Başaran and became the driving force behind her recent book, The New Spirit of Islamism, which examines the relationships between the AKP and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the AKP and Ennahda from 2011 to 2013. The focus on Tunisian Ennahda, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the AKP was not to compare their strategies or practices but to unravel the details of their political confluence. This period also marked the first time the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda participated in free elections, established political parties, and assumed power; hence, a unique opportunity for analysis of the goals and aims of Islamist movements. Based on the findings regarding this political confluence, Dr Başaran aims to deliver insights into what she calls the “new spirit of Islamism.” Ezgi Başaran is a journalist and political scientist from Istanbul, currently living in Oxford, UK. She began her career as a reporter, covering conflict zones and significant global events, and later became the youngest editor-in-chief of a major liberal left newspaper. She has written extensively on the Kurdish conflict, Turkish and Middle Eastern politics, human rights violations, and freedom of speech. Her investigative work has earned her several accolades, and her commentary has appeared in major international media. Her first English book, Frontline Turkey: The Crisis at the Heart of the Middle East (2017), explores Turkey’s Kurdish issue and its regional implications. Her second book, The New Spirit of Islamism, was published in June 2024 by I.B Tauris/Bloomsbury. Ezgi holds an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford, St Antony’s College.

Professor Malika Zeghal (Harvard University) presents her new book 'The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa', an innovative analysis that traces the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam. In The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton University Press, 2024), Malika Zeghal reframes the role of Islam in modern Middle East governance. Challenging other accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states turned secular in modern times, Zeghal shows instead the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Drawing on intellectual, political, and economic history, she traces this custodianship from early forms of constitutional governance in the nineteenth century through post–Arab Spring experiments in democracy. Her detailed and groundbreaking analysis, which spans Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, makes clear the deep historical roots of current political divisions over Islam in governance. Malika Zeghal is the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. She is the author of Gardiens de l’Islam, Les Oulémas d’al-Azhar dans l’Egypte Contemporaine and Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics. Chaired by Professor Raihan Ismail, H.H. Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor in Contemporary Islamic Studies.

Ali Mirsepassi in conversation with Stephanie Cronin about his new book

Book Launch for "The Damascus Events: the 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World" By Eugene Rogan, Published in hardback by Allen Lane, 2 May 2024. A watershed moment in the history and the making of the modern Middle East. Renowned Arab scholar, Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule at a formative juncture that was to reshape the future of the region to the present day. The old Empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion and tensions were raised – nowhere more so than in Damascus. LInked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, Damascus was a warily tolerant place until local diplomatic and trade reforms consistently favoured Christians over Arab Muslims, who came to see their Christian neighbours as an existential threat, such that the extermination of the Syrian Christians seemed like a reasonable solution. The unprecedented violence that followed shocked the world, claiming more than 10k Christians in Mount Lebanon and 5k in Damascus. For Syria, Lebanon and the Arab states it remains a defining moment. It would take a generation for the Ottoman government to rebuild the city and restore peace between the Muslims and Christians of Damascus, introducing far reaching administrative and financial reforms which would return stability not only to the Syrian capital but also shape the future of the newly emerging countries of the modern Middle East. That peace in Damascus would last 150 years, until the outbreak of civil war in 2011. Eugene Rogan has been mulling over the pivotal importance of this massacre all his professional life. Drawing on the never-before-seen first hand reports of Dr Mishaqa, the Christian vice-Consul to the US, and other notable scholars of the time, he answers key questions: why did the Muslim of Damascus massacre the Christians of their city? and How did the Ottoman authorities bring the city back from that brink? He brings essential new material to the history of the moment, while building the most comprehensive survey to date of eye witness accounts from both the Christian and Muslim perspectives. The Damascus Events offers a superb history of a moment of deeply divisive trauma that unmade a great city and examines the possibility, even after conflict and tragedy, of renewal.

Professor Ardi Imseis new book explores the UN’s management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the Organisation’s position and international law. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the United Nations (UN) on the question of Palestine. What forms has the UN’s failure to respect international law taken, and with what implications? The author critically interrogates the received wisdom regarding the UN’s fealty to the international rule of law, in favour of what is described as an international rule by law. This book demonstrates that through the actions of the UN, Palestine and its people have been committed to a state of what the author calls ‘international legal subalternity’, according to which the promise of justice through international law is repeatedly proffered under a cloak of political legitimacy furnished by the international community, but its realization is interminably withheld.

Dr. Diana Galeeva introduces her book which examines the relations between the Gulf States and Russia from the Soviet era to the present day. In recent decades Russia has played an increasingly active role in the Middle East as states within the region continue to diversify their relations with major external powers. Yet the role of specific Russian regions, especially those that share an 'Islamic identity' with the GCC has been overlooked. In this book Diana Galeeva examines the relations between the Gulf States and Russia from the Soviet era to the present day. Using the Republic of Tatarstan, one of Russia's Muslim polities as a case study, Galeeva demonstrates the emergence of relations between modern Tatarstan and the GCC States, evolving from concerns with economic survival to a rising paradiplomacy reliant on shared Islamic identities. Having conducted fieldwork in the Muslim Republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Dagestan, the book includes interviews with high-ranking political figures, heads of religious organisations and academics. Moving beyond solely economic and geopolitical considerations, the research in this book sheds light on the increasingly important role that culture and shared Islamic identity play in paradiplomacy efforts. The person who asks the best question from the audience during the audience Q&A will be gifted a copy of the book from the author Dr. Diana Galeeva is a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and a Non-Resident Fellow with the Gulf International Forum. She has previously been an Academic Visitor to St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2019-2022). Dr. Galeeva is the author of two books, “Qatar: The Practice of Rented Power” (Routledge, 2022) and “Russia and the GCC: The Case of Tatarstan’s Paradiplomacy” (I.B. Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2023). She is also a co-editor of the collection “Post-Brexit Europe and UK: Policy Challenges Towards Iran and the GCC States” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Diana’s academic papers and public engagement pieces have appeared in International Affairs, The RUSI Journal, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Journal of Islamic Studies, Middle East Institute, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, Gulf International Forum, and the LSE Middle East Centre. She has presented her research at Oxford University, Cambridge University, LSE, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, George Mason University, and MGIMO. Dr Galeeva was a convenor of the international conference ‘Russia and the Muslim World: Through the Lens of Shared Islamic Identities’ (Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, 2021) and a co-director of the workshop ‘Post-Brexit Britain, Europe and Policy towards Iran and the GCC states: Potential Challenges, and the Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge University, Gulf Research Meeting, 2019). Dr. Galeeva completed her bachelor’s at Kazan Federal University (Russia), she holds an MA from Exeter University (UK) and a Ph.D. from Durham University (UK). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/russia-and-the-gcc-9780755646166/

This lecture explores Israel’s secret relations with its neighbors during the years 1948-2022. In order to survive in a hostile environment in the Middle East, Israeli decision makers developed a pragmatic regional foreign policy, designed to find ways to approach states, leaders and minorities willing to cooperate with it against mutual regional challenges (such as the Periphery Alliance with Iran and Turkey (until 1979), the Kurds, the Maronites in Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, South Sudan and more). Contacts with these potential partners were mostly covert. The aim of this lecture, which is part of a new comprehensive book on Israel’s secret relations with its neighbors during the years 1948-2022 is two-fold: First, to offer a theoretical framework explaining the way Israel conducted its covert diplomacy; and second, to focus on several less-known episodes of such clandestine activity, such as Israel’s ties with Saudi Arabia and Gulf in general. The research is based on three types of sources: archival material (mainly Israeli, but also British and American); media (newspapers, Internet, etc.); and more than 100 personal interviews with leading Israeli officials involved in this secret activity in the Mossad, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Intelligence. Elie Podeh is Bamberger and Fuld Professor in the History of the Muslim Peoples in the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served as the Department Chair during the years 2004-2009, and President of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI) during the years 2016-2022. Since 2011 he is Board Member of Mitvim – The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies. He has published and edited fourteen books and more than eighty academic articles in English, Hebrew and Arabic. His most recent book is Israel’s Secret Relations with States and Minorities in the Middle East, 1948-2020 (Hebrew, 2022; and English forthcoming).

Dr Hertog presents the key arguments of his new short monograph “Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism” published by Cambridge University Press. The book argues against the received wisdom that neo-liberal reforms are the main culprit explaining slow growth, corruption and inequality across low- to mid-income Arab countries. It instead proposes that it is the uneven presence of the state – over-protecting some while neglecting others – that accounts for the region’s lopsided development and creates deep insider-outsider divides in Arab economies. On the labour market these divides run between protected public sector workers on one hand and precarious workers in the informal private sector on the other; among firms, the divides run between crony insider companies and small, unconnected firms in the informal economy. Uneven state intervention and insider-outsider divisions reinforce each other and together contribute to an equilibrium of weak productivity and skill formation, which in turn deepens insider-outsider divides. While some of these features are generic to developing countries, others are regionally specific, including the relative importance and historical ambition of the state in the economy and, closely related, the relative size and rigidity of the insider coalitions created through government intervention. Insiders and outsiders exist everywhere, but the divisions are particularly stark, immovable and consequential in the Arab world. They undermine the negotiation of a more equitable social contract between state, business and labour.

Dr Michael Willis' new book offers an explanation of this unexpected development known as the Hirak Movement, examining the political and social changes that have occurred in Algeria since the ‘dark decade’ of the 1990s When mass protests erupted in Algeria in 2019, on a scale unseen anywhere in the region since the Arab Spring, the outside world was taken by surprise. Algeria had been largely unaffected by the turmoil that engulfed its neighbours in 2011, and it was widely assumed that the population was too traumatised and cowed by the country’s bloody civil war of the 1990s to take to the streets demanding change. Algeria: Politics and Society from the Dark Decade to the Hirak offers an explanation of this unexpected development known as the Hirak Movement, examining the political and social changes that have occurred in Algeria since the ‘dark decade’ of the 1990s. It examines how the bitter civil conflict was brought to an end, and how a fresh political order was established following the 1999 election of a new leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Initially underwritten by revenue from Algeria’s substantial hydrocarbons resources, this new order came to be undermined by falling oil prices, an ailing president, and a population determined to have its voice heard by an increasingly corrupt, out-of-touch and opaque national leadership. Dr Michael Willis is a Fellow of the Middle East Centre and St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford where he has taught modern Maghreb politics since 2004. Algeria: Politics and Society from the Dark Decade to the Hirak is his second book on Algeria. His first was The Islamist Challenge in Algeria; A Political History published in 1997. He is also the author of Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring which came out in 2012. Guest Speaker: Dr Michael Willis (St Antony’s College, University of Oxford) Chair: Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)

A new theoretical framework for how democracy can emerge in the Middle East and wider Muslim world, where political conflicts over religion often predominate. Abstract: This talk focuses on the speaker's recently published book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). It provides a new theoretical framework for how democracy can emerge in the Middle East and wider Muslim world, where political conflicts over religion often predominate. Its novel argument is that rather than resolving intractable theological debates about the role of Islam in politics and the public sphere, democratization hinges instead upon religious actors like Islamists and their secularist rivals to make pragmatic compromises that guarantee their mutual survival. Such pacting can usher in long-term accommodation, and lead to the institutionalization of democratic order. From there, theological shifts can occur, demonstrating that temporal politics can be the catalyst for renewed religious interpretations. Tuesday, 22 November 2022 - 5:00pm to 6:00pm Venue: Investcorp Lecture Theatre, St Antony's College Speaker(s): Hicham Alaoui Chair: Dr Michael Willis (St Antony's College) Biography: Hicham Alaoui is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion, with a focus on the MENA region. In the past, he served as a visiting scholar and Consulting Professor at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford University. He more recently served as postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Harvard University. He was also Regents Lecturer at several campuses of the University of California system. Outside of academia, he has worked with the United Nations in various capacities, such as the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He has also worked with the Carter Center in its overseas missions on conflict resolution and democracy advancement. He has served on the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch and the Advisory Board of the Carnegie Middle East Center. He served on the board of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and has recently joined the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. His academic research has been widely published in various French and English journals, magazines, and newspapers of record. His latest book is Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). His memoirs, Journal d'un Prince Banni, was published in 2014 by Éditions Grasset, and has since been translated into several languages. He is co-author with Robert Springborg of The Political Economy of Arab Education (Lynne Rienner, 2021), and co-author with the same colleague on the forthcoming volume Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023).

A talk based on John McManus’s book, Inside Qatar: hidden stories from one of the richest nations on earth. A social anthropologist, McManus lifts a lid on the hidden worlds of Qatar’s gilded elite, its spin doctors and thrill seekers, its manual labourers and domestic workers. He attempts to go beyond the government PR and the negative headlines about its treatment of migrant workers to capture what life is really like in this nation of 3 million people, only 11 per cent of whom are Qatari citizens. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity. The sum of their tales is not some exotic cabinet of curiosities. Instead, Inside Qatar opens a window onto the global problems - of unfettered capitalism, growing inequality and climate change - that concern us all. Biography: John McManus is a social anthropologist whose research looks at sport, migration and multiculturalism in the Middle East, in particular Turkey and Qatar. He is the author of Inside Qatar: hidden stories from one of the richest nations on earth (Icon Books, 2022) and Welcome to Hell? In Search of the Real Turkish Football (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018), the latter awarded runner-up in the 2019 British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society book prize. John holds a PhD in Social anthropology and MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford and is a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the British Institute at Ankara (2016-18). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Financial Times and the BBC, as well as academic journals.

Aaron Rock-Singer presents their latest book "In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East". Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practices—praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation—are understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. In this talk, which is based on his new book In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th Century Middle East,Aaron Rock-Singer argues that Salafism is a creation of the twentieth century and that its signature practices emerged primarily out of Salafis’ competition with other social movements amid the intellectual and social upheavals of modernity. In doing so, he moves beyond the surface claims of Salafism’s own proponents—and the academics who often reproduce them—into the larger sociocultural and intellectual forces that have shaped Islam’s fastest growing revivalist movement. A short biography of Dr Aaron Rock-Singer, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Aaron Rock-Singer is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on 20th century Islamic movements and states. He received his BA at the University of Pennsylvania, his M.Phil at St. Anthony's College, Oxford and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. In his first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and Islamic Revival (Cambridge, 2019), he drew on ideologically diverse Islamic magazines from this period to chart the rise of an Islamic Revival in 1970s Egypt within a larger global story of religious contestation and change. He is currently an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ian Martin presents his latest book on Libya: All Necessary Measures? The United Nations and International Intervention in Libya. In the book, he asks and offer personal answers to these questions: Was the international intervention in Libya a justified response to an impending massacre and wider threat to civilians, or were other motivations involved in seeking to oust Gaddafi and shape the future of an oil-rich country? What were the dynamics that brought about the resolutions of the UN Security Council, including the authorization of military action? How did NATO act upon that authorization, and did it exceed its mandate to protect civilians by seeking regime change? What role in the military victory of the rebels was played by the secretive special forces operations of bilateral actors, and with what consequences? Was there ever a possibility of a peaceful political transition being brought about by the mediation efforts of the UN, the African Union (AU) or others? How well-informed, or how ignorant, were policymakers about Libya and the regional implications of their decisions? What post-conflict planning was undertaken by the UN and other international actors, and by the Libyans themselves, and how did it play out during the first transitional government? Should and could there have been a major peacekeeping or stabilization mission to provide security during the transition, instead of a “light footprint” of the international community? Was the first national election held too soon? Who should and could have done more to help bring the proliferation of armed groups under government authority, and achieve their integration into state security forces or demobilization? In answering each of these questions, he offers his own reflections on the views held at the time and his reassessment today. Ian Martin has headed United Nations field missions in several countries, including as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) 2011-12; Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Nepal 2005-09; and Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the East Timor Popular Consultation 1999. He served as a member of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which reported in June 2015. His other senior UN appointments include Head of the Headquarters Board of Inquiry into certain incidents in the Gaza Strip; Special Envoy for Timor-Leste; Representative in Nepal of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea; Chief of the UN Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda; and Director for Human Rights of the UN/Organization of American States International Civilian Mission in Haiti. He also served in the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina as Deputy High Representative for Human Rights. He was Secretary General of Amnesty International (1986-92), Vice President of the International Center for Transitional Justice (2002-05), and Executive Director of Security Council Report (2015-18). His writings include Self-Determination in East Timor: the United Nations, the Ballot, and International Intervention (2001) and All Necessary Measures? The United Nations and International Intervention in Libya (2022).

A vivid and authoritative account of the making of the modern Middle East, from the BBC’s long-serving correspondent in the region. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor (former Middle East Editor), has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. In this new book, in part based on his acclaimed podcast, Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control. With his deep understanding of the political, cultural and religious differences between countries as diverse as Erdogan's Turkey, Assad's Syria and Netanyahu's Israel and his long experience of covering events in the region, Bowen offers readers a gripping and invaluable guide to the modern Middle East, how it came to be and what its future might hold.

Join us for Booktalk Episode 9, Professor Deborah Starr (Cornell University) in conversation about her new book, Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema, published by California Press. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion. Extract from publisher’s website: In this book, Deborah Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By re-evaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema. Deborah Starr is a professor of Near Eastern Studies and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University. She writes and teaches about issues of identity and inter-communal exchange in Middle Eastern literature and film, with a focus on the Jews of Egypt. She is the author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire (Routledge 2009), and co-editor with Sasson Somekh of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Her new book Togo Mizrahi and The Making of Egyptian Cinema (University of California Press, 2020) recuperates the work of a Jewish a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Starr has also published articles in a variety of journals on cosmopolitanism and levantinism in modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and Egyptian cinema Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). Join us for our MEC live webinars – registration essential; details available from Middle East Centre Events, St Antony's College or subscribe to our weekly e-mailing newsletter by emailing [email protected] and follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC Speakers: Professor Deborah Starr (Cornell University) Chair: Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony’s College, Oxford)

Join us for Booktalk Episode 8, Dr Carl Rommel (University of Helsinki) in conversation about his new book Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics, published by University of Texas Press in July 2021. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion. The book is available for purchase for customers in Europe and the Middle East from https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781477323175/egypts-football-revolution/, quote CSFS2021 at check-out for 30% discount; and for customers in the US, https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/rommel-egypts-football-revolution, quote UTROMEGY at check-out for 20% discount. This video is also available with accessibility features as a podcast at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/middle-east-centre-booktalk Extract from publisher’s website: Both a symbol of the Mubarak government’s power and a component in its construction of national identity, football served as fertile ground for Egyptians to confront the regime’s overthrow during the 2011 revolution. With the help of the state, appreciation for football in Egypt peaked in the late 2000s. Yet after Mubarak fell, fans questioned their previous support, calling for a reformed football for a new, post revolutionary nation. In Egypt’s Football Revolution, Carl Rommel examines the politics of football as a space for ordinary Egyptians and state forces to negotiate a masculine Egyptian chauvinism. Basing his discussion on several years of fieldwork with fans, players, journalists, and coaches, he investigates the increasing attention paid to football during the Mubarak era; its demise with the 2011 uprisings and 2012 Port Said massacre, which left seventy-two fans dead; and its recent rehabilitation. Cairo’s highly organized and dedicated Ultras fans became a key revolutionary force through their anti regime activism, challenging earlier styles of fandom and making visible entrenched ties between sport and politics. As the appeal of football burst, alternative conceptions of masculinity, emotion, and politics came to the fore to demand or prevent revolution and reform. Dr Carl Rommel is a social anthropologist, who earned his PhD from SOAS, University of London (2015). His doctoral research explored the emotional politics of Egyptian football before and after the January 2011 Revolution. Currently, Dr Rommel is a postdoctoral research affiliate in the ERC-funded Crosslocations project at the University of Helsinki. He also teaches anthropology at Stockholm University. His ongoing field research in Cairo interrogates intersections between precarity, masculinity, temporality and urban space in, around and through a variety of large and small ‘projects’ (mashari‘). Dr Rommel’s research has been published in Critical African Studies, Middle East – Topics & Arguments, and Men and Masculinities. Other key article publications by Carl Rommel are: - Rommel, Carl (2018) “Men in time: On masculine productivity, corruption and youth football in the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution” Men and Masculinities, 21(3), 341-362, DOI: 10.1177/1097184X17748173. - Rommel, Carl (2016) “Troublesome Thugs or Respectable Rebels: Class, martyrdom and Cairo’s revolutionary Ultras” Middle East – Topics & Arguments, 6, 33-42, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17192/meta.2016.6.3788. - Rommel, Carl (2014) “A Veritable Game of the Nation: On the changing status of football within the Egyptian national formation in the wake of the 2009 World Cup qualifiers against Algeria” Critical African Studies, 6(2-3), 157-175, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2014.936079. - Rommel, Carl (2011) “Playing with difference: Football as a performative space for division among Suryoye migrants in Sweden” Soccer & Society, 12(6), 850-864, DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2011.609684. Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). Join us for our MEC live webinars – registration essential; details available from Middle East Centre Events | St Antony's College (ox.ac.uk) or subscribe to our weekly e-mailing newsletter by emailing [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford Middle East Centre | St Antony's College (ox.ac.uk) https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/research-centres/middle-east-centre

Join us as we listen to Dr Chihab El Khachab (King’s College, Cambridge) in conversation about his new book – Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry. Published by American University in Cairo Press. Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, Oxford) chairs the discussion. The book is available for purchase from the book distributors of the publisher, email: [email protected] and quote discount code AUCPRESS20 for your 20% discount. Offer available until 31st July 2021. Chihab El Khachab is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. He holds a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford (2017), and was a Junior Research Fellow in Christ Church, Oxford, between 2016 and 2020. His first book, Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology and Mediation Shape the Industry, was published by the American University in Cairo Press in 2021. His broader research interests include Egyptian popular culture, technology, humor, and bureaucracy. Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000). Extract from publisher’s website: The enormous influence of the Egyptian film industry on popular culture and collective imagination across the Arab world is widely acknowledged, but little is known about its concrete workings behind the scenes. Making Film in Egypt provides a fascinating glimpse into the lived reality of commercial film production in today’s Cairo, with an emphasis on labor hierarchies, production practices, and the recent transition to digital technologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation among production workers, on-set technicians, and artistic crew members, Chihab El Khachab sets out to answer a simple question: how do filmmakers deal with the unpredictable future of their films? The answer unfolds through a journey across the industry’s political economy, its labor processes, its technological infrastructure, its logistical and artistic work, and its imagined audiences. The result is a complex and nuanced portrait of the Arab world’s largest film industry, rich in ethnographic detail and theoretical innovations in media anthropology, media studies, and Middle East anthropology. Join us for our MEC live webinars – registration essential; details available from Middle East Centre Events | St Antony's College (ox.ac.uk) or subscribe to our weekly e-mailing newsletter by emailing [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @OxfordMEC

For our sixth episode of MEC Booktalk, guest author David Warren (Washington University in St Louis) discusses his recent book, Rivals in the Gulf, published by Routledge in January 2021. David Warren is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St Louis. This episode is hosted by Dr Usaama al-Azami (Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford). Rivals in the Gulf is available for purchase online direct from routledge.com Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qa (routledge.com) . Use the promo code RITG20 at check-out for your 20% discount. https://www.routledge.com/Rivals-in-the-Gulf-Yusuf-al-Qaradawi-Abdullah-Bin-Bayyah-and-the-Qatar-UAE/Warren/p/book/9780367280628 Extract about the book from the publisher’s website: Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis details the relationships between the Egyptian Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Al Thani royal family in Qatar, and between the Mauritanian Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah and the Al Nahyans, the rulers of Abu Dhabi and senior royal family in the United Arab Emirates. These relationships stretch back decades, to the early 1960s and 1970s respectively. Using this history as a foundation, the book examines the connections between Qaradawi’s and Bin Bayyah’s rival projects and the development of Qatar’s and the UAE’s competing state-brands and foreign policies. It raises questions about how to theorize the relationships between the Muslim scholarly-elite (the ulama) and the nation-state. Over the course of the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis, Qaradawi and Bin Bayyah shaped the Al Thani’s and Al Nahyan’s competing ideologies in important ways. Offering new ways for academics to think about Doha and Abu Dhabi as hegemonic centers of Islamic scholarly authority alongside historical centers of learning such as Cairo, Medina, or Qom, this book will appeal to those with an interest in modern Islamic authority, the ulama, Gulf politics, as well as the Arab Spring and its aftermath. David H. Warren is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St Louis. His research examines the politics of the Muslim scholarly-elite (the ulama), with a particular focus on the Arab Spring and its aftermath. He is the author of Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis (Routledge 2021). Dr Usaama al-Azami is Department Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. His research explores the way in which Islamic scholars, known as the ulama, have responded to modernity, especially in the political realm. He is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Islam and the Arab Revolutions: The Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy.

Guest author Dr Fatemeh Shams (Assistant Professor of Modern Persian Literature, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania) talks with Booktalk host Dr Zuzanna Olszewska (University of Oxford). Dr Zuzanna Olszewska is Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of the Middle East, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. Book available for purchase online at A Revolution in Rhyme OUP Academic discount with promo code AAFLYG6 to save 30% https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-revolution-in-rhyme-9780198858829?cc=gb&lang-en& A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic offers, for the first time, an original, timely examination of the pivotal role poetry plays in policy, power and political legitimacy in modern-day Iran. Through a compelling chronological and thematic framework, Shams presents fresh insights into the emerging lexicon of coercion and unrest in the modern Persian canon. Analysis of the lives and work of ten key poets traces the evolution of the Islamic Republic, from the 1979 Revolution, through to the Iran-Iraq War, the death of a leader and the rise of internal conflicts. Ancient forms jostle against didactic ideologies, exposing the complex relationship between poetry, patronage and literary production in authoritarian regimes, shedding light on a crucial area of discourse that has been hitherto overlooked. (Book description from OUP website) Dr Fatemeh Shams is a specialist in Persian literature. She earned her Ph.D in Oriental Studies from University of Oxford, Wadham College. Before joining Penn, she has taught Persian language and literature in various academic institutions including University of Oxford, University of SOAS and Courtauld Institute of Art in the United Kingdom. Her work focuses on the intersection of literature, politics and society. Fatemeh is interested in the evolution of poetry and patronage in the Persian literary tradition and the representation and transformation of this relationship in modern Iran. She has published articles and book chapters on poetry, patronage and politics in the Iranian context. Her forthcoming book A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option Under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020) is particularly concerned with the question of poets and patrons in the past and present Iran. In her book she demonstrates the role of state-sponsored literary institutions and the ideological state apparatus in promoting state-sponsored literature in the post-revolutionary Iran. She has recently won the Humboldt Foundation Fellowship to join Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin in 2021 in order to embark on her second book project on exile and exilic writing in Persian tradition. Fatemeh is also an internationally acclaimed, award-winning poet and has so far published three collections of poetry in Persian and English. Her first collection, 88 (Berlin: Gardoon, 2012) won the Jaleh Esfahani Poetry Award in London, UK. Her third bilingual collection, When They Broke Down the Door (Washington: Mage Publisher, 2015), translated by the world-famous British literary scholar, translator and poet, Dick Davis, won Latifeh Yarshater Book Award in 2016. Her poetry and her translations have been so far featured in the World Literature Today, Michigan Quarterly Review, Life and Legends, Poetry Foundation, Jacket 2, Penn Sound and more. The upcoming Penguin Anthology of 1000 Years of Poetry by Persian Women Poets translated by Dick Davis (2021) has featured a number of her poems. Website: https://mec.sas.upenn.edu/people/fatemeh-shams Dr Zuzanna Olszewska is a social anthropologist specialising in the ethnography of Iran and Afghanistan, with a focus on Afghan refugees in Iran, the Persian-speaking Afghan diaspora, the anthropology of literature and cultural production, and digital ethnography. She is the author of The Pearl of Dari: Poetry and Personhood among Young Afghans in Iran (Indiana University Press, 2015), an ethnographic inquiry into how poetic activity reflects changes in youth subjectivity in an Afghan refugee community, based on work with an Afghan cultural organisation in Mashhad, Iran. Website: https://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-zuzanna-olszewska#tab-267761

Join us for the fourth MEC Booktalk episode where Dr Usaama al-Azami talks with guest author Andrew March about his new book, The Caliphate of Man: The Invention of Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, published by Harvard University Press, 2021 The book can be purchased direct from the publisher's distributor by emailing [email protected] and quoting h0339 for a 30% discount. Andrew March is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Masachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of political philosophy, Islamic law and political thought, religion and political theory, and comparative and non-Western political theory more generally. His first book, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (Oxford, 2009) is an exploration of the Islamic juridical discourse on the rights, loyalties, and obligations of Muslim minorities in liberal politics, and won the 2009 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion. Andrew has published articles on Islamic law and political thought, secularism, religion and free speech, religious freedom and the boundaries of marriage in liberal society. The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought examines the problem of divine and popular sovereignty in modern Islamic thought through the Arab Spring. Taken direct from the publisher’s webpage: A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change. The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory? Dr Usaama al-Azami is Department Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. His research explores the way in which Islamic scholars, known as the ulama, have responded to modernity, especially in the political realm. He is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Islam and the Arab Revolutions: The Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy.

Join us for the third MEC Booktalk episode where Dr Usaama al-Azami talks with guest author Ahmed El Shamsy about his new book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition. The book can be purchased direct from the publisher's website at a 25% discount until 28/04/21, by quoting DIS21 at check-out: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174563/rediscovering-the-islamic-classics Ahmed El Shamsy is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. Dr Usaama al-Azami is Department Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. His research explores the way in which Islamic scholars, known as the ulama, have responded to modernity, especially in the political realm. He is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Islam and the Arab Revolutions: The Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy.

Episode 2, with Dr Faisal Devji, (St Antony’s College, Oxford), talks with Joshua Craze (University of Chicago) and writer Aaron Tugendhaft about Aaron's new book The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet, University of Chicago Press 2020. Aaron Tugendhaft is an author and educator based in Berlin. He studied art history, political philosophy, and the history of religion at the University of Chicago, New York University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Sorbonne, and has taught humanities to diverse audiences on four continents. In 2013, he was awarded the Jonas C. Greenfield Prize by the American Oriental Society. Joshua Craze is a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a writer-in-residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva, where he is finishing a book on displacement and grief. He has taught political philosophy and anthropology at Sciences-Po, Paris, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has published essays and fiction in the Guardian, N+1, Cabinet, and Foreign Policy, amongst other venues, and was the 2014 UNESCO Artist Laureate in Creative Writing. His work is available at https://www.joshuacraze.com/ Abstract from the book In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq's Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. This book unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet. Beginning with the Islamic State's claim that the smashed objects were idols of the "age of ignorance," Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage. Finally, he compares the Islamic State's production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides. Episode chaired by Dr Faisal Devji, St Antony’s College. Faisal has held faculty positions at the New School in New York, Yale University and the University of Chicago, from where he also received his PhD in Intellectual History. Devji was Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, and Head of Graduate Studies at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, from where he directed post-graduate courses in the Near East and Central Asia.

First episode of Booktalk, where host Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, Oxford) talks with David Rundell on his book Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads, Bloomsbury Publication (2020. The book is available for purchase with the 30% discount code: VOM30 from https://www.Bloomsbury.com/uk/vision-or-mirage-9781838605933 (NB discount code expires end of February 2021) David Rundell. David came to Oxford in 1976 to read for the M.Phil. in modern Middle Eastern studies. He was a student of Albert Hourani’s and a direct contemporary of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. After completing the MPhil in 1978, David entered the U.S. Foreign Service. In 1981 he was posted as a political officer to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, marking the beginning of a 30-year career in diplomacy – 16 of those years spent in Saudi Arabia alone. As America’s most experienced Saudi hand, friends and colleagues have long anticipated his book on Saudi Arabia. Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury’s I.B. Tauris. Abstract from the book itself Something extraordinary is happening in Saudi Arabia. A traditional, tribal society once known for its lack of tolerance is rapidly implementing significant economic and social reforms. An army of foreign consultants is rewriting the social contract, King Salman has cracked down hard on corruption, and his dynamic though inexperienced son, the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is promoting a more tolerant Islam. But is all this a new vision or Saudi Arabia or merely a mirage likely to dissolve into Iranian-style revolution? David Rundell- one of America's foremost experts on Saudi Arabia - explains how the country has been stable for so long, why it is less so today, and what is most likely to happen in the future. The book is based on the author's close contacts and intimate knowledge of the country where he spent 15 years living and working as a diplomat. Vision or Mirage demystifies one of the most powerful, but least understood, states in the Middle East and is essential reading for anyone interested in the power dynamics and politics of the Arab World.