Bøger i Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Paradigms serien

Although decades of scholarship have critiqued traditional binaries of developed and undeveloped in Arab studies, the narrative of 1798 symbolizing the coming of the modern west to the rescue of the static east endures. This book takes stock of this dominant paradigm, interrogating its origins and the ways in which scholarship perpetuates it.

This is the first study in English of French-language fiction by Lebanese women writers and therefore brings a relatively unknown literary tradition to light.

Takes a gendered approach to labor conflicts, anticolonial struggles, and citizenship in modern Lebanon. Challenging the assumptions about culturally inscribed roles for Middle Eastern women, this book highlights traditions of public activism and militancy among rural women that are in turn adapted to the spaces of the French Tobacco Monopoly.

Draws a comparison between the dynamics of settler colonialism in the United States in regard to Native Americans and Israel in regard to the Palestinians, revealing the way in which politics influences literary production. This work also identifies the commonalities in the myths and rationales employed by both groups.

In fine detail, Hanna explores economic influences on culture during periods of plenty and poverty during the first three centuries of Ottoman rule. She unveils a fully-fledged Cairene middle-class culture that bridges the gap between the salons (majalis) of the elite and the common people.

A history of elite women who were concubines and wives of powerful slave-soldiers, known as Mamluks, who dominated Egypt both politically and militarily in the eighteenth century.

This study of modern Egypt aims to open the debate regarding new terms and methods for understanding the Middle East and Islamic societies. Sonbol shows continuity in the division of Egyptian society into two groups: the ""Khassa"" which tried to impose a hegemonic culture, and the opposing ""Amma"".

In the wake of recent upheavals across the Arab world, a simplistic media portrayal of the region as homogenous has given way to a new though equally shallow portrayal, casting it as divided along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines. The essays gathered in this volume challenge this representation with a nuanced exploration of the ways in which ethnic, religious, and linguistic commitments have intersected to create "minority” communities in the modern era.

"This volume originated in a conference held at the Middle East Studies Center at Portland State University in 2013, Minorities of the Modern Middle East."--Acknowledgments page.

Offers a reexamination of the Egyptian women's movement in light of class differences. This book describes the way in which elite feminism created a concept of womanhood that fed into the nationalist cultural ideal, one that was not necessarily progressive for all Egyptian women.

Deftly synthesizing a wide range of economic and historical theory, Hanna reinvigorates the current scholarship on early Ottoman history and provides a persuasive challenge to the largely shallow perception of artisans' role in Egypt's economy.

The popular image of the family and the court of law in Muslim societies is one of traditional, unchanging social frameworks. The author suggests a different view. This book challenges assumptions about family, courts of law, and the nature of modernity in Muslim societies against the backdrop of Haifa and Jaffa during the long 19th-century.

Combined into one volume and translated into English for the first time from two seminal Arabic works published in the 1970s, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of landownership and its effects on Egyptian society. The authors draw from extensive archival sources, successfully integrating in their work the competing forces of the state, the landlords, and the peasants.

Challenges the paradigm of the societal decline as inadequate for understanding the Ottoman society and state during this period. This book evaluates the established historical view of the Ottoman Empire as an Eastern despotic nation-state in decline, and instead analyzes it as a modern state comparable to contemporary states in Europe and Asia.

Challenging the ethnocentric notion that a capitalist economy could only be transferred to the peripheral states through contact with Europe, this text argues that the capitalist transformation of the Egyptian economy was begun by Muslim merchants and Mamluk rulers in the 18th century.