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 talk from Joseph Bahout, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Associate Professor of Practice in Political Studies. In this talk, Joseph Bahout, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Associate Professor of Practice in Political Studies, shares his analysis of the current political situation in Lebanon and Syria.

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.