Middle East Centre Booktalk

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

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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.