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A remarkable view of how geopolitics affects ordinary people, this book documents the lives of Armenians in the last two decades. Based on intimate interviews with 300 Armenians, it brings together firsthand testimony about the social, economic, and spiritual circumstances of Armenians during the 1980s and 1990s, when the country faced an earthquake, pogroms, and war. The book is a story of extreme suffering and hardship, a searching look at the fight for independence and a complex portrait of the human spirit. A companion to Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide by the same authors, it focuses on four groups of people: survivors of the earthquakes that devastated northwestern Armenia in 1988; refugees from Azerbaijan who fled Baku and Sumgait because of pogroms against them; women, children, and soldiers who were affected by the war in Nagorno-Karabakh; and ordinary citizens who survived several winters without heat because of the blockade against Armenia by Turkey and Azerbaijan. The authors' narrative situates these accounts contextually and thematically, but the voices of individuals remain paramount.

Inspired by stories he heard in the West Bank as a child, the author of this biook uncovers here a hidden history central to the narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict but for the most part willfully ignored until now. This book was initially published in Israel to high acclaim and intense controversy and tells the story of Arabs who, from the very beginning of the Arab-Israeli encounter, sided with the Zionists and aided them politically, economically, and in security matters. Based on newly declassified documents and research in Zionist, Arab, and British sources, the book follows Bedouins who hosted Jewish neighbors, weapons dealers, pro-Zionist propagandists, and informers and local leaders who cooperated with the Zionists, and others to reveal an alternate history of the mandate period with repercussions extending to this day. The book illuminates the Palestinian nationalist movement, which branded these “collaborators” as traitors and persecuted them; the Zionist movement, which used them to undermine Palestinian society from within and betrayed them; and the collaborators themselves, who held an alternate view of Palestinian nationalism. This book offers a new view of history from below and raises profound questions about the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Bread from Stones explores how modern humanitarianism evolved in the face of the historical experience of mass violence, starvation, human trafficking, and the displacement of millions in the early twentieth-century eastern Mediterranean. Using a vast array of archival, literary, and visual sources, the book juxtaposes the inhumanity of war, civil conflict, and genocide with the creation of forms of aid for the victims of violence, the establishment of institutions to resettle displaced peoples, and the elaboration of novel, international legal regimes for refugees. It traces the origins of modern humanitarianism from the perspective of its implementation in the eastern Mediterranean as both practice and ideology, and it connects it to the other dominant ideologies of the interwar period—nationalism and colonialism; it defines humanitarianism’s role in the history of human rights and addresses how the concept of shared humanity informed bureaucratic, social, and legal humanitarian practices.

This historical and political analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict combines the unique perspectives of two prominent segments of the Middle Eastern puzzle: Israeli Jews and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Written jointly by an Israeli anthropologist and a Palestinian family therapist born weeks apart to two families from Haifa, the book merges the personal and the political as it explores the various stages of the conflict, from the 1920s to the present. The text weaves vivid accounts and vignettes of family history into a multidisciplinary analysis of the political drama that continues to unfold in the Middle East. The book offers an authoritative inquiry into the traumatic events of October 2000, when thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed by Israeli police during political demonstrations, and culminates in a blueprint for reform.

Israel's military court system, a centerpiece of Israel's apparatus of control in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. This book provides a rare look at an institution that lies both figuratively and literally at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book includes the results of in-depth interviews with dozens of Israelis and Palestinians—including judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendants, and translators—about their experiences and practices to explain how this system functions, and how its functioning has affected the conflict. The study highlights the array of problems and debates that characterize Israel's military courts as it asks how the law is deployed to protect and further the interests of the Israeli state and how it has been used to articulate and defend the rights of Palestinians living under occupation.

Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, this book shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. It challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to Westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, not a primordial reaction to it. The author argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement, launched in 1839, and the growing European presence in the Middle East, contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. The book highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms, each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity, and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. It is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.

This book establishes the existence of a special radical trajectory spanning four continents and linking Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914. The author shows that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. In situating the Middle East within the context of world history, she challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history, as well as Eurocentric ideas about global radical movements. The book demonstrates that these radical trajectories played a fundamental role in shaping societies throughout the world, and offers a powerful rethinking of Ottoman intellectual and social history.

Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its national form of Islam, “Moroccan Islam.” This book argues that Moroccan Islam is far from timeless, that the discourse on Moroccan Islam was the collective product of a generation of French scholars, volunteer ethnologists, and colonial officers. The chapters in part 1 trace the history of the Moroccan colonial archive over the period 1900–1912. They argue that the Moroccan colonial archive was not just a product of its Algerian colonial roots and discursive destiny. Rather, it must be viewed against the background of the multiple historical conjunctures (diplomatic, political, and intellectual). The chapters in part 2 explore the transformation of Moroccan Islam following the 1912 establishment of the French protectorate. In this phase, French ethnographers were tasked with providing the basis for native policy planning. A series of publications were launched and new institutions were founded, among them, the Institut des hautes marocaines and the Ecole supérieure des lettres. Chapters in this section also detail the development of French policy toward Moroccan Berbers and cities. Part 3 traces how the discourse on Moroccan Islam provided the ideological template for the French protectorate over Morocco, a model of indirect rule that claimed to be deeply respectful of Moroccan traditions and culture and the preexisting Moroccan state structures. Ultimately, the French colonial project was deeply dependent upon the hegemony of the discourse on Moroccan Islam. It structured, organized, and institutionalized the perceptions of the protectorate for non-Moroccans and Moroccans alike, in the process, creating the modern Moroccan polity.

Drawing on a rich trove of documents, including correspondence not seen for 300 years, this study explores the emergence and growth of a remarkable global trade network operated by Armenian silk merchants from a small outpost in the Persian Empire. Based in New Julfa, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, these merchants operated a network of commercial settlements that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco. The New Julfan Armenians were the only Eurasian community that was able to operate simultaneously and successfully in all the major empires of the early modern world—both land-based Asian empires and the emerging sea-borne empires—astonishingly without the benefits of an imperial network and state that accompanied and facilitated European mercantile expansion during the same period. This book brings to light for the first time the trans-imperial cosmopolitan world of New Julfa. Among other topics, it explores the effects of long distance trade on the organization of community life, the ethos of trust and cooperation that existed among merchants, and the importance of information networks and communication in the operation of early modern mercantile communities.

This study illuminates the Egyptian experience of modernity by critically analyzing the foremost medium through which it was articulated: history. This comprehensive analysis of a Middle Eastern intellectual tradition examines a system of knowledge that replaced the intellectual and methodological conventions of Islamic historiography only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Covering more than one hundred years of mostly unexamined historical literature in Arabic, the book explores Egyptian historical thought, examines the careers of numerous critical historians, and traces this tradition's uneasy relationship with colonial forms of knowledge as well as with the post-colonial state.