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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.

The objective of Destroying Yemen is to put South Arabia within a framework of analysis that permits new ways to explore the global transformations driven by “liberalism and market economics” during the 1900-2017 period. Of concern are the kinds of interactions between external parties, primarily driven by globalist doctrines seeking to extract the considerable surplus wealth produced in South Arabia. Crucially, the response from Yemen’s indigenous peoples appears to have global significance. Long self-sufficient and often themselves actively engaged in dynamic trans-regional relations that pre-date the ascendency of global capitalism, looking closely at how Yemenis confront and until now, resist globalist encroachments presents us an opportunity to reinterpret recent events in Yemen and the larger world since the Cold War. In particular, this book analyzes post-war Yemen through its close association with, among other things, a neo-liberal model of economic “development” that ultimately arrives in Yemen via various channels—Egypt’s invasion in 1962, Takfiri violence with Saudi support, and neoliberal “reforms” introduced by stealth over a period of 30 years. The fact that Yemen played an important role in shaping the trajectory of what were global visions for imposing Euro-American power throughout the Middle East, may prove invaluable to a broad range of scholars interested in studying the modern world from the perspective of indigenous agents.

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.

Like electricity, political power travels through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. Electrical Palestine charts the construction of Palestine’s electric grid in the interwar period and its implication in the area’s rapid and uneven development. It does so in an effort to rethink both the origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the interplay of politics, capital, and technology more broadly. The study follows the coevolution of the power system and Zionist state building efforts in Palestine on the conceptual and material level. Conceptually, the design and construction of the system shaped Palestine as a precisely bounded entity with a distinct political, social, and economic character. Materially, the borders of the mandate were mapped onto the power system and structured an ethno-national division of capital, land, and labor. In 1948, these coevolving forces ultimately carried over into Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness.

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.

Based on the reading of top-secret files of the Israeli police and the prime minister's office, this book exposes the full extent of the crucial, and, until now, willfully hidden history of Palestine's collaboration with Israelis—and of the Arabs' resistance to it. A previous book, Army of Shadows, told how this hidden history played out from 1917 to 1948. Now, this book focuses on the system of collaborators established by Israel in each and every Arab community after the 1948 war. Covering a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, the book brings together the stories of activists, mukhtars, collaborators, teachers, and sheikhs, telling how Israeli security agencies penetrated Arab communities, how they obtained collaboration, how national activists fought them, and how deeply this activity influenced daily life. When this book was first published in Hebrew, it became a bestseller. It evoked bitter memories and intense discussions among Palestinians in Israel, and prompted the reclassification of many of the hundreds of documents the author viewed to uncover a story that continues to unfold to this day.

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, this book discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by the author show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as a geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.

Through a microhistory of Qina, a small province in Upper Egypt, this book investigates the history of five world empires that assumed hegemony in this province over the last five hundred years. It explores modes of subaltern rebellion against these “imagined empires” that failed in achieving their professed goals and brought about environmental crises to Qina province. As the book deconstructs myths about early modern and modern empires, it shows how these global hegemons claimed to introduce forms of modernity to the colonized peoples of Qina, particularly through market-economy measures, but their modernity only dispossessed peasants, repressed laborers, and further subjugated women. Imperial modernity and its market economy disrupted existing systems of landownership, irrigation, trade, and more, and left behind immense waves of the plague and cholera. Qina’s lower classes, who were hurt and sometimes killed by the imperial incompetence, devised their own modes of both daily-life resistance and massive uprisings against the empire, in which audacious bandits assumed leadership roles. The book covers the Ottoman, French, Muhammad Ali’s, and the British Empires, and alludes to the US Empire and its failed market economy in Upper Egypt, which partially resulted in Qina’s participation in the 2011 revolution.

This history of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip allows us to see beyond the smoke screen of politics in order to make sense of the dramatic changes that have developed on the ground. Looking at a wide range of topics, from control of water and electricity to health care and education, as well as surveillance and torture, it reveals a fundamental shift from a politics of life—when, for instance, Israel helped Palestinians plant more than six-hundred thousand trees in Gaza and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds—to a macabre politics characterized by an increasing number of deaths. Drawing attention to the interactions, excesses, and contradictions created by the forms of control used in the Occupied Territories, the author argues that the occupation's very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government or the actions of various Palestinian political factions, has led to this radical shift.

Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.

This biography is an insider's account of the life and times of Mohammad Reza Shah, who ruled from 1941 to 1979 as the last Iranian monarch. The book takes advantage of unparalleled access to a large number of individuals—including high-ranking figures in the shah's regime, members of his family, and members of the opposition—to depict the unfolding of the shah's life against the forces and events that shaped the development of modern Iran. This account provides a new perspective on key events in Iranian history, including the 1979 revolution, U.S.-Iran relations, and Iran's nuclear program. It also sheds new light on what drives political and cultural currents in a country at the heart of today's most perplexing geopolitical dilemmas.

Histories written in the aftermath of empire have often featured conquerors and peasant rebels but have said little about the vast staffs of locally recruited clerks, technicians, teachers, and medics who made colonialism work day to day. Even as these workers maintained the colonial state, they dreamed of displacing imperial power. This book examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898–1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation-state. Relying on a rich cache of Sudanese Arabic literary sources—including poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as colonial documents and photographs—it examines colonialism from the viewpoint of those who lived and worked in its midst. By integrating the case of Sudan with material on other countries, particularly India, the book has broad comparative appeal. The author shows that colonial legacies—such as inflexible borders, atomized multi-ethnic populations, and autocratic governing structures—have persisted, hobbling postcolonial nation-states. Thus countries like Sudan are still living with colonialism, struggling to achieve consensus and stability within borders that a fallen empire has left behind.

This book reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male authored, in the late nineteenth century, short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. The book uses more than 500 “famous women” biographies—which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu, and Lucy Stone—to demonstrate how these narratives prescribed complex role models for middle-class girls, in a context where nationalist programs and emerging feminisms made defining the ideal female citizen an urgent matter. It begins by asking how cultural traditions shaped women's biography, and to whom the Egyptian biographies were directed. The biographies were published at a time of great cultural awakening in Egypt, when social and political institutions were in upheaval. The stories suggested that Islam could be flexible on social practice and gender, holding out the possibility for women to make their own lives. Yet ultimately they indicated that women would find it extremely difficult to escape the nationalist ideal: the nuclear family with “woman” at its center. This conflict remains central to Egyptian politics today, and in her final chapter the author examines Islamic biographies of women's lives that have been published in more recent years.