Browse

This book discusses how justice was administrated and applied in medieval Egypt. The model that evolved during the early middle ages involved four judicial institutions: the cadi, the court of complaints (mazalim), the police (shurta), responsible for criminal justice, and the Islamised market law (hisba), administrated by the market supervisor (the muhtasib). Literary and non-literary sources are used to highlight how these institutions worked in real-time situations such as the famine of 1024-1025, which posed tremendous challenges to both the market supervisor and the ruling establishment. The inner workings of the court of complaint during the Fatimid period (10^th-12^th century) are also extensively discussed. The discussion is extended to include the way the courts of non-Muslim communities were perceived and functioned during the Fatimid period. The discussion also provides insights into the scope of non-Muslim self-rule/judicial autonomy in medieval Islam.

A socio-political and cultural history of the Armenians in Cold War Lebanon, this book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial 1940s and 1950s. Tsolin Nalbantian explores Armenians’ discursive re-positioning within the newly independent Lebanese nation-state; the political-cultural impact (in Lebanon as well as Syria) of the 1946–8 repatriation initiative to Soviet Armenia; the 1956 Catholicos election; and the 1957 Lebanese elections and 1958 mini-civil war. What emerges is a post-Genocide Armenian history of – principally – power, renewal and presence, rather than one of loss and absence. Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own investigates Lebanese Armenians’ changing views of their place in the making of the Lebanese state and its wider Arab environment, and in relation to the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic. It challenges the dominant Armenian historiography, which treats Lebanese Armenians as a subsidiary of an Armenian global diaspora, and contributes to an understanding of the development of class and sectarian cleavages that led to the breakdown of civil society in Lebanon from 1975. In highlighting the role of societal actors in the US–Soviet Cold War in the Middle East, it also questions the tendency to read Middle East history through the lens of dominant (Arab) nationalisms.

Since the early 1990s, Israel has greatly expanded a system checkpoints, walls and other barriers in the West Bank and Gaza that restrict Palestinian mobility. As a result, such border spaces have become ubiquitous elements of everyday life, with profound political, socio-cultural, and economic effects.  Israel/Palestine examines how authors and filmmakers in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel have grappled with the spread and impact of these borders in the period since the Oslo Accords of 1994. Focusing on novels by Raba’i al-Madhoun, Ghassan Kanafani, Sami Michael and Sayed Kashua, and films by Elia Suleiman, Simon Bitton, Emad Burnat, and Guy Davidi, Israel/Palestine traces how political engagement in literature and film has shifted away from previously common paradigms of resistance and coexistence. Instead, it has become reorganised around these now ubiquitous physical barriers. Using strategies of narrative fragmentation, multivocality, metafiction, fantasy, and silence to depict the effects of these borders, authors and filmmakers interrogate the notion that such spaces are impenetrable and unbreakable by revealing their deceptive and illusive qualities. In doing so, they also imagine distinct forms of protest, and redefine the relationship between cultural production and political engagement.

Uncovering a history buried by competing nationalist narratives (Jewish, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has lasted for over a century. It changes how we understand the conflict by exploring the period before World War One: a time when a unique sense of Palestinian identity emerged, and many Zionists imagined a Jewish national home within an Ottoman framework. Further it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict. The new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions, rather than serving as a unifying factor. Offering an integrative approach, this book considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years. This book is based on documents in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and French, and moves beyond Palestine to see how the debate over Zionism also played out in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, where both Jews and Palestinians set out to “claim their homeland.

Palestinian citizens in Israel are part of the Palestinian nation that was scattered and divided during the 1948 War (Nakba, a catastrophe), amidst which Israel was founded. Today, Palestinian citizens in Israel are not part of the emancipatory movement of Palestinians outside of Israel. The primary question, then, that this book aims to address relates to understanding the transformation in Palestinian discourse, from that which spoke of national self-determination, to a discourse that is not coherently nationalist. The study of literature aims to provide a view ‘from within’ onto Palestinian discourse. Incorporating almost the entire corpus of Palestinian novels published in Israel between 1948 and 2010, the book aims to deal with the widest possible spectrum of representation. This choice aims to complement existing sociological and literary analysis on Palestinians in Israel. The book is divided to three chapters, corresponding to political periods in the life of Palestinians in Israel (1948−1967; 1967−1987; and 1987−2010). In the first period, Palestinians in Israel adapt to life under military rule, but they also undergo a process of modernization that aimed, so they believed, to facilitate their integration in Israeli society. Since the late 1960s, during the second period, Palestinians start to question the implications of modernization on their society, highlighting the ambivalence of their life in Israel. In the third period, Palestinians in Israel start to contemplate ‘solutions’ for this ambivalence, or alienation, bringing to the fore issues relating to their relationship with Israel as well as Palestinians across the border.

Focusing on the construction of sanctity and its manifestations in individual devotions, formal ceremonies and communal rites, this book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates Islamic thinking about and practice in sacred places and times through the detailed research of two contested case-studies: the shrine(s) in honour of the head of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAli, and the (arguably) holy month of Rajab. The narrative spans the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, attuned to changing political contexts and sectarian affiliations, and to the input of the social sciences and the study of religion. The juxtaposition of sacred place and time reveals that the two expanses were regarded as complementary venues for similar religious devotions, and imagined by a common vocabulary.

This book provides a study of secularisation and secularism in the Arab World, between middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth. It approaches the its subject in the modern history of the Arab World as a set of historical changes which affected the regulation of social, political, religious and cultural order which permeated the concrete workings of society, rather than as an ideological discussion framed from the outset by the presumed opposition between Islam and secularism. The book traces social, institutional and cultural changes of a secularising character, the emergence and consolidation of a secular political and legal system, the rise of a new type of educational and political arrangements with their complement of a modern intelligentsia, the social and institutional attrition of the Muslim religious institution and the strong reformist current in Islam, the rise of modern cognitive regimes, ideologies and secular culture, and the balances of secular and religious elements in nationalism. The book traces the rise of secularist and anti-religious culture in the variety of its manifestations, and of anti-modernism as well, and the emergence of associated religious and anti-modernist currents in the wake of the 1967 war, the associated strengthening of Islamist politics and its move from the margins to the centre in the last quarter of the twentieth century.