Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East – serie
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60 produkter
60 produkter
235 kr
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This is a study of Arab writers such as Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaikh, Emily Nasrallah and Etel Adnan. It presents a constructive literary approach to the ravages of the civil war in the Lebanon. The ways in which women's consciousness is awakened in terms of female liberation is a theme.
Sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa
Contemporary Issues and Challenges
Inbunden, Engelska, 2024
878 kr
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Issues of sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa have served as a lightning rod for international discussions surrounding the treatment of those who identify as LGBTQ+, sexual and reproductive health, and the prevention of sexual violence. While a growing body of scholarship and internal advocacy groups have brought more open dialogue within the MENA region, this volume is the first of its kind to provide critical insights and academic analysis into a broad range of complex and controversial issues dealing with sexuality. Spanning a wide array of countries from Algeria to Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, this volume offers a comprehensive regional analysis that transcends the limitations of country-specific studies. Three themes guide the volume’s organization: sexual politics, rights, and movements; gender and sexual minorities; and sexual health, identity, and well-being. Drawing on contemporary scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork, the contributors shed light on the ways in which sexuality is a foundational element of national and regional discourses, serves as a political tool for marking difference, and has the possibility to enlighten, restrict, liberate, or oppress the millions of individuals living in the region. This volume is essential reading for scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of sexuality, identity, and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa.
Sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa
Contemporary Issues and Challenges
Häftad, Engelska, 2024
404 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Issues of sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa have served as a lightning rod for international discussions surrounding the treatment of those who identify as LGBTQ+, sexual and reproductive health, and the prevention of sexual violence. While a growing body of scholarship and internal advocacy groups have brought more open dialogue within the MENA region, this volume is the first of its kind to provide critical insights and academic analysis into a broad range of complex and controversial issues dealing with sexuality. Spanning a wide array of countries from Algeria to Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, this volume offers a comprehensive regional analysis that transcends the limitations of country-specific studies. Three themes guide the volume’s organization: sexual politics, rights, and movements; gender and sexual minorities; and sexual health, identity, and well-being. Drawing on contemporary scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork, the contributors shed light on the ways in which sexuality is a foundational element of national and regional discourses, serves as a political tool for marking difference, and has the possibility to enlighten, restrict, liberate, or oppress the millions of individuals living in the region. This volume is essential reading for scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of sexuality, identity, and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa.
Istanbul Appearances
Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey
Häftad, Engelska, 2023
363 kr
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In the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly common practice, especially among younger and middle-aged women. Turkey now ranks among the top countries worldwide with the highest number of cosmetic procedures, and with its cultural and economic capital, Istanbul has become a regional center for the beauty and fashion industries. Istanbul Appearances shows the profound effects of this growing market on urban residents’ body images, gendered norms, and practices. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork carried out in beauty salons and clinics in different parts of the city, Liebelt explores how standards of femininity and female desire have shifted since the consolidation of power and authoritarian rule of the conservative, pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party.Arguing that the politics of beauty are intricately bound up with the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Liebelt shows that female bodies have become a major site for the negotiation of citizenship. It is in the numerous beauty salons and clinics that the heteronormative ideals and images of gendered bodies become real, embodied in a complex array of emotional desires of who and what is considered not only beautiful but also morally proper.
713 kr
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When modern debates about Islamic law and women’s rights make headlines, they often overlook centuries of history where Muslim women actively engaged with and shaped Islamic legal traditions. In Living Law, Rosemary Admiral reveals how women in premodern Morocco weren’t merely subjects of Islamic law—they were savvy legal actors who used religious courts and scholarly opinions to advocate for their rights and protect their interests. Drawing on a rich collection of fatwas (legal opinions) from the Maliki school of Islamic law, Admiral reconstructs a world where women negotiated marriage contracts, secured their financial futures, and built partnerships that aligned with their vision of family life. These women, though not formally trained as legal scholars, displayed sophisticated knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence and skillfully navigated the legal system to achieve their goals. Living Law offers an interdisciplinary perspective that challenges simplistic narratives about gender and Islamic law. Admiral demonstrates how the Maliki legal tradition in Morocco—a region that remained outside Ottoman control—provided women with tools to renegotiate their rights through contract stipulations and consultations with local scholars. The result is a nuanced portrait of how Islamic law functioned not as an unchangeable divine mandate, but as a living tradition shaped by the communities it served.
745 kr
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While humanitarian organizations and media outlets often reduce Syrian refugees to statistics or brief anecdotes, the real story of displacement unfolds in the intimate spaces of family life. Through the interwoven narratives of five middle-aged sisters from Damascus, Lines of Flight, Assemblages of Home reveals how Syrian women navigate war, exile, and the profound transformation of their families and identities. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017, this book follows an extended Sunni Muslim family as they flee their homes in Damascus’s Eastern Ghouta suburbs and scatter across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and eventually Europe. As these women move through an increasingly hostile landscape of border controls, refugee camps, and human trafficking networks, they must reinvent themselves—from stable middle-class mothers to resourceful survivors, from guardians of tradition to architects of change. Their journeys challenge conventional assumptions about refugee experiences, revealing how displacement reconfigures family networks, religious practices, and gender roles. Leila Hudson’s intimate portrait of Syrian displacement offers vital insights for researchers and practitioners working in humanitarian assistance, refugee resettlement, and forced migration. It provides essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how ordinary families navigate extraordinary circumstances, and how women in particular bear both the burdens and opportunities of displacement.
205 kr
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This volume is about the ways of promoting women's participation in the affairs of Muslim societies: from raising conciousness and changing codes of law, to penetrating the economic markets and influencing national and international policies.
310 kr
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This collection of articles written by feminist scholars focuses on intimate Arab familial relationships. The authors identify key family relationships - mother-son, brother-sister, co-wives, father-daughter - to explore women's contribution to shaping and defining themselves in relation to others.
214 kr
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This work serves to articulate the disparate, dispersed, and displaced narratives of five Persian subjects. Its complex arguments show five figures' links to a stable Persian identity - complicated by their experiences of travel, exile, conversion, and social change.
119 kr
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An incisive study of the past, present, and future of Jordanian and Palestinian women women and issues of employment, education, human rights, Islamic law, and legal practice. Focusing specifically on Jordanian and Palestinian women, Amira El-Azhary Sonbol shows the legal constraints extant in a number of legal codes, namely penal codes that permit violence against Muslim women and personal status laws that require a husband's permission for a woman to work. Leniency in honor crimes and early marriage and motherhood for girls are other factors which extend the patriarchal power throughout an Arab and Muslim woman's life, and ultimately deny her full legal competency. Constitutions may declare all citizens equal before the eyes of the law, but labor, personal status, and criminal laws contradict this. Significantly, Sonbol notes that social acceptance of these laws as ""Islamic"" constitutes a major problem in any effort to change them - even though historically the Islamic Shari'a actually encourages women's work and throughout Islamic history Muslim women have contributed materially to their society's economy. In a book that will make an important contribution to the literature in the field Sonbol effectively illustrates how Jordanian laws controlling gender, family, and work combine with laws and legal philosophies derived from tribal, traditional, Islamic, and modern laws to form a strict patriarchal structure.
235 kr
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A true ""intersection"" of Arab women's texts that challenges and rewrites the traditional boundaries of nation, gender, and community. This rigorously documented collection brings together for the first time original essays by leading authorities in the field on nine contemporary Arab women novelists from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. The work focuses on texts available in English translation and explores with great theoretical sophistication the relationship of these authors' texts to contemporary phenomena of feminism, nationalism, post-colonialism, war, transnationalism, and societal change.
257 kr
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Six candid interviews introduce readers to a class of Muslim women rarely acknowledged in the West. The book aims to shed light on the status, conflicts and social realities of educated Muslim women in Pakistan. They tell of the conflicts and compromises with family and community, while facing violence, archaic marriage rules and locally entrenched codes of conduct. They speak of human dignity and gender equality, economic deprivation and social justice, and of feminism and fundamentalism. Challenging prevalent stereotypes, the book aims to reveal the uniqueness of each woman and the diversity of Pakistani women's life experiences, their world views and the struggles to change their society. Each chapter explores a particular woman's life experiences and her attempts to reconcile her career with her personal life, providing examples of ways of resolving religious, cultural and political conflicts. Through their struggles, professional Pakistani women have become conscious of their own and other women's situations within their society. Because they exercise power and authority in their chose fields, they risk losing their family's support and antagonizing their community. The book offers a perspective to reflect on the changing circumstances of professional Pakistani women, as well as on the established patterns and structural constraints within Pakistan. On a broader level, it examines western misconceptions regarding Islam, a religion that crosses many borders and impacts differently on many cultures.
205 kr
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In the late 1990s, Mahnaz Kousha interviewed 15 Iranian women in Tehran who originally came from cities and towns throughout Iran. The youngest was 38, the eldest in her 50s. Extensive excerpts from their dialogues comprise the heart of this volume. The women explore their relationships with their mothers, fathers, husbands and children. They reflect upon the institutions of courtship and marriage and address issues of childcare, housework and women's employment. They talk openly about their concerns, ambitions and frustrations. Finally, they discuss everyday personal problems and the solutions they devise to cope with such difficulties. Offset by commentary, the conversations offer firsthand insights into the life experiences of the modern Iranian woman and her search for identity. Aiming to fill a gap in the study of gender and family relationships in Iran, the books footnotes on similar studies in the US and other countries mean the text should be relevant beyond Iran and the Middle East.
475 kr
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This volume introduces new sources for the study of the past and present life of Muslim women that challenge paradigms about the ways in which ""they"" have been studied in the past. Most research has treated stereotypical images of Muslim women's outward manifestations, such as veiling, as passive and oppressive - women were depicted as different. Exoticizing (orientalizing) Muslim women - or Islamic society in general - has meant that ""they"" are dealt with outside of general women's history and thus have little to contribute to the writing of world history or to the life of their sisters worldwide. By approaching widely used sources with different questions and methodologies, and by using new or little-used research (with much primary research), this book redresses these deficiencies. Amira El-Azhary Sonbol and the contributors deconstruct the past and offer fresh new perspectives. Authors revisit and reevaluate scripture and scriptural interpretation; church records involving non-Muslim women of the Arab world; archival court records dating from the present back to the Ottoman period; and the oral and material culture and its written record, including art and architecture, oral history, textbooks, sufi practices, and the politics of dress.
257 kr
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This book examines gender, women's involvement, and sexuality in the ideologies and strategies of a transnational Palestinian political movement. This book focuses on the central party apparatus of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Democratic Front (DF) branches established in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Jordan in the 1970s, and the most influential and innovative of the DF women's organizations: the Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees in the occupied territories. Until now, no study of a Palestinian political organization has so thoroughly engaged with internal gender histories. In addition, no other work attempts to systematically compare branches in different regional locations to explain those differences. Students of gender and Middle East studies, especially those with a specialty in Palestinian studies, will find this work to be of critical importance. This book will also be of great interest to those working on political protest movements and factional ties.
482 kr
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This groundbreaking volume takes an insightful look at how entire households, families, and individuals "cope," negotiate their lives, and plan to achieve goals in Occupied Palestine. Contributors raise critical questions about such issues as tradition vs. modernity and the socio-cultural consequences of emigration. Living Palestine posits that household dynamics (i.e., kin-based marriage, fertility decisions, children's education, and living arrangements) cannot be fully grasped unless linked to the traumas of the past and worries of the present. Likewise, that family strategies for survival and social mobility under occupation are swept up in the tide of history that engulfs the world in which Palestinians live and struggle as individuals, households, and as a society. Living Palestine is drawn from an expansive 1999 research project of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University in which two thousand households in nineteen communities were surveyed with an aim to examining the Palestinian household from multiple angles.
Pioneers or Pawns?
Women Health Workers and the Politics of Development in Yemen
Inbunden, Engelska, 2007
398 kr
Skickas inom 11-20 vardagar
Using the Hodeida Urban Primary Health Care Project as a case study, Marina de Regt offers a fascinating analysis of how development policies of the state interconnect with agendas of global donor organizations and the employment of women in the face of social disapproval and barriers to advancement. She demonstrates women's positive impact on the complex workings of Yemeni health institutions. Her highly accessible writing blends keen observations steeped in personal experience with a thorough grounding in the theoretical literature. Through interviews and the experience of working directly with the women she writes about, de Regt gives voice to her subjects and offers an extraordinary portrait of the lives, emotions, and work of women dedicated to healing in a time of great political change. This vitally important work not only challenges preconceived notions about how health care is distributed in the Middle East but also questions the way women participate, facilitate, and resist the political change around them.
261 kr
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This groundbreaking volume takes an insightful look at how entire households, families, and individuals "cope," negotiate their lives, and plan to achieve goals in Occupied Palestine. Contributors raise critical questions about such issues as tradition vs. modernity and the socio-cultural consequences of emigration. Living Palestine posits that household dynamics (i.e., kin-based marriage, fertility decisions, children's education, and living arrangements) cannot be fully grasped unless linked to the traumas of the past and worries of the present. Likewise, that family strategies for survival and social mobility under occupation are swept up in the tide of history that engulfs the world in which Palestinians live and struggle as individuals, households, and as a society. Living Palestine is drawn from an expansive 1999 research project of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University in which two thousand households in nineteen communities were surveyed with an aim to examining the Palestinian household from multiple angles.
416 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
Examining late twentieth-century autobiographical writing by Arab women novelists, poets, and artists, this anthology explores the ways in which Arab women have portrayed and created their identities within differing social environments. Even as the collection dismantles standard notions of Arab female subservience, the works presented here go well beyond the confines of those traditional boundaries. The book explores the many routes Arab women writers have taken to speak to each other, to their readers, and to the world at large. Drawing from a rich body of literature, the essays collectively attest to the surprisingly lively and committed roles Arab women play in varied geographic regions, at home and abroad. These recent writings assess how the interplay between individual, private, ethnic identity and the collective, public, global world of politics has impacted Arab women's rights.
328 kr
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The legal treatment of sexual behavior is a subject that receives little scholarly attention in the field of Middle East women's studies. Important questions about the relationship between sexuality and the law and about the societies enforcing that relationship are rarely addressed in the current literature. Elyse Semerdjian's ""Off the Straight Path"" takes a bold step toward filling that gap, offering a fascinating look at the historical progression of Islamic law's treatment of illicit sex.Semerdjian provides a comprehensive review of the concept of zina, sexual indiscretion, exploring the diverse interpretation of zina crime as presented in a variety of sources from the Qur'an and hadith to legal literature. She then delves into the history of legal responses to zina within the specific community of Aleppo, Syria.Drawing on a wealth of shari 'a court records, Semerdjian brings to life Syrian society during the Ottoman period. With vivid detail, she describes specific women's lives and experiences as their cases are presented before the court. Semerdjian argues that the actual treatment of zina crimes in the courts differs substantially from sentences prescribed by codifed Islamic jurisprudence. In contrast to the violent corporal punishments dictated in the Islamic legal code, the courts often punished crimes of sexual indiscretion with nonviolent sentences, such as removal from the community. Employing exceptional insight, ""Off the Straight Path"" presents a powerful challenge to the traditional view of Islamic law, enabling a richer understanding of Islamic society.
Representing the Unpresentable
Historical Images of National Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran
Inbunden, Engelska, 2008
323 kr
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In this pioneering book, Negar Mottahedeh explores the central issues of vision and visibility in Iranian culture. She focuses on historical and literary texts to understand the use of visual culture in the production of the contemporary nation. Tracing the historical mediation and dissemination of ideas for national reform in the modern period of Iran, the book examines the various discourses that have constituted the image of the ""Babi."" As cinema began to displace other forms of Iranian entertainment, Islamic culture attempted to keep the motion picture industry free from what it perceived to be the taint of foreign values and intervention. With rich insight and compelling detail, Mottahedeh looks at the revealing ways in which Iranian cinema has dealt with representing the unpresentable. In her exploration of gender and Iranian film, the author argues powerfully against contemporary uses of veiling in the representation of Iran as a modern nation. This highly original work, signaling a paradigm shift in Iranian studies and gender studies, will be an invaluable resource for scholars.
518 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles among Arab communities. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and among each other. Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.
482 kr
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Situated in the southernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Aden is considered the economic capital of the Republic of Yemen. Once a British colony, the port city later served as the capital of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only Marxist regime in the Middle East. Tracing the social and political history of Aden, Dahlgren explores the evolving ways in which gender and family relations are established. The author offers a complex picture of Adeni society in which norms for morality and propriety vary according to the context of the social space. Documenting a nuanced social flexibility, Dahlgren stresses women’s agency and power to maneuver within a traditional patriarchal Muslim community.
697 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
A woman not only needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote, but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will; for a room without that right becomes a prison cell. The privilege of self-directed movement, the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional ""right"" of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, and even beauty. It is only during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women writers have been at the forefront of this desegregating movement and renegotiation of boundaries. Words, Not Swords explores the legacy of sex segregation and its manifestations in Iranian literature and film and in notions of beauty and the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding, between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies that divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe.
665 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
History books often weave tales of rising and falling empires, royal dynasties, and wars among powerful nations. Here, Maksudyan succeeds in making those who are farthest removed from power the lead actors in this history. Focusing on orphans and destitute youth of the late Ottoman Empire, the author gives voice to those children who have long been neglected. Their experiences and perspectives shed new light on many significant developments of the late Ottoman period, providing an alternative narrative that recognizes children as historical agents.Maksudyan takes the reader from the intimate world of infant foundlings to the larger international context of missionary orphanages, all while focusing on Ottoman modernization, urbanization, citizenship, and the maintenance of order and security. Drawing upon archival records, she explores the ways in which the treatment of orphans intersected with welfare, labor, and state building in the Empire. Throughout the book, she does not lose sight of her lead actors, and the influence of the children is always present if we simply listen and notice carefully as Maksudyan so convincingly argues.
314 kr
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Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centred struggles. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. They employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces.
Interpreters of Occupation
Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network
Häftad, Engelska, 2016
379 kr
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During the Iraq War, thousands of young Baghdadis worked as interpreters for US troops, becoming the front line of the so-called War on Terror. Deployed by the military as linguistic as well as cultural interpreters—translating the ""human terrain"" of Iraq—members of this network urgently honed identification strategies amid suspicion from US forces, fellow Iraqis, and, not least of all, one another. In Interpreters of Occupation, Campbell traces the experiences of twelve individuals from their young adulthood as members of the Ba’thist generation, to their work as interpreters, through their navigation of the US immigration pipeline, and finally to their resettlement in the United States. Throughout, Campbell considers how these men and women grappled with issues of belonging and betrayal, both on the battlefield in Iraq and in the US-based diaspora. A nuanced and richly detailed ethnography, Interpreters of Occupation gives voice to a generation of US allies through their diverse and vividly rendered life histories. In the face of what some considered a national betrayal in Iraq and their experiences of otherness within the United States, interpreters negotiate what it means to belong to a diasporic community in flux.
Interpreters of Occupation
Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network
Inbunden, Engelska, 2016
668 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
During the Iraq War, thousands of young Baghdadis worked as interpreters for US troops, becoming the front line of the so-called War on Terror. Deployed by the military as linguistic as well as cultural interpreters—translating the ""human terrain"" of Iraq—members of this network urgently honed identification strategies amid suspicion from US forces, fellow Iraqis, and, not least of all, one another. In Interpreters of Occupation, Campbell traces the experiences of twelve individuals from their young adulthood as members of the Ba’thist generation, to their work as interpreters, through their navigation of the US immigration pipeline, and finally to their resettlement in the United States. Throughout, Campbell considers how these men and women grappled with issues of belonging and betrayal, both on the battlefield in Iraq and in the US-based diaspora. A nuanced and richly detailed ethnography, Interpreters of Occupation gives voice to a generation of US allies through their diverse and vividly rendered life histories. In the face of what some considered a national betrayal in Iraq and their experiences of otherness within the United States, interpreters negotiate what it means to belong to a diasporic community in flux.
778 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
On December 20, 2011, Egyptian women of all ages and backgrounds—urban and rural, working class and upper class—came out in force to Cairo’s Tahrir Square in one of the largest uprisings in the country’s history. The demonstrators gathered as citizens and likewise as women demanding social change and the right to gender equality. The size and impact of that uprising underscore the vital importance of women activists to what became known as the Arab Spring. In Resistance, Revolt, and Gender Justice in Egypt, Tadros charts the arc of the Egyptian women’s movement, capturing the changing dynamics of gender activism over the course of two decades. She explores the interface between feminist movements, Islamist forces, and three regime ruptures in the battle over women’s status in Egyptian society and politics. Parsing the factors that contribute to the success and failure of activist movements, Tadros provides valuable insight on sustaining social change and a vitally important perspective on women’s evolving status in a contemporary authoritarian context.
257 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
The legal treatment of sexual behavior is a subject that receives little scholarly attention in the field of Middle East women’s studies. Important questions about the relationship between sexuality and the law and about the societies enforcing that relationship are rarely addressed in the current literature. Elyse Semerdjian’s ""Off the Straight Path"" takes a bold step toward filling that gap, offering a fascinating look at the historical progression of Islamic law’s treatment of illicit sex.Semerdjian provides a comprehensive review of the concept of zina, sexual indiscretion, exploring the diverse interpretation of zina crime as presented in a variety of sources from the Qur’an and hadith to legal literature. She then delves into the history of legal responses to zina within the specific community of Aleppo, Syria. Drawing on a wealth of shari ’a court records, Semerdjian brings to life Syrian society during the Ottoman period. With vivid detail, she describes specific women’s lives and experiences as their cases are presented before the court. Semerdjian argues that the actual treatment of zina crimes in the courts differs substantially from sentences prescribed by codifed Islamic jurisprudence. In contrast to the violent corporal punishments dictated in the Islamic legal code, the courts often punished crimes of sexual indiscretion with nonviolent sentences, such as removal from the community. Employing exceptional insight, ""Off the Straight Path"" presents a powerful challenge to the traditional view of Islamic law, enabling a richer understanding of Islamic society.