A Q&A with Heba Arafa Abdelfattah In this author Q&A, Heba Arafa Abdelfattah introduces her latest book, Filming Modernity and Islam in Colonial Egypt, which explores the formative years of Egyptian film (1919–52) to contest the contradiction between Islam and…
by Shuaib Ally, McGill University Around the turn of the 15th century in Cairo, a hadith scholar named Salah al-Din al-Aqfahsi heard Salah al-Din al-Kalai, a scholar associated with the Sufi Shadhili order, teaching the Quran. Part of his teaching…
by Kjetil Selvik, Jacob Høigilt Only a few years ago, Tunisia was the freest country in the Arab world, with a flourishing media scene. Journalists were scrambling to reinvent their role in the public sphere that emerged after the Jasmine…
by Catherine Cobham and Fabio Caiani 23 March 2023 marked the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Iraq. Predictably, western mainstream media made little or no reference to contemporary Iraqi culture. Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in…
by Relli Shechter Tell us a bit about your book The Egyptian Social Contract discusses the long-term history of the social contract in Egypt since partial independence from the British (1922) and until the Arab Uprising (2011). It focuses on…
by Mitchell Allen Bill outlined his vision for our book almost half a century ago as we sat at the foldup dinner table in a domed room of the compound of Hajji Nafaz Khan, ruler of the village Khwaja ‘Ali…
In this interview, Ned Curthoys and Isabelle Hesse, editors of Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada, discuss their new book. Tell us a bit about your book. Our edited collection Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict…
by Walter Feldman Love is the Way and the Path of our Prophet. We are Love’s children, and Love is our Mother. Rumi These words echo down through the ages from when Mevlana (”Our Master”) Jalaluddin Rumi (d. 1273), first…
by Scott Weiner What is a tribe? Social scientists have long been interested in tribes, but political science has struggled to talk about them. Tribes exist on every inhabited continent and are as foundational to many states as political parties,…