New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

Hadi Abdullah's Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution (DoppelHouse Press, 2025), translated by Alessandro Columbu, is no ordinary diary. It’s a testimony written in the heat of events (demonstrations in Daraa and Homs, the bombardments of Aleppo, sieges, and funerals). Through Hadi’s words, we glimpse the Syrian revolution not through statistics, but through the eyes of someone who was there, who risked his life to record what others tried to silence. Alessandro’s translation conveys not only the urgency of testimony but also the rhythms of protest chants, the tenderness of Syrian idioms, and the weight of memory. In this episode, we sit down with translator Alessandro Columbu to discuss the challenges of translating a voice born of crisis, the role of grassroots media in preserving truth, and what it means to convey such words into English at a moment when Syria’s story is still unfolding. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation

Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas. Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced to bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Beyond simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as

A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity (U California Press, 2025) traces the rhetorical strategies of religious radicalization that encouraged fifth- and sixth-century miaphysite Christians to be willing to suffer physical deprivation and harm rather than abandon the church that the late Roman Empire defined as heresy after the Council of Chalcedon in 451. These Syriac texts created genealogies of orthodoxy and heresy, represented their heroes as martyr saints, and reminded their followers of God's coming judgment. Later they gained renewed relevance when they were copied and translated under the emerging 'Umayyad caliphate of Islam. This book reshapes representations of late antiquity by centering Syriac Christianity in these complex and politicized doctrinal conflicts. Tracing these rhetorical strategies not only sheds light on early Christian history in the Middle East, but also provides a rich case study of religious schism, devotion, and

Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of people dead. Neither side emerged as a clear victor, but both sides would eventually claim victory in some form. Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War (Stanford UP, 2025) considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present. It demonstrates how writers from both countries have transformed once militarized, officially sanctioned war literatures into literatures of mourning, and eventually, into vehicles of protest that presented powerful counternarratives to the official state narratives. In writing the first

A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots. In Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' li

The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies—and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels. In Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale UP, 2025), Dr. Steve Tibble engagingly traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations. Their fanaticism changed the medieval world—and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory. This inter

In this episode, New Books Network Host Nina Bo Wagner speaks with Karen Bartlett about The Escape From Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance (The New Press and Duckworth, 2025). The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges, and set out to transform their country. Their work, however, posed an existential threat to everything the Taliban believed in. When the United States withdrew in August 2021, the women judges of Afghanistan faced mortal danger. Journalist Karen Bartlett goes beyond their escape, and talks about the Afghan women judges’ backgrounds, the cases they were tie breakers on, and the importance of the international network of women judges who helped them evacuate in 2021. Bartlett critiques the abandonment of Afghanistan by the West, and warns people not to normalise or be complacent to the Taliban regime which is s

Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power distributed among mountain fortresses rather than centralized in cities. Through spatial analysis, the book demonstrates how systematic warfare, driven by imperial ambitions, shaped Urartian and Assyrian territories, creating symbolically and materially powerful landscapes. Dr. Earley-Spadoni challenges traditional views by emphasizing warfare’s role in organizing ancient landscapes, suggesting that Urartu’s strength lay in its strategic optimization of terrain through fortified regional networks. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes GIS-enabled studies and integrates archaeological, historical, and art-h

Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), notes that “British India” once spanned all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the border with Thailand, covering South Arabia, South Asia and Burma. Yet between 1937 and 1971, the region split into various different national entities, creating the countries and borders we see today. Sam is a historian, filmmaker, and cofounder of Project Dastaan, a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 partition of India. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shattered Lands. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, a

The Book of Travels Ḥannā Diyāb: A Conversation with Johannes StephanThe Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights.Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Me

Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (open access) examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration traces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration. The database of data is: historyofincarceration.com New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Rev

Archives are not only sources for history but have their own histories too, which shape how historians can tell stories of the past. In Managing Paperwork in Mamluk Cairo: Archives, Waqf and Society (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Daisy Livingston explores the archival history of one of the most powerful polities of the late-medieval Middle East: the ‘Mamluk’ sultanate of Cairo. Relying on surviving original documents, Livingston focuses on archival practices connected to waqf, the pious endowments that became one of the characteristic features of late-medieval Islamic societies. By centering a close exploration of documents connected to processes of endowment and property exchange, this book sheds light on a startling culture of document accumulation that was shared by the diverse social groups involved in founding and managing endowments: sultans and emirs, qadis, legal notaries, and scribes. Emphasizing the documents’ life cycles from production, to preservation, to disposal and loss, it argues for the use of surviv

What are the prospects for democracy in Syria? Is this the right question to ask? What do we need to better understand about Syria’s new leader, its civil society, and the challenges it faces in a new era for Syria? Join Rana Khoury, Daniel Neep, and Emily Scott for this special joint episode of the Localization in World Politics and People, Power, Politics podcasts. Rana B. Khoury is assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work explores conflict processes, civil action, and humanitarianism, particularly in the Middle East and Syria. Her book, Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press and available for pre-order here. Daniel Neep is nonresident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He is interested in conflict and state-building, as well as processes of political, institutional, and social transformation in the Middle East, in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. His b

"If we were different people, to write down these words might be to leave them behind us. But words are our artifacts, and I am seeding a trail for the journey, home." What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit? It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighbourhoods of a father’s childhood and the deep roots of family who have lived in one place, Jerusalem, for generation upon generation. Fixing her gaze on moments, places and objects – from the streets of Bethlehem to the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the New Jerusalem – Micaela Sahhar assembles a story of Palestinian diaspora. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family (Newsouth, 2025) is a book about the gaps and blank spaces that cannot be easily recounted, but which insists on the vibrant reality of chance, fragments and memory to reclaim a place called home. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the 

It's often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States. That may be the case but popular renderings of the writings of this 13th-century Muslim have largely detached him from the Islamic tradition, and specifically Sufi mysticism. In Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition (Yale University Press, 2018), Omid Safi, Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, places Jalal al-Din alongside luminaries within the rich archive of Islamic Sufi poetry. In this anthology of newly translated poetry Safi focuses on love, especially ‘ishq/eshq, what he renders as “radical love.” The volume organizes translations of Qur’an and Hadith, Sufi mystics and poets into four thematic sections: God of Love, Path of Love, Lover & Beloved, and Beloved Community. Radical Love does an excellent job of introducing readers to key ideas from Islamic mysticism that are rooted in first hand knowledge of Arabic and Persian texts. This book is valuable to both the scholar and the student be

It is not Egypt's 2011 revolution that opened a space for women's and feminist activism, but—as Biography of a Revolution: The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt (U of California Press, 2025) shows—the long history of women's activism that created the intellectual and political background for revolution. By centering the experiences and ideas of multiple generations of women activists and intellectuals, Lucia Sorbera traces the feminist genealogies of Egypt's nationalist, student, Marxist, labor, human rights, and democratic social movements. Biography of a Revolution gathers a series of interrelated intimate and relational stories, charting in vivid detail the entanglements between women's aspirations across a century of politics and friendships. This historical analysis innovatively deploys decolonial and indigenous feminist epistemologies, bringing women's, gender, and feminist history into the center of Egypt's political, social, and intellectual history. More than a decade after the 2013 military co

A major new history of Saudi Arabia, from its eighteenth-century origins to the present day Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam’s two holiest cities. It is also one of the world’s only absolute monarchies. How did Saudi Arabia get to where it is today? In Saudi Arabia: A Modern History (Yale UP, 2025), David Commins narrates the full history of Saudi Arabia from oasis emirate to present-day attempts to leap to a post-petroleum economy. Moving through the ages, Commins traces how the Saud dynasty’s reliance on sectarianism, foreign expertise, and petroleum to stabilize power has unintentionally spawned secular and religious movements seeking accountability and justice. He incorporates the experiences of activists, women, religious minorities, Bedouin, and expatriate workers as the country transformed from subsistence agrarian life to urban consumer society. This is a perceptive portrait of Saudi Arabia’s complex

In Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World (Cornell UP, 2025), Steve L. Monroe argues that geopolitics and social connections between state and capital underpin the Arab world's uneven trade policies. Despite decades of international pressure, neoliberal trade policy reform in the Arab world has been varied, selective, and often ineffective. Neoliberal trade policies have not deepened international trade in many of the region's markets. This book explains why. When the region's regimes have strong support from global powers and strong social connections to the industrial elite, they engage in extensive but deceptive trade policy reform. Behind an edifice of neoliberal trade policies, neopatrimonial forms of protectionism like tax evasion and noncompetitive procurement shield the socially connected from international competition and obstruct actual trade liberalization. Industrialists are less trustful of regime promises of neopatrimonial protectionism after reform when they

A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace (U California Press, 2025) is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position in the Indian Ocean. Here the reign of Oman’s longest-serving ruler, Saʿid bin Sultan, offers a keyhole through which we can peer to see the entangled histories of Arabia and the Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa in the Omani Empire. In centering this empire, Nicholas P. Roberts shows how Arabs, Africans, and Asians actively shaped the conditions of commercial engagement in the Western Indian Ocean, uniting the empire’s domains into a single oceanic marketplace in which Europeans and Americans had to accede if they wished to succeed. Drawing upon sources in three languages from four continents, A Sea of Wealth is a vivid narrative full of colorful characters that upturns many conventional understandings of our modern world. Nicholas P. Roberts was formerly Assistant Professor of History at Norwich University and the Howell Fellow for Arabian Peninsula and Gulf St

US-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many of us might be unaware. Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims (Columbia Global Reports, 2024) tells the story of Americans’ colossal mobilization to proclaim Christianity “to the ends of the Earth,” a movement that triumphed in the Global South, challenged the Vatican, then turned east in full force after 9/11 to spread the Gospel among Muslims. When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq set off a wave of anti-American attacks and made the field too dangerous for US missionaries, thousands of disciples, particularly from Latin America, were mobilized to finish the task. In Soul by Soul, journalist Adriana Carranca follows the pilgrimage of a missionary family from Brazil as they move to Afghanistan. Carranca brings us on a harrowing journey through the underground passages of the global evangelical movement as it clashes with the full force of militant Islamic groups in the Middle East and South Asia, wher