New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, exa

Capitalism is not only an economic system but also a system of production and allocation of hope. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this.  In The Labor of Hope:: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt (Stanford U

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut (University of Texas Press, 2024), Dr. Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art ha

The Indian state of Kerala is one of the largest blocs of migrants in the oil economies of the Arab Gulf.  Looking closely at the cultural archives produced by and on the Gulf migrants in Malayalam -- the predominant language of Kerala -- The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford UP, 20

This week, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Among other rhetorical aspects of the conflict, Goldberg reflects on the meaning

In Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda (Syracuse UP, 2024), Maha AbdelMegeed offers a compelling and far-reaching alternative to the traditional mode of analyzing Arabic literature through an encounter between Arabic narrative forms and European ones. Drawing upon close engagements with the works of ca