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Tripoli, Lebanon's 'Sunni City' is often presented as an Islamist or even Jihadi city. However, this misleading label conceals a much deeper history of resistance and collaboration with the state and the wider region. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork and using a broad array of primary sources, Tine Gade analyses the modern history of Tripoli, exploring the city's contentious politics, its fluid political identity, and the relations between Islamist and sectarian groups. Offering an alternative explanation for Tripoli's decades of political troubles - rather than emphasizing Islamic radicalism as the principal explanation - she argues that it is Lebanese clientelism and the decay of the state that produced the rise of violent Islamist movements in Tripoli. By providing a corrective to previous assumptions, this book not only expands our understanding of Lebanese politics, but of the wider religious and political dynamics in the Middle East.

Questions about the authenticity and authority of sunna are central to the study of Islam and Islamic law. Tracing the emergence of modern debates, Daniel Brown assesses the implications of new approaches to the law on contemporary Islamic revivalist movements, and explores the impact of modernity on religious authority generally.

The first study of Israeli foreign policy towards the Middle East and selected world powers, including China, India, the European Union and the US since the end of the Cold War to the present, providing essential historical context for the domestic political scene during these pivotal decades.

Zoltan Pall examines how Salafism, a globally significant Islamic movement, has entrenched itself in the religiously diverse Lebanese society and continues to reshape religious authority within the Sunni community. Appealing to scholars of Islamic and Middle East studies, the book provides a model to examine religious movements as networks transcending national borders.

This well-overdue examination of the history of the Syrian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood draws on extensive primary research including interviews with Brotherhood members to understand why the group failed to capitalise on the political advantage available to it in the 2011 Syrian uprising.

The ghost of the Holocaust is ever present in Israel, in the lives and nightmares of the survivors and in the absence of the victims. In this compelling analysis, Idith Zertal considers how Israel has used the memory of the Holocaust to define and legitimize its existence and politics.

Salwa Ismail provides an original analysis of the routine and spectacular violence witnessed in Syria under the rule of the Asad family over the last four decades. Ismail examines how the political prison and the massacre developed as apparatuses of rule, shaping Syrians' political subjectivities and their relations with government.

In this book, Zahra Ali foregrounds a wide range of interviews with a variety of women involved in women's rights activism. Using these life stories, Ali provides a nuanced understanding of the everyday lives of women, the production and reproduction of gender norms and relations, and the development of feminisms in Iraq.

History - other areas, Middle East history, Middle East government, politics, policy

From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon endured one of the most protracted and bloody civil wars of the twentieth century. Sune Haugbolle's often poignant book chronicles the battle over ideas that emerged from the wreckage of that war.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork with grassroots activists of Tunisia's al-Nahda movement, Rory McCarthy offers a challenging new perspective on one of the Middle East's most successful Islamist projects. He explains how an Islamic movement transforms over time as it struggles to adjust to a rapidly changing political environment.

Eugene Rogan documents the case of Transjordan to provide a theoretically informed account of how the Ottoman state restructured itself during the last decades of empire. In so doing, he explores the idea of frontier as a geographical and cultural boundary and sheds light on the processes of state formation.

Sheila Carapico's book on civic participation in modern Yemen makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of political culture in Arabia. The author traces the complexities of Yemen's history, considering its response to the colonial encounter and to years of civil unrest.

Suleiman's 2004 book considers national identity in relation to language, the way in which language - in this case the Arabic language - can be manipulated to signal political, cultural or historical difference.

Islamic law entitles women to inherit property and to manage their own income. This book examines under what circumstances they claim property rights and when they are prevented from doing so.

The emergence of nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s served to redefine Egyptian identity. The authors show how the growth of an urban middle class, combined with economic and political failures in the 1930s, eroded the earlier territorial and isolationist order.

Discusses some of the most significant ideological debates that have animated the Arab world over the last two decades; from the 'Arab age of ideology', through an 'age of ideological transformation', demonstrating how the recent flow of ideas from one group to another have their roots in the past.

The book offers a systematic yet non-technical analysis of the economy of Mandatory Palestine. It is the first to focus on both the Arab and Jewish communities of the period and in this respect promises to make a significant contribution to the economic history of the Modern Middle East.

In an historically informed critique of development assistance, this book examines Britain's foreign aid programme in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s and raises important questions about the nature of the development process in the Middle East and Third World generally. This book was first published in 1996.

Benny Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem was published in 1988. Its startling revelations about how and why 700,000 Palestinians left their homes and became refugees during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 undermined traditional interpretations as to whether they left voluntarily or were expelled as part of a systematic plan. This book represents a revised edition of the earlier work, compiled on the basis of newly-opened Israeli military archives. While the focus remains the 1948 war and the analysis of the Palestinian exodus, the new material contains more information about what happened in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, and how events there led to the collapse of Palestinian urban society. It also sheds light on the battles and atrocities that resulted in the disintegration of rural communities. The story is a harrowing one. The refugees now number four million and their existence remains a major obstacle to peace.

Challenging recent scholarship which has dwelt on Islamic activism, Nadje Al-Ali explores the anthropological and political significance of secular-oriented activism by focusing on the women's movement in Egypt. The author frames her work around current theoretical debates in Middle Eastern and post-colonial scholarship and interviews with members of the movement.

Explores the social and political dynamics of nineteenth-century Shi'ism and through this sheds light on modern debates.

Based on three decades of ethnographic fieldwork and documentary research, this 1997 book traces the political and social history of the Shahsevan, one of the major nomadic peoples of Iran.

Sanasarian's book explores the political and ideological relationship between religious minorities in Iran and the state during the formative years of the Islamic Republic. While the book is essentially empirical, it also highlights questions associated with exclusion and marginalization and the role of the state in defining those boundaries.

The authors speculate on the relationship between identity and citizenship in Israeli society and explore the differential rights accorded different social strata. They conclude that, despite ongoing tensions, globalization and economic liberalization have transformed Israel from a frontier society to one more oriented towards peace and private profit.

In a challenging and authoritative analysis, Parvin Paidar considers how Iranian women have been affected, and their position redefined, by the political transformations of twentieth-century Iran.

A. J. Racy is well known as a scholar of ethnomusicology. In this pioneering book, he provides an intimate portrayal of the Arab musical experience. The focus is tarab, a multifaceted concept which refers to indigenous music and the ecstasy associated with it. This is the first book of its kind.

In Saudi Arabia there are now open debates about religion and politics, often in violation of official taboos. Madawi Al-Rasheed explores this phenomenon, and how, in consequence and with the rise of multiple interpretations of religious texts, the traditional Wahhabi discourse is losing its hold on the new generation.

This 2006 book provides a rigorous theoretical analysis of the Kurdish issue through the lens of social movement theory. The empirical material, the result of research in Ankara, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria makes the book a compelling read for students of the Middle East, ethnic relations and sociology.

This work looks in detail at the state-emigrant relationship in the cases of Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon. A socio-economic and political history of the migration is used as background to a discussion of the evolution of state policies put in place to enable states to control these expatriates.