Middle East Studies Association (MESA)
Kinship, Islam, and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan
The Outside
Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam
Staging Cultural Encounters
Muthanna / Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy
Remaking Islam in African Portugal
Unexpected State
Israeli Foreign Policy
On the Sultan's Service
Yiddish in Israel
The Media World of ISIS
Zionism and Melancholy
Women of the Midan
Featured Titles
Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women
Published by: Indiana University Press
When thinking of intrepid travelers from past centuries, we don't usually put Muslim women at the top of the list. And yet, the stunning firsthand accounts in this collection completely upend preconceived notions of who was exploring the world.
Editors Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma recover, translate, annotate, and provide historical and cultural context for the 17th- to 20th-century writings of Muslim women travelers in ten different languages. Queens and captives, pilgrims and provocateurs, these women are diverse. Their connection to Islam is wide-ranging as well, from the devout to those who distanced themselves from religion. What unites these adventurers is a concern for other women they encounter, their willingness to record their experiences, and the constant thoughts they cast homeward even as they traveled a world that was not always prepared to welcome them.
Perfect for readers interested in gender, Islam, travel writing, and global history, Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women provides invaluable insight into how these daring women experienced the world—in their own voices.
Published by: Indiana University Press
Galilee has been a crossroads of cultures, religions, and languages for centuries, as illustrated in these fascinating Bedouin folktales, which offer excellent examples of the Arabic narrative tradition of the Middle East.
Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel collects nearly 60 traditional folktales, told mostly by women, that have been carefully translated in the same colloquial style in which they were told. These stories are grouped into themes of love and devotion, ghouls and demons, and animal stories. The work also includes phonetic transcription and linguistic annotation. Accompanying each folktale is a comprehensive ethnographic, folkloristic, and linguistic commentary, placing the tales in context with details on Galilee Bedouin dialects and the tribes themselves.
A rich, multifaceted collection, Bedouin Folktales from the North of Israel is an invaluable resource for linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, and any reader interested in a tradition of storytelling handed down through the centuries.
The Invisible Palestinians
The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv
Published by: Indiana University Press
Within the heart of the Jewish city of Tel Aviv, there is a hidden reality—Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority without access to equal urban citizenship.
Grounded in the everyday lives of Palestinians in Tel Aviv, The Invisible Palestinians offers an ethnographic critique of the city's self-proclaimed openness and liberalism. Andreas Hackl reveals that Palestinians' access to the social and economic opportunities afforded in Tel Aviv depends on keeping a low profile, which not only disrupts opportunities for true urban citizenship but also draws opposition from other Palestinians. By looking at the city from the perspective of this hidden urban minority, Hackl uncovers a critical opportunity to imagine and build a more inclusive and just future for Tel Aviv.
An important read, The Invisible Palestinians explores the marginalized urban presence of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian laborers from the West Bank in this quintessential Jewish Israeli city. Hackl reveals a highly diverse Palestinian population that includes young people, manual workers and middle-class professionals, residents and commuters, students, artists, and activists, as well as members of an underground Palestinian LGBT community who carefully navigate their place in a city that refuses to recognize them.
The Wretched of France
The 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism
Translated by Andrew Brown
Published by: Indiana University Press
In 1983—as France struggled with race-based crimes, police brutality, and public unrest—youths from Vénissieux (working-class suburbs of Lyon) led the March for Equality and Against Racism, the first national demonstration of its type in France.
As Abdellali Hajjat reveals, the historic March for Equality and Against Racism symbolized for many the experience of the children of postcolonial immigrants. Inspired by the May '68 protests, these young immigrants stood against racist crimes, for equality before the law and the police, and for basic rights such as the right to work and housing. Hajjat also considers the divisions that arose from the march and offers fresh insight into the paradoxes and intricacies of movements pushing toward sweeping social change.
Translated into English for the first time, The Wretched of France contemplates the protest's lasting significance in France and its impact within the context of larger and comparable movements for civil rights, particularly in the US.
Arab Masculinities
Anthropological Reconceptions in Precarious Times
Contributions by Bård Helge Kårtveit, Jamie Furniss, Hsain Ilahiane, Alice Elliot, Anne Hovgaard Jørgensen, Gustavo Barbosa, Sabiha Allouche, Lisa L. Wynn, and Laura Ferrero
Published by: Indiana University Press
Arab Masculinities provides a groundbreaking analysis of Arab men's lives in the precarious aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings. It challenges received wisdoms and entrenched stereotypes about Arab men, offering new understandings of rujula, or masculinity, across the Middle East and North Africa.
The ten individual chapters of the book foreground the voices and stories of Arab men as they face economic precarity, forced displacement, and new challenges to marriage and family life. Rich in ethnographic details, they illuminate how men develop alternative strategies of affective labor, how they attempt to care for themselves and their families within their local moral worlds, and what it means to be a good son, husband, father, and community member.
Arab Masculinities sheds light on the most private spaces of Arab men's lives—offering stories that rarely enter the public realm. It is a pioneering volume that reflects the urgent need for new anthropological scholarship on men and masculinities in the changing Middle East.
Forthcoming Titles
Fantasmic Objects
Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950
Coming December 2022
Published by: Indiana University Press
In Lebanon, the study of modern art—rather than power or hierarchy—has compelled citizens to confront how they define themselves as a postcolonial nation.
In Fantasmic Objects, Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense of what it means to be Lebanese through the evolution of new exhibition, pedagogical, and art-writing practices. She reveals that art and artists helped found the nation during the French occupation, as the formal qualities and international exhibitions of nudes and landscapes in the 1930s crystallized notions of modern masculinity, patriotic femininity, non-sectarian religiosity, and citizenship.
Examining the efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists in Lebanon who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being, Fantasmic Objects offers an insightful approach to the history and formation of modern Lebanon.
IU Press Journals
The Journal of Education in Muslim Societies (JEMS) is a semiannual, peer-reviewed journal published in partnership with the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Indiana University Press. JEMS encourages work on a wide range of topics pertinent to the education sector including but not limited to pedagogies, teacher practices, leadership, and policy as it relates to the conditions and status of education in Muslim societies and communities. The guiding premise of the Journal is that education serves more than just the acquisition of knowledge and skills but the enhancement of the holistic aspects of individuals and societies. JEMS seeks manuscripts in subject areas such as comparative education, youth and youth development, curriculum reform, early childhood education, higher education, as well as others. The journal has no disciplinary or methodological bias.
All manuscripts are subjected to a double-blind peer-review process prior to acceptance and publication.
Other IU Press Journals
The Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JIMS) is a double-blind, peer-reviewed multidisciplinary academic journal sponsored by the North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies (NAAIMS). Published semiannually (May and November), JIMS is dedicated to expanding a repertoire of scholarship on Muslim societies and Islam as a religion and civilization. Its purpose is to forward the field of Islamic and Muslim studies more broadly, and to make contributions to its represented disciplines in advancing theories, epistemologies, pedagogies, and methods. Each issue consists of the following five sections which disseminate knowledge through the interdisciplinary lens of the social sciences and humanities: Articles, Book Reviews, Film Reviews, Discussion and Debate Forum, and Conference Reports.
The Journal of Muslim Philanthropy & Civil Society is a biannual, peer-reviewed, open access journal that focuses on the broad scope of Muslim philanthropy and civil society. The terms “Muslim” and “philanthropy” are defined broadly to be inclusive of cutting-edge research from across the world and disciplines, and the journal’s editorial focus is to showcase the dynamic practice and understanding of Muslim prosocial action. The journal seeks original academic research examining Muslim nonprofit, philanthropic, and voluntary action and provides a forum for researchers to publish timely articles from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
The Journal of Muslim Philanthropy & Civil Society is sponsored by the Center on Muslim Philanthropy and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis.
Mande Studies: The Journal of the Mande Studies Association is an interdisciplinary journal publishing original research that focuses on the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa and the Mande community in diaspora, from slavery to the post-colony. We welcome articles in the social sciences and the humanities including, but not limited to: history, art history, archeology, sociology, and public health. Articles may range from the precolonial period to the present.
Founded in 1976 (as the Turkish Studies Association Bulletin), each issue of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association contains the latest scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, and includes state of the field essays, book reviews and review articles that examine the wide-ranging studies that cross-disciplinary, national, ethnic, imperial, periodized, religious, geographic, and linguistic boundaries and take as their focus the diversity of peoples, influences, approaches, times, and regions that make up the Turkish and former Ottoman worlds.
The Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association is published semiannually by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.
The Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies (PJHS) aims to develop critical ideas on less explored and innovative themes in social, cultural, art, architectural, political, and economic histories. Scholars engaged with current historical debates about any region and period can submit articles on a particular theme thus initiating a dialogue on theoretical and methodological issues. By moving beyond the dualistic discourse on secularism vs theocracy, capitalism vs communism, traditionalism vs modernism, colonialism vs postcolonialism, meta-narrative vs micro-narrative, and so on, each issue aims to promote rigorous scholarship helpful in understanding our past and its contradictions.
PJHS is a peer-reviewed semiannual journal sponsored by the Khaldunia Centre for Historical Research in Lahore, Pakistan.
