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Axis of Hope

Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders

By Catherine Z. Sameh

Political tensions between Iran and the United States in the post-9/11 period and the Global War on Terror have set the stage for Iranian women’s rights activists inside and outside Iran as they seek full...

Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya

An Ambivalent Modernism

By Brian L. McLaren

To be a tourist in Libya during the period of Italian colonization was to experience a complex negotiation of cultures. Against a sturdy backdrop of indigenous culture and architecture, modern metropolitan culture brought its systems...

Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus

By James P. Grehan

Damascus was for centuries a center of learning and commerce. Drawing on the city's dazzling literary tradition-a rich collection of poetry, chronicles, travel accounts, and biographical dictionaries-as well as on Islamic court records, James Grehan...

The New Woman in Uzbekistan

Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism

By Marianne Ruth Kamp

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize

Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award

Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association...

Afghanistan's Endless War

State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban

By Larry P. Goodson

Going beyond the stereotypes of Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan mujahideen and black-turbaned Taliban fundamentalists, Larry Goodson explains in this concise analysis of the Afghan war what has really been happening in Afghanistan in the last twenty years.

Beginning...

The Martyrs of Karbala

Shi'i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran

By Kamran Scot Aghaie

This innovative study examines patterns of change in Shi’i symbols and rituals over the past two centuries to reveal how modernization has influenced the societal, political, and religious culture of Iran. Shi’is, who support the...

The Merchant Houses of Mocha

Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port

By Nancy Um

Gaining prominence as a seaport under the Ottomans in the mid-1500s, the city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen pulsed with maritime commerce. Its very name became synonymous with Yemen's most important...

Modern Clan Politics

The Power of "Blood" in Kazakhstan and Beyond

By Edward Schatz

Edward Schatz explores the politics of kin-based clan divisions in the post-Soviet state of Kazakhstan. Drawing from extensive ethnographic and archival research, interviews, and wide-ranging secondary sources, he highlights a politics that poses a two-tiered...

A Moveable Empire

Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

By Resat Kasaba

A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier...

Islamist Mobilization in Turkey

A Study in Vernacular Politics

By Jennifer B. White

Winner of the William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology

The emergence of an Islamist movement and the startling buoyancy of Islamic political parties in Turkey--a model of secular modernization, a cosmopolitan frontier, and NATO ally--has...

Activists in Office

Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey

By Nicole F. Watts

Thousands of Kurdish politician-activists have been prosecuted and imprisoned, and hundreds have been murdered for espousing Kurdish political and cultural rights over the past twenty years. The risks are high, yet Pro-Kurdish political parties have...

Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran

By Arash Khazeni

Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran traces the history of the Bakhtiyari tribal confederacy of the Zagros Mountains through momentous times that saw the opening of their territory to the outside world....

The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival

By Yasser Tabbaa

The transformation of Islamic architecture and ornament during the eleventh and twelfth centuries signaled profound cultural changes in the Islamic world. Yasser Tabbaa explores with exemplary lucidity the geometric techniques that facilitated this transformation, and...

Modernism and the Middle East

Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century

By Sandy Isenstadt, Kishwar Rizvi

This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial...

Nationalizing Iran

Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940

By Afshin Marashi

When Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran from 1848 to 1896, claimed the title Shadow of God on Earth, his authority rested on premodern conceptions of sacred kingship. By 1941, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi...

Shiraz in the Age of Hafez

The Glory of a Medieval Persian City

By John W. Limbert

In the fourteenth-century Persian city of Shiraz, poets composed, scholars studied, mystics sought hidden truths, ascetics prayed and fasted, drunkards brawled, and princes and their courtiers played deadly games of power. This was the world...

Coffee and Coffeehouses

The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East

By Ralph S. Hattox

Drawing on the accounts of early European travelers, original Arabic sources on jurisprudence and etiquette, and treatises on coffee from the period, the author recounts the colorful early history of the spread of coffee and...

The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam

By Abol-Qasem Ferdowsi. Translated by Jerome W. Clinton

The tyrannical monster Zahhak upon whose shoulder grew serpents that feasted daily on the brains of Iran’s youth; the giant hero Rostam who vanquished entire armies with his immense strength and military prowess; the inept...

Modernism and Nation Building

Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic

By Sibel Bozdogan

Winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians

Winner of the M. Fuat Koprulu Book Prize in Turkish Studies sponsored by the Turkish Studies Association

With the proclamation of the Turkish...

The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan

Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War

By M. Nazif Shahrani

An extended new Preface and a new Epilogue written after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, place The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan, originally published in 1979, in the context of a vastly changed...