Featured Research
Afghan Village Voices: Stories from a Tribal Community (Richard Tapper)
Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this little-known period of peace and captures a society and culture now changed irreversibly by four decades of revolution, invasion, civil war, famine, exile, death and suffering.
Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World (Jörg Matthias Determann)
The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extraterrestrial life.
‘The Legitimate’ after the Uprisings: Justice, Equity, and Language Politics in Morocco (Kaoutar Ghilani)
Debates on languages have been omnipresent in the Moroccan public space since independence. This article examines the regimes of justification employed by language advocates to approach historically the norms of legitimacy, i.e., ‘the legitimate’. It argues that a new discourse on languages has emerged in 2011 in Morocco employing justice and equity as the main legitimating principles in language politics.
The Arab Lefts: Histories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s (Laure Guirguis)
This book explores the entangled histories of Left-wing trends across the Mashreq and Maghreb regions in the ‘Long Sixties’. Based on an analysis of textual and audio-visual materials, it surveys radical Left traditions in the Arab world that took shape between the 1950s and 1970s.
Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (Nicola Pratt)
When women took to the streets during the mass protests of the ‘Arab Spring’, the subject of feminism in the Middle East and North Africa returned to the international spotlight. In the subsequent years, countless commentators treated the region’s gender inequality as a consequence of fundamentally cultural or religious problems. In so doing, they overlooked the specifically political nature of these women’s activism.
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The Database of Expertise in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies provides a publicly available list of MENA experts with their research and areas of expertise.
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