Turkish is a member of the Turkic family of languages, which extends over a vast area in southern and eastern Siberia and adjacent portions of Iran, Afganistan, and China. Turkic, in turn, belongs to the Altaic family of languages. This book deals with the morphological and synt…
Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine a…
Inventing the Berbers examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their home.
In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela shows how--through observation, inference, and reference to ideas on language and writing--intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and the uses …
Most contemporary scholarship affirms that the Christian and Islamic medieval political imperative was about the preservation of order and stability. We considered this characterization insufficient, given the treatment of the concept of religious and political justice by mediev…
This thesis presents a critical analysis of the contemporary Islamic discourse of interfaith dialogue (IFD) founded on normative examinations of the Qur'an and hadith. Expanding from this baseline, theories of religious universalism and particularism are engaged as well as under…
This dissertation aims to evaluate the utility of democracy promotion in the Middle East to U.S. foreign policy; in particular, it asks why the Arab-Islamic world has proven uniquely resistant to liberal democracy. The overall argument is that an inadequate theoretical understan…
This dissertation examines the contemporary paradoxes, impasses, and new possibilities negotiated by Syrian Muslim men who practice the musical group worship of dhikr. Dhikr is group activity often associated with Sufism, and has long been an important part of Islamic practice i…
This dissertation explores how and why parliamentarian Islamists, both in Morocco and in Turkey, moderated their beliefs and behaviors over time. From a heavily identity-based discourse, both parties became more policy-oriented and pro-systemic over time, albeit with differing d…
This dissertation explores how the contradictory historical processes set in motion by the politics of empire, nationhood and sovereignty in the Middle East are critically refracted through everyday practices of kinship and self-making in Palestinian refugee communities in Tyre …
In the expulsions of 1492 AD and 1496 AD, many of the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal immigrated to the Ottoman Empire. A significant portion ended up in the Greek city of Salonika. The Sephardic Jews of Salonika thrived for centuries under Ottoman rule thanks to their Dh…
This dissertation is a study of the popular commercial cinema during the Pahlavi era in and as modern Iranian history. Critics of this cinema, more commonly known as filmfarsi (or "Persian-film" ), have drawn on and contributed to an extensive post-war literature on film enterta…
This dissertation examines the development of experimental Middle Eastern dance in the United States. It focuses on terminology, ideas, and practices presented by six choreographers and their works performed at An Evening of Experimental Middle Eastern Dance (EEMED) . In order t…
Discipline and Development is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with families and in primary schools in a Moroccan village near Fez. I examine the everyday lives of children and youth, situated in the context of uneven state development of this region. In carefully an…
The American occupation of Iraq revealed intense intra-society violence in Iraq that was not possible to take note of during decades of the state's systematic practice of violence against society and the organized counter-violence in response to it. The occupation, along with th…
