Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Middle East Studies

In this innovative study of everyday charity practices in Jeddah, Nora Derbal employs a 'bottom-up' approach to challenge dominant narratives about state-society relations in Saudi Arabia. Exploring charity organizations in Jeddah, this book both offers a rich ethnography of associational life and counters Riyadh-centric studies which focus on oil, the royal family, and the religious establishment. It closely follows those who work on the ground to provide charity to the local poor and needy, documenting their achievements, struggles and daily negotiations. The lens of charity offers rare insights into the religiosity of ordinary Saudis, showing that Islam offers Saudi activists a language, a moral frame, and a worldly guide to confronting inequality. With a view to the many forms of local community activism in Saudi Arabia, this book examines perspectives that are too often ignored or neglected, opening new theoretical debates about civil society and civic activism in the Gulf.

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.

Based on extensive interviews and oral histories as well as archival sources, Women and the Islamic Republic challenges the dominant masculine theorizations of state-making in post-revolutionary Iran. Shirin Saeidi demonstrates that despite the Islamic Republic's non-democratic structures, multiple forms of citizenship have developed in post-revolutionary Iran. This finding destabilizes the binary formulation of democratization and authoritarianism which has not only dominated investigations of Iran, but also regime categorizations in political science more broadly. As non-elite Iranian women negotiate or engage with the state's gendered citizenry regime, the Islamic Republic is forced to remake, oftentimes haphazardly, its citizenry agenda. The book demonstrates how women remake their rights, responsibilities, and statuses during everyday life to condition the state-making process in Iran, showing women's everyday resistance to the state-making process.

Although Middle Eastern states are commonly referred to as 'police states', little has been written about their police. By studying the 'low policing' of interpersonal disputes in Jordan, this book outlines the inconspicuous, daily methods the state uses to create and sustain the social order.

This first study into the role of US and European 'democracy promoters' in Jordan uses a diverse range of original source material to reveal what democracy promotion looks like in practice, vividly illustrating what a greater US and European policy presence in the Global South really means.

Khaled Fahmy offers a new interpretation of modern Egyptian history and the rise of Egyptian nationalism in a theoretically informed study. The book challenges traditionally held views about early nineteenth-century Egypt and the role of Mehmed Ali as the founder of modern Egypt.

Family law continues to be one of the most controversial legal areas in all Muslim-majority countries. In this book, Doerthe Engelcke explores the remarkable differences in the engagement with family law in the 2000s by Morocco and Jordan, both ostensibly similar regimes.

The AKP period in Turkey has often been understood as a break from the 'secular' pattern of state-building. Ceren Lord challenges this by showing how Islamist mobilisation in Turkey has been facilitated by state institutions established during early nation-building, offering a new perspective on the politicisation of religion.

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.

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.

Why and how did independent trade unions emerge in Egypt, despite its history of state control over organized labour? And why was the movement pioneered by traditionally quiescent civil servants? Bishara examines the relationship between labour organizations and the state to reveal how political change occurs under an authoritarian regime.

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.

This accessible scholarly work traces the regional politics of the Shia in the Eastern Province of Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia since the nineteenth century. The first book in English on the topic, it casts new light on the survival strategies and political mobilization of the Shia community as it confronts the repressive machinery of the Saudi regime.

Madawi Al-Rasheed's goes beyond the conventional tropes that describe women in Saudi Arabia to probe the historical, political and religious forces that have thwarted their emancipation. It demonstrates how women have become hostage to contradictory political projects that demand female piety and encourage modernity.

Details the effects of political aid in the Middle East by analyzing discursive and professional practices in four key subfields.

The first comprehensive study of Syria's religious scene and the Sunni ulama. This book shows how the secular, non-Sunni Ba'thist regime has been compelled to bring the clergy into the political fold. Pierret affords a new perspective on Syrian society now at the crossroads of political, social and religious fragmentation.

Distinguished historian Ali M. Ansari explores ideas about nationalism and how they apply to twentieth-century Iran.

This book contributes to the debate on the Islamization of Turkish politics by focusing on the Imam-Hatip schools, founded in 1924. Through textual analysis and interviews, it explores how Imam-Hatip education shapes students' politics and behaviour and examines the schools' role in Turkey's Islamization at both the high and grassroots levels of politics.

Examines the endurance and influence of mystical beliefs on political strategy in Iran from the Safavid dynasty to the present day. Rahnema demonstrates, with examples from contemporary Iranian politics, that this has allowed leaders to present themselves as representatives of the divine, and their rivals as the embodiment of evil.

Saudi Arabia is widely considered to be the heartland of radical Islamism. This 2010 book presents the first ever history of Saudi jihadism based on extensive fieldwork in the kingdom and primary sources in Arabic. It offers a powerful explanation for the rise of Islamist militancy in Saudi Arabia.

Moore's book is the first to examine relations between state authority and elite business representation in the Middle East. By considering the Kuwait and Jordan cases, he concludes that unleashing the private sector alone is insufficient to change current political and economic arrangements when established political infrastructures remain in place.

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.

Colonialism denied Algeria its own history; nationalism reinvented it. James McDougall charts the creation of that history through colonialism to independence, exploring the relationship between history, Islamic culture and nationalism in Algeria. This book will be read by colonial historians, social theorists, scholars of the Middle East and North Africa.

This book examines the political and social life of the Gulf city and its coastline, as exemplified by Manama in Bahrain. Written as an ethnography of space, politics and community, it addresses the changing relationship between urban development, politics and society before and after the discovery of oil.

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.

Arang Keshavarzian's fascinating book compares the economics and politics of the marketplace under the Pahlavis, who sought to undermine it in the drive for modernisation and under the subsequent revolutionary regime which came to power with a mandate to preserve the bazaar as an 'Islamic' institution.

Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its international context.

The book addresses important questions about the nature of Egypt's judicial system and the reasons why such a system appeals to Arab rulers outside Egypt. From the theoretical perspective, it also contributes to the debates about liberal legality, political change and the relationship between law and society in the developing world.

The Islamist Justice and Development Party swept to power in Turkey in 2002. Since then it has shied away from a hard-line ideological stance in favour of a more conservative and democratic approach. This book asks whether it is possible for a political party with deeply religious ideology to liberalise and entertain democracy?