Modern Middle East Research Guide
Resources for Studies of the Modern Middle East
Finding Physical Books
Books on the history of the Middle East are shelved in multiple locations: predominantly the DS range, though content on particular themes can also be found in H ranges (HT-HV), and JQ. All of those ranges are located on the upper floor of the library.
Although you will find that the physical collection is dominated by books either on terrorism or Israel, volumes on various Middle Eastern countries, cultures, and concerns are available.
Click any of links below to be taken to the page for some of the more recent volumes from the physical collection. Otherwise, feel free to use the search engine on the Library home page to find books on your subject (click here for a pre-loaded search), or simply walk upstairs and browse the stacks!
A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929 by ISBN: 9781477311752Drawing on extensive archival research in Iran, Tanzania, England, and France, as well as fieldwork and interviews in Iran, Behnaz A. Mirzai offers the first history of slavery in modern Iran from the early nineteenth century to emancipation in the mid-twentieth century. She investigates how foreign military incursion, frontier insecurity, political instability, and economic crisis altered the patterns of enslavement, as well as the ethnicity of the slaves themselves.
Iran: A Modern History by ISBN: 9780300112542This history of modern Iran offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years. The book covers the complex history of the diverse societies and economies of Iran against the background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars, foreign occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.
ISIS: A History by ISBN: 9780691170008In this book, Fawaz Gerges provides a clear and compelling explanation of the deeper conditions that fuel ISIS. This unique history shows how decades of dictatorship, poverty, and rising sectarianism in the Middle East, exacerbated by foreign intervention, led to the rise and growth of ISIS--and why addressing those problems is the only way to ensure its end.
The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East by ISBN: 9780521761178The modern Middle East emerged out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when Britain and France partitioned the Ottoman Arab lands into several new colonial states. The following period was a charged and transformative time of unrest. Insurgent leaders, trained in Ottoman military tactics and with everything to lose from the fall of the Empire, challenged the mandatory powers in a number of armed revolts. This is a study of this crucial period in Middle Eastern history, tracing the period through popular political movements and the experience of colonial rule.
A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil from Tahrir Square to ISIS by ISBN: 9780374252946A Rage for Order tracks the tormented legacy of what was once called the Arab Spring. Combining dramatic storytelling with an original analysis of the Arab world today, A Rage for Order captures the psychic and actual civil wars raging throughout the Middle East and explains how the dream of an Arab renaissance gave way to a new age of discord.
Finding Digital eBooks
Finding useful eBooks is no different from finding specific physical books or journal articles: drop your search terms into the search engine on the Library's home page and let the system do the work for you! For those who are just browsing, a few recent examples are linked below. If you would like a painstaking deep dive into the catalog, you may simply click here for a preloaded search listing nearly 4,000 eBooks in our catalog that have to do with the Middle East.
Beyond Piety and Politics by ISBN: 9780253060549Beyond Piety and Politics provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the depth and variety of political attitudes held by people who consider themselves to be pious Muslims. Using survey data on religious preferences and behavior, the authors argue for the relevance and importance of four outlook categories--religious individualist, social communitarian, religious communitarian, and post-Islamist--and use these to explore complex and nuanced attitudes of devout Muslims toward issues like democracy and economic distribution.
Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine by ISBN: 9780520382893Camera Palaestina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904-1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh's nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the social history of Palestine.
The End of Two Illusions: Islam After the West by ISBN: 9780520976320Dabashi demonstrates how "the West" was an ideological commodity and civilizational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicenter for the rise of globalized capitalist modernity. In turn, Orientalist ideologues went around the world manufacturing equally illusory abstractions in the form of inferior civilizations in India, China, Africa, Latin America, and the Islamic world. The result was the projection of "Islam and the West" as the prototype of a civilizational hostility that has given false explanations and flawed prognoses of our contemporary history, with weaponized Islamophobia on one side and militant Islamism on the other as its most palpable manifestations.
A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967-1979 by ISBN: 9781501769177
Novel Palestine: Nation Through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah by ISBN: 9780520394667Engaging the writings of Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nora E. H. Parr traces a vocabulary through which Palestine can be discussed as a changing and flexible national network linking people across and within space, time, and community. Through an exploration of the Palestinian literary scene subsequent to its canonical writers, Parr makes the life and work of Nasrallah available to an English-language audience for the first time, offering an intervention in geography while bringing literary theory into conversation with politics and history.
