This page features recent publications by Islamic Studies faculty at Duke. For additional information about DISC faculty (CVs, course offerings, and more publications) access their individual web pages from the Core and Affiliated Faculty page or select their names from the list at the end of the right-hand column of this page.

FEATURED BOOK PUBLICATIONS

A Mind at Peace, by Ahmet Hamid Tanipar; translated by Erdag Göknar

A MIND AT PEACE, originally published in 1949, is a magnum opus and a lyrical homage to Istanbul. During President Obama's high-profile and symbolic April 2009 visit to Turkey, Deniz Baykal presented the president with a copy of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's novel A MIND AT PEACE. Baykal explained to President Obama that this book will help him understand "the nuances of [Turkish] culture and identity." Read more about the exchange between Baykal and Obama.

Displaced Allegories : Post Revolutionary Iranian Cinema, Negar Mottahedeh

In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film.

Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism, Rebecca Stein

Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of “discrepant mobility,” foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel’s future in the Arab Middle East.

Dissident Syria, miriam cooke

Dissident Syria, miriam cooke

In this intimate account of dissidence in Asad’s Syria, cooke describes how intellectuals attempted to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it.

 

On Violence: A Reader, ed., Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim

On Violence: A Reader, ed. Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim

The volume proceeds from the editors’ contention that violence is always historically contingent; it must be contextualized to be understood. . . . It is intrinsic to the human condition, an inescapable fact of life that can be channeled and reckoned with but never completely suppressed. Above all, they seek to illuminate the relationship between action and knowledge about violence, and to examine how one might speak about violence without replicating or perpetuating it.

Being and Belonging: Katherine Pratt Ewing

In Being and Belonging, Katherine Pratt Ewing leads a group of anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural studies experts in exploring how the events of September 11th have affected the quest for belonging and identity among Muslims in America—for better and for worse.

 

 

Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin, Katherine Pratt Ewing

The covered Muslim woman is a common spectacle in Western media—a victim of male brutality, the oppressed and suffering wife or daughter. And the resulting negative stereotypes of Muslim men, stereotypes reinforced by the post-9/11 climate in which he is seen as a potential terrorist, have become so prominent that they influence and shape public policy, citizenship legislation, and the course of elections across Europe and throughout the Western world. In this book, Katherine Pratt Ewing asks why and how these stereotypes—what she terms "stigmatized masculinity"—largely go unrecognized, and examines how Muslim men manage their masculine identities in the face of such discrimination.

Liberalism without Democracy, Abdeslam Maghraoui

The history of Western intervention in the Middle East stretches from the late eighteenth century to the present day. All too often, the Western rationale for invading and occupying a country to liberate its people has produced new forms of domination that have hindered rather than encouraged the emergence of democratic politics. Abdeslam M. Maghraoui advances the understanding of this problematic dynamic through an analysis of efforts to achieve liberal reform in Egypt following its independence from Great Britain in 1922.

Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism, Timur Kuran

In this bold and timely critique, Timur Kuran argues that the doctrine of Islamic economics is simplistic, incoherent, and largely irrelevant to present economic challenges. Observing that few Muslims take it seriously, he also finds that its practical applications have had no discernible effects on efficiency, growth, or poverty reduction. Why, then, has Islamic economics enjoyed any appeal at all? Kuran's answer is that the real purpose of Islamic economics has not been economic improvement but cultivation of a distinct Islamic identity to resist cultural globalization.

 

The Graves of Tarim: Geneaology and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, Engseng Ho

The Graves of Tarim narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Engseng Ho explores the transcultural exchanges--in kinship and writing--that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized. A work of both anthropology and history, this book brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide groundbreaking ways of studying religion, diaspora, and empire.