Books in the Cambridge Middle East Studies series

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?

This work looks in detail at the state-emigrant relationship in the cases of Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon. A socio-economic and political history of the migration is used as background to a discussion of the evolution of state policies put in place to enable states to control these expatriates.

This 2006 book provides a rigorous theoretical analysis of the Kurdish issue through the lens of social movement theory. The empirical material, the result of research in Ankara, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria makes the book a compelling read for students of the Middle East, ethnic relations and sociology.

Questions about the authenticity and authority of sunna are central to the study of Islam and Islamic law. Tracing the emergence of modern debates, Daniel Brown assesses the implications of new approaches to the law on contemporary Islamic revivalist movements, and explores the impact of modernity on religious authority generally.

In a challenging and authoritative analysis, Parvin Paidar considers how Iranian women have been affected, and their position redefined, by the political transformations of twentieth-century Iran.

Sanasarian's book explores the political and ideological relationship between religious minorities in Iran and the state during the formative years of the Islamic Republic. While the book is essentially empirical, it also highlights questions associated with exclusion and marginalization and the role of the state in defining those boundaries.

Based on three decades of ethnographic fieldwork and documentary research, this 1997 book traces the political and social history of the Shahsevan, one of the major nomadic peoples of Iran.

Challenging recent scholarship which has dwelt on Islamic activism, Nadje Al-Ali explores the anthropological and political significance of secular-oriented activism by focusing on the women's movement in Egypt. The author frames her work around current theoretical debates in Middle Eastern and post-colonial scholarship and interviews with members of the movement.

Explores the social and political dynamics of nineteenth-century Shi'ism and through this sheds light on modern debates.

Sheila Carapico's book on civic participation in modern Yemen makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of political culture in Arabia. The author traces the complexities of Yemen's history, considering its response to the colonial encounter and to years of civil unrest.

The ghost of the Holocaust is ever present in Israel, in the lives and nightmares of the survivors and in the absence of the victims. In this compelling analysis, Idith Zertal considers how Israel has used the memory of the Holocaust to define and legitimize its existence and politics.

The book offers a systematic yet non-technical analysis of the economy of Mandatory Palestine. It is the first to focus on both the Arab and Jewish communities of the period and in this respect promises to make a significant contribution to the economic history of the Modern Middle East.

In an historically informed critique of development assistance, this book examines Britain's foreign aid programme in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s and raises important questions about the nature of the development process in the Middle East and Third World generally. This book was first published in 1996.

The emergence of nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s served to redefine Egyptian identity. The authors show how the growth of an urban middle class, combined with economic and political failures in the 1930s, eroded the earlier territorial and isolationist order.

Eugene Rogan documents the case of Transjordan to provide a theoretically informed account of how the Ottoman state restructured itself during the last decades of empire. In so doing, he explores the idea of frontier as a geographical and cultural boundary and sheds light on the processes of state formation.

Suleiman's 2004 book considers national identity in relation to language, the way in which language - in this case the Arabic language - can be manipulated to signal political, cultural or historical difference.

Why do young Saudis, night after night, joyride and skid cars on Riyadh's avenues? Who are these 'drifters' who defy public order and private property? What drives their revolt? Based on four years of fieldwork in Riyadh, Pascal Menoret's Joyriding in Riyadh explores the social fabric of the city and connects it to Saudi Arabia's recent history. Car drifting emerged after Riyadh was planned, and oil became the main driver of the economy. For young rural migrants, it was a way to reclaim alienating and threatening urban spaces. For the Saudi state, it jeopardized its most basic operations: managing public spaces and enforcing law and order. A police crackdown soon targeted car drifting, feeding a nation-wide moral panic led by religious activists who framed youth culture as a public issue. This book retraces the politicization of Riyadh youth and shows that, far from being a marginal event, car drifting is embedded in the country's social violence and economic inequality.

What role does military force play during a colonial occupation? The answer seems obvious: coercion crushes local resistance, quashes political dissent and consolidates the dominance of the occupying power. However, as this discerning and theoretically rigorous study suggests, violence can have much more ambiguous consequences. Set in Syria during the French Mandate from 1920 to 1946, the book explores a turbulent period in which conflict between armed Syrian insurgents and French military forces not only determined the strategic objectives of the colonial state, but also transformed how the colonial state organised, controlled and understood Syrian society, geography and population. In addition to the coercive techniques, the book shows how civilian technologies such as urban planning and engineering were also commandeered in the effort to undermine rebel advances. Colonial violence had a lasting effect in Syria, shaping a peculiar form of social order that endured well after the French occupation.

Since its revolution in 1979, Iran has been viewed as the bastion of radical Islam and a sponsor of terrorism. The focus on its volatile internal politics and its foreign relations has, according to Kamrava, distracted attention from more subtle transformations which have been taking place there in the intervening years. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini a more relaxed political environment opened up in Iran, which encouraged intellectual and political debate between learned elites and religious reformers. What emerged from these interactions were three competing ideologies which Kamrava categorises as conservative, reformist and secular. As the book aptly demonstrates, these developments, which amount to an intellectual revolution, will have profound and far-reaching consequences for the future of the Islamic republic, its people and very probably for countries beyond its borders. This thought-provoking account of the Iranian intellectual and cultural scene will confound stereotypical views of Iran and its mullahs.

How can we make sense of Algeria's post-colonial experience - the tragedy of unfulfilled expectations, the descent into violence, the resurgence of the state? Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics explains why Algeria's domestic political economy unravelled from the mid-1980s, and how the regime eventually managed to regain power and hegemony. Miriam Lowi argues the importance of leadership decisions for political outcomes, and extends the argument to explain the variation in stability in oil-exporting states following economic shocks. Comparing Algeria with Iran, Iraq, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, she asks why some states break down and undergo regime change, while others remain stable, or manage to re-stabilise after a period of instability. In contrast with exclusively structuralist accounts of the rentier state, this book demonstrates, in a fascinating and accessible study, that political stability is a function of the way in which structure and agency combine.

Benny Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem was published in 1988. Its startling revelations about how and why 700,000 Palestinians left their homes and became refugees during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 undermined traditional interpretations as to whether they left voluntarily or were expelled as part of a systematic plan. This book represents a revised edition of the earlier work, compiled on the basis of newly-opened Israeli military archives. While the focus remains the 1948 war and the analysis of the Palestinian exodus, the new material contains more information about what happened in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, and how events there led to the collapse of Palestinian urban society. It also sheds light on the battles and atrocities that resulted in the disintegration of rural communities. The story is a harrowing one. The refugees now number four million and their existence remains a major obstacle to peace.

The June 1967 war was a watershed in the history of the modern Middle East. In six days, the Israelis defeated the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies. Two veteran scholars of the Middle East bring together experts in their fields to reassess the origins and the legacies of the war.

In Saudi Arabia there are now open debates about religion and politics, often in violation of official taboos. Madawi Al-Rasheed explores this phenomenon, and how, in consequence and with the rise of multiple interpretations of religious texts, the traditional Wahhabi discourse is losing its hold on the new generation.