New Releases
Knowledge and Power in Muslim Societies
Approaches in Intellectual History
Kazuo Morimoto, Sajjad Rizvi (eds.) – 2023-06
The study of Islam and of Islamic history is enjoying something of a revival with an emphasis on intellectual history and a greater concern with the ’subaltern’ within that. Why does religion continue to hold significance in our times? Are humans better off, adaptable, less violent, consistently unpredictable? How can we understand the course of our political history and the seeming dominance of democracy and its discontents, not least the legacies of coloniality and empire? While nationalist historiographies prevail in man...
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Bahrain’s Surviving Dynasty
The Al Khalifa’s Rulership Struggles and Successions 1783-1932
Mohamed Matar – 2023-06
The Al Khalifa of Bahrain is a long-standing dynasty that has established dispute resolution measures to overcome intra-tribal ambitions for power and wealth, replacing extra-constitutional rulership succession with primogeniture. Since their control over Bahrain began in 1783 until the British withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971, the Al Khalifa introduced ten senior ruling shaykhs, seven of whom experienced turbulent successions, and faced in-house rivalries and power-seeking disputes. This book provides valuable insights int...
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Islamic Legal Principles and Intellectual Property Rights in the Gulf States
Nadia Naim – 2023
The book focuses on the relationship between Islamic law and intellectual property law and proposes groundbreaking alternatives to better support the growth of intellectual property in line with the Islamic moral economy. The author provides an overview of the development of intellectual property under Shariah principles in the Gulf States. She focuses on how the US and the EU have shaped the intellectual property regimes in the Gulf States, the WTO and WIPO in the pre-TRIPS era, and compliance with the minimum standards o...
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Iranian / Persianate Subalterns in the Safavid Period: Their Role and Depiction
Recovering ’Lost Voices‘
Andrew J. Newman – 2022
‘Subaltern studies’ refers to the importance of ‘subordinate’ groups in the making of history. The latter are usually defined as encompassing the urban and rural underclasses, the majority in any society, although generally the term is said to refer to all non-elites, including women. Most often the discourse concentrates on instances of social protest as points whereat the ‘subalterns’ make their ‘voices’ heard in response to, or even independent of, manipulations by the elite. The book draws on wide-ranging sources to b...
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The Arab Spring: Ten Years On
Sujata Ashwarya, Mujib Alam (eds.) – 2022
It has been a decade since people across the Arab world rose up in revolt against their governments in 2010/11, demanding political empowerment, social reform and economic improvement. Pro-democracy protests, as they were called in common parlance, which spread rapidly through the mobilisation of social media calls, ended up overthrowing long-standing authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. That gave rise to hope for a more representative future, as well as economic reforms, after decades of mismanagemen...
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Grand Strategy in the Contemporary Middle East
The Concepts and Debates
Tore T. Petersen, Clive Jones (eds.) – 2022
This unique volume explores the role that Grand Strategy has played in the shaping of the Middle East and why, conceptually, its core principles still have traction in explaining the shifting alliances and dispensation of power across the region. When so much of the spatial as well as the geo-political boundaries of the Middle East are in flux, it is now time to revisit the very ideas that inform Grand Strategy that once again, are enjoying a wider intellectual renaissance in world affairs. Through a longitudinal met...
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The Holy Land: Travels Through Galilee to Damascus and Baalbek.
And the Green Mosque of Bursa
Pierre Loti – 2022
First English translation of ‘La Galilée’, an account of Pierre Loti’s travels in the Holy Land from Jerusalem to Beirut, via Damascus and many other interesting places, in 1894. Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was born Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud into a Protestant family in Rochefort in Saintonge, South-West France (now Charente Maritime). He was an officer of the French Navy and a prolific author of considerable note in 19th-/early-20th-century France, publishing many novels and numerous accounts of his travels around the world. H...
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