Marilyn Booth speaking on her new book. This book is an intellectual biography of early Arabic feminist Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1850-1914) and a study of her life in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, in the context of Arabophone debates on gender, modernity and the good society, 1890s-1910. Chapters take up her writing and debates in which she participated, concerning socia ... Show More
Mar 2025
The chaos (fawḍà) Bashshar al-Asad warned against – Damascus University 10th November 2005 – and present-day Syria
On Friday 21 February 2025, Professor Johannes Waardenburg gave the Middle East Centre’s Friday seminar Biography: Professor JST Waardenburg teaches the general history of the Arab world at the IULM in Milan. As a
historian, he specialises in the period of the Ba‘th party in powe ... Show More
51m 18s
Feb 2025
Israeli Public Opinion, War and Prospects for Peace
Political strategist and public opinion researcher, Dr Dahlia Scheindlin, shares her analysis of public opinion surveys before and during the war in Gaza. Israelis have shown increasingly hardline, right-wing, nationalist trends in public opinion surveys in recent years, leading ... Show More
1h 10m
Mar 2021
Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin, "Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization Subversion and Change" (McGill Queens UP, 2020)
In their groundbreaking new book, Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization, Subversion, and Change (McGill, 2020), Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin raise excellent questions about the existence and formation of a canon in the Islamic tradition. This ... Show More
1h 5m
Mar 2021
Hawraa Al Hassan, "Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State" (U Edinburgh Press, 2020)
Hawraa Al Hassan’s Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba’thist State: Contending Discourses of Resistance and Collaboration, 1968-2003 (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020) is unique because it both explores discourse concerning women and how women themselves used literature to create ... Show More
55m 54s
Apr 2014
Sa’diyya Shaikh, “Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University ... Show More
55m 26s
Sep 2019
Elizabeth S. Kassab, "Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates" (Columbia UP, 2019)
The "Arab Spring" shook the world in 2011, revealing profound dissatisfaction throughout the Middle East and North Africa, as people throughout the region took to the streets demanding dramatic political change. The uprisings have been analyzed by scholars, journalists, and other ... Show More
59m 23s
Feb 2021
Celene Ibrahim, "Women and Gender in the Qur'an" (Oxford UP, 2020)
In Women and Gender in the Qur’an (Oxford University Press in 2020), Celene Ibrahim explores key themes related to gender in the Qur’an, focusing on women, such as female sexuality, female kin and relations, and female figures in the sacred text. Among her findings is that there ... Show More
56m 57s