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Muriam Haleh Davis's new book Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria explores the colonial roots of Algeria's transition into a modern capitalist economy. But it is...
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Dan Hodd travelled from Europe to COP27 in Egypt without stepping foot on a plane to highlight the case for environmental travel, MEMO caught up with him along the way
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This new book edited by Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed seeks to make sense of the October 2019 uprising that shook Lebanon. The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices...
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Regions such Dagestan, Chechnya and the Caucasus tend to make us think of territories that are firmly under Moscow's control as part of the Russian Federation. However, Russian control...
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"It turned out that Syria is our sacred land," wrote a Russian blogger sarcastically in 2016 following attempts by some public figures to recast Syria as part of Russia...
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Arjomand takes us into the critical and largely invisible work of the media fixer. Defining what fixers do is difficult as their role can be quite fluid but, essentially,...
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A popular Russian-speaking Jewish satirist from Kharkiv, Leonid Osmolovskyi, had become a shadow of his former self by the 1980s. Once famed for his witty essays and part of...
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'Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world'.
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In his new book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture In Modern Egypt, Andrew Simon recounts how, on 12 June, 1974, US President Richard Nixon landed in Cairo for...
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"From a deep history perspective, Ottoman rule in Iraq — the land of ancient Babylonia — was a political oddity," writes Faisal Husain in Rivers of the Sultan: The...
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How does history look at non-urban, rural populations who lived through the last century of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish republic? Chris Gratien's The Unsettled...
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In January 2022, Kazakhstan made international headlines when it was hit by waves of popular protests which were suppressed by the authorities in the Central Asian state. What began...
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Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity by Elise Burton, is a sweeping history of 'genetic nationalism' in the 20th century covering Iran, Turkey, Israel,...
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Jocelyn Hendrickson takes us on a historical and legal tour exploring Islamic responses to Christian conquests in Spain and North West Africa in her book Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law...
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"Tyranny is the origin of every perversity," claims the author of The Nature of Tyranny and the Devastating Results of Oppression. "Tyranny corrupts the mind by restrictions, and degrades...
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MEMO sat down with Emad Kiyaei of the Middle East Treaty Organisation to discuss the significance of the nuclear talks
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96 km off the Horn of Africa coast lies a unique archipelago of Yemeni islands
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This new book by Cigdem Oguz, who teaches history at Bologna University, reveals the growing concern in Ottoman society during the First World War about the decline in public...
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The author of The Last Great War of Antiquity makes the point that its writing was "no easy task… but given the importance of the war, it is worth...
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In post-World War One Iraq, Britain was the occupying power. At a celebration of Prophet Muhammad's birthday in 1920 (peace be upon him) in Baghdad's Haydar-Khana Mosque, blind poet...
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Tancred Bradshaw concludes in his new book – The End of Empire in the Gulf: From Trucial States to the United Arab Emirates – that, "The British imperial project...
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Zana Gulmohamad's new book, The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite, takes on the mammoth task of exploring and explaining how Iraq has...
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Kelly A. Hammond's book China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II is published at a time when Islam in China is under intense scrutiny with...
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Laleh Khalili's book Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula is a surprisingly seductive read. A cross between history, geopolitics and economics, with a...
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Our interview with Mauritanian-American activist Nasser Weddady discussing corruption in Mauritania
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The United Arab Emirates is waging a war for influence over the Horn of Africa
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Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions by Oludamini Ogunnaike is a sweeping and ambitious book that operates on multiple levels with...
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Our interview with Dr Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, historian of nationalism and race at King's College London, about Islamophobia in France in light of President Emmanuel Macron's recent comments about Islam being 'in crisis'.
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It is almost a year since Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani (11 March 1957 – 3 January 2020) was killed in a US drone attack near Baghdad International...
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Social anthropologist Madawi Al-Rasheed's new book The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia looks at the conflicts taking place in the desert Kingdom both historically and under...
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Ulrike Freitag's A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is a seductively charming urban history of the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah,...
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Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi's Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran takes us on an intellectual tour of post-Islamism and Islamic left thought in Iran. The early 1990s...