Review – Books

"Oral histories always beg the question of what lives and cultural forms are isolated, erased and made insignificant by bringing this narrative to the fore," Livia Wick writes in...

Could the end of liberalism be the end of diverse multi-ethnic states, from Indonesia to the United States? Azeem Ibrahim seems to think so and aims to make the...

"Arabic is eloquence, Persian is wittiness, Turkish is abomination, and the rest is filth," Evliya Celebi, the 17th century Ottoman travel writer, is reported to have remarked. The high...

Brendan Ciaran Browne's contribution to the literature on Palestine is not only welcomed, but sharply focused. Veering away from the mainstream discourse that protects the two-state compromise at the...

Few can claim to have produced a wealth of scholarship and achieved mastery over Middle Eastern history, but Roy Mottahedeh's insatiable curiosity for the past has left us with...

A group of men and women have gathered with an instructor to partake in a religious ceremony which, aside from worship, represents something broader in their lives: how to...

Azad Essa's book, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press, 2023), offers detailed insights into the politics of Zionism and Hindutva. With an introduction by...

In 2020, with the full extent of the coronavirus outbreak still unknown, Chris Buckley of the New York Times received a phone call from a woman at the Wuhan...

Matthew Teller had to unlearn much of what he had learnt about Jerusalem before he could write his book Nine Quarters of Jerusalem – A New Biography of the...

Locals and foreigners alike often ask why people in the Middle East are "so lazy". While such a view held by people from outside the region has its roots...

For the Algerian-born Parisian poet, Hocine Tandjaoui, the memory of the Algerian War of Independence, and the personal biography that shapes it, is best relayed through poetry. His genre-bending...

Nora Lester Murad's young adult novel, Ida in the Middle (Crocodile Books, 2022), explores Palestinian identity and makes it relatable to a non-Palestinian audience. Ida, a young teenager, is...

The Palestinian return is never as envisaged. For Palestinian poet and author Hussein Barghouti, his struggle with cancer prompted a return to Palestine from his "voluntary exile" after 30...

The JNF/KKL: A Charity Complicit with Ethnic Cleansing by academic and civil rights activist Dr Uri Davis is the latest offering by MEMO Publishers and brings to light the...

Tony Greenstein's well researched book, Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of the State and Nation will not sit well with proponents of the...

NO WAY TO GAZA is a book recently published in London by MEMO, narrated by three Brazilian professors travelling from Cairo through Sinai, in the summer of 2019, to...

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...

One of the most startling aspects of Israel's ongoing takeover of historic Palestine is how, despite the catalogue of human rights abuse, violations of international law and the practice...

The devastating war in Yemen has been raging for eight years, and with the recent expiry of a UN-brokered truce, conflict between the warring parties remains unlikely to end...

This complex subject is presented with meticulous research by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi in Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practising Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). The book goes beyond the...

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...

Sharing a very personal account of his own incarceration at the hands of the Israeli occupation authorities, MEMO's Palestinian political cartoonist, Mohammad Sabaaneh, offers us a glimpse into this...

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...

Human rights, in itself, have long been a contentious industry, developing over the decades and adapting to particular regions and surroundings. It is no different in Palestine, and perhaps...

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear defies order and structure. It is a staggeringly diverse collection and as deep, heavy and haunting as the very days Israel...

It's Christmas Eve in London and Heba Hayek's narrator is looking to bake something that reminds her of home. She settles for basbousa, a coconut yoghurt semolina cake, which...

A prominent part of Israel's colonial violence is the deprivation of free movement for Palestinians. Maryam S. Griffin's book, Vehicles of Decolonisation: Public Transport in the Palestinian West Bank...

Of the 12 official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Ain El-Hilweh ('Ayn Al-Hilwe) is the largest in both area and population and is known among its 33,000 or so...

"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...

The deployment of the physical body into a site of struggle and resistance remains one of the most poignant and controversial methods of protest. Due to its tremendous toll,...

The concept of martyrdom is one that is shared by all three Abrahamic faiths and one which, by the time of the advent of Islam, was understood firmly by...

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,...