Review – Books

When one thinks of contemporary political Shia Islam the Islamic Republic of Iran tends to spring to mind, a theocracy which those familiar with the subject know is based...

In the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, Palestinians have had to contend with different forms of erasure and fragmentation of Palestinian identity, while acquainting themselves, without choice, with a...

Tribes and Global Jihadism edited by Virginie Collombier and Olivier Roy is the collaborative work of scholars seeking to explore and explain the relationships between the tribal communities of...

Ulf Laessing's book Understanding Libya Since Gaddafi is published at a time when it has never been so important to know what is happening in Libya, but few outside...

This is an important book with an ambitious theme: the blockade of Gaza and the Egyptian government’s significant role in perpetuating it.

International donors have influenced and shaped narratives on Palestine, to the point that to speak about Palestine without reflection is an exercise in disseminating global perceptions and intent. Nadia...

This is a work that will enthral those interested in the intersection of census data, map making using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and politics. It provides insights in the...

The nature of authoritarian rule in Syria remains little understood outside the country. As a notoriously closed society with limited access to the outside world before the 2000s, with...

Ahmed El Shamsy's Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed An Intellectual Tradition takes us into the story of how seminal works of Islamic philosophy, theology,...

From 2013 to 2016, academic and activist Karma Chávez hosted a radio programme which gave voice to people supporting the Palestinian struggle for their rights and justice. Palestine on...

The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought by Andrew F March comes to us at an interesting time. The 2011 Arab Spring led many across the...

"It is particularly in Darwish's poetical progression that Palestine endured and became metaphor." This observation in the introduction to Palestine as Metaphor (Olive Branch Press, 2019) resonates throughout the...

What the news reports eliminate, Ramzy Baroud's new book, These Chains Will be Broken: Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press, 2019), pushes to the fore....

"Oh, you're Israeli." "No, I'm not Israeli! I'm Palestinian!" He stared at me for a few seconds in silence and then continued, in the same neutral tone; "Listen, I...

In this ethnographic study, French-Iraqi sociologist Zahra Ali embarks on a unique journey, capturing the voices of Iraqi women of all ages, religions and political persuasions to get a...

The ostracisation of Palestine by the international community to facilitate its exploitation by colonial Israel is portrayed excellently in Palestine Past and Present (Nova Publishers, 2019). This collection of...

Events in the Arab world and beyond over the past decade have ignited an intense debate about Islam, Muslims and political engagement. A common theme of western historical research...

Normalising Israel as a Jewish state absents "Palestinian experience, history and identity claims". Yasmeen Abu Laban and Abigail Bakan, Palestinian and Jewish authors of "Israel, Palestine and the Politics...

For the past few weeks, Lebanon has been rocked by anti-government protests calling for a change in the ruling system and an end to corruption, economic decay and political...

"The rain was not in a docile mood." Huzama Habayeb's opening sentence of her novel Velvet (Hoopoe Fiction, 2019), beckons the reader to delve into intertwining worlds: the extravagance...

One would be at stretch to find another place on earth where the mining of history evokes as much controversy as Palestine. You would struggle even further to name...

It is currently olive harvest season in Palestine, which makes it the perfect time to talk about Yasmin Khan’s book Zaitoun, which translates to 'olive' in Arabic

For decades, Palestine has been framed by international law. This convenient perspective, rendered mainstream by the international community and the Palestinian Authority, has made international law a weapon to...

From the late sixties up until the early eighties Palestinians formed a resistance movement to liberate their homeland and ensure the return of their refugees. A vital part of...

Gardner Thompson's book, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books, 2019) opens with a brief observation that contradicts all mainstream propaganda which spouts the...

When discussing the Palestinian cause from the Nakba to the Great March of Return, many things spring to mind: the phenomenon of Zionism and its gradual takeover of Palestine;...

"Baris." He sighed. "It is where my life is." So Faruq Al-Azmeh, the "one other Arab on board the ship to Marseille", told an impressionable Midhat Kamal as he...

Literature about Palestine by Palestinian authors is like a deluge of insights into what is missing from what we proclaim to know. Our knowledge is dominated by news reports...

The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History by Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn makes for chilling reading as it takes us inside the three sieges that the...

The colonisation of Palestinian landscape and minds, author Greg Burris argues, is imbued with spaces in what he terms "the radical imagination" that breaks through Israeli impositions. Film and...

Palestinian memory has become synonymous with the 1948 Nakba and Palestinian resistance. Yet there are other strands of memory which are overlooked. Farah Aboubakr's treatise "The Folktales of Palestine"...

Nakba-themed anthologies dispel the concept of linear time and chronology. The brutal and abrupt halting of pre-1948 Palestinian life remains a reference point in Palestinian history, memory and literature,...