I Am the Wounded Victim of a Suicide Bomber presents a selection of poems, translated into English and including the Perisan texts, by Fazel Ahad Ahadi, a scholar and poet driven from his home in Afghanistan by the political and social disruptions that have beset his country since the mid-twentieth century. Drawing heavily on these years of warfare and domination by outsiders and by extremists, this collection highlights the struggles… Read more
Muslims in the Movies provides a series of essays that explore the portrayal and reception of Muslims in Euro-American film, transnational productions, and global national cinemas. The volume brings together a group of internationally recognized experts to introduce Muslims in the films of Europe, North America, Australia, Iran, Egypt, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The interdisciplinary collection explores issues of identity, cultural production, and representation through… Read more
The study of Islam has historically been approached in two different ways: apologetical and polemical. The former focuses on the preservation and propagation of religious teachings, and the latter on the attempt to undermine the tradition. The dialectic between these two approaches continued into the Enlightenment, and the tension between them still exists today. What is new in the modern period, however, is the introduction of a third approach, the… Read more
The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures is an unapologetic collection of imaginative essays from thought-provoking Middle East scholar Richard W. Bulliet. Not your ordinary think pieces, this volume collects for the first time Bulliet’s Big Bang–Big Crunch theory of Islamic history and his illuminating conception of the “Muslim South.” Speculations range from future political events to counterfactual histories of how reversal of the outcome of a 1529 battle… Read more
The twenty-first century has been a volatile period for American Muslims. Anti-Muslim hate crimes peaked after September 11, 2001, then increased again dramatically in parallel with the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. Yet American Muslims now have unprecedented avenues of influence in US politics. Muslims and US Politics Today explores the various representations of Muslims in American political and civic life, the myriad ways American Muslims are affected by politics, and… Read more
The roster of Muslim superheroes in the comic book medium has grown over the years, as has the complexity of their depictions. Muslim Superheroes tracks the initial absence, reluctant inclusion, tokenistic employment, and then nuanced scripting of Islamic protagonists in the American superhero comic book market and beyond. This scholarly anthology investigates the ways in which Muslim superhero characters fulfill, counter, or complicate Western stereotypes and navigate popular audience expectations globally,… Read more
The Making of Iranian Modernity brings together a diverse array of scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and areas of research specialization to celebrate Houchang E. Chehabi, one of the leading scholars in the field of Iranian Studies. Since the 1980s, Chehabi’s interdisciplinary body of work has made major contributions both to the study of modern Iran’s social and cultural history, as well as to the understanding of Iran’s… Read more
The athletes known in Iran as pahlavāns and the domed structure, the zurkhāneh, where they congregate to practice ritualized martial arts, physical culture, and spirituality, are usually presented as the cornerstone of traditional Iranian masculine identity. However, this idealization does not do justice to the complex history of Iranian society. Philippe Rochard, who has observed the zurkhāneh world for the past thirty years and actually lived in it for over four years, sets out to… Read more
Travelers have always experimented with disguise while observing the disguises of others. Each of the chapters in Mobility and Masks illustrates the strategies of concealment in the experience of travel: a seventeenth-century German aristocrat discovers new freedom as she travels incognito, Jesuits write home from China in the eighteenth century about how costume changes serve their mission, a Chinese opera star reflects on his own masked art during a tour… Read more
