This text presents the literature of contemporary Islamic feminist authors, and analyzes their strategies for self-definition and self-empowerment.

In a book that radically and fundamentally revises the way we think about war, Miriam Cooke charts the emerging tradition of women's contributions to what she calls the "War Story," a genre formerly reserved for men. Concentrating on the contemporary literature of the Arab world, Cooke looks at how alternatives to the master narrative challenge the authority of experience and the permission to write. She shows how women who write themselves and their experiences into the War Story undo the masculine contract with violence, sexuality, and glory. There is no single War Story, Cooke concludes;...

Crucial to understanding Islam is a recognition of the role of Muslim networks. The earliest networks were Mediterranean trade routes that quickly expanded into transregional paths for pilgrimage, scholarship, and conversion, each network complementing and reinforcing the others. This volume selects major moments and key players from the seventh century to the twenty-first that have defined Muslim networks as the building blocks for Islamic identity and social cohesion.

Although neglected in scholarship, Muslim networks have been invoked in the media to portray post-9/11 terrorist...

"These writings on war by Middle Eastern and South Asian women are passionate, bitter, and deeply attached to place and circumstance. They should be part of our essential reading. At the tail end of this century, they help to remap a vivid, splintering world."--Meena Alexander, author of "Fault Lines." Lightning Print On Demand Title

This is a study of Arab writers such as Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaikh, Emily Nasrallah and Etel Adnan. It presents a constructive literary approach to the ravages of the civil war in the Lebanon. The ways in which women's consciousness is awakened in terms of female liberation is a theme.

From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of protest into official agitprop. Syrian dissidents were forced to negotiate between the desire to genuinely criticize the authoritarian regime, the risk to their own safety and security that such criticism would invite, and the fear that their work would be co-opted as government propaganda, as what...

From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of protest into official agitprop. Syrian dissidents were forced to negotiate between the desire to genuinely criticize the authoritarian regime, the risk to their own safety and security that such criticism would invite, and the fear that their work would be co-opted as government propaganda, as what...

The Mediterranean is the meeting point of three continents--Asia, Africa, and Europe--as well as three major monotheistic religions--Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Focusing on global networks and cultural exchanges, Mediterranean Passages collects writings from across 3,000 years to provide a pan-Mediterranean perspective of the cultural, political, and economic relations that crisscross the region, linking people and places from antiquity to the present.

From Homer's hymn to Apollo to the writing of French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida, from the contemporary...

In 1928, a young Lebanese woman, Nazira Zeineddine al-Halabi, wrote a book called "Unveiling and Veiling," an indictment of patriarchal oppression in which she boldly stated that the veil was un-Islamic, directly challenging the teachings of wiser" male scholars. Considered by many an attack on Islam, it rocked the Muslim world and was banned by many clerics, although it quickly went into a second edition and was translated into several languages. In this latest addition to Makers of the Muslim World series, Miriam Cooke offers an intimate portrait of the life and work of this pioneering...