Bayoumi offers a revealing portrait of life for people who are often scrutinized but seldom heard from. --Booklist (starred review)

Wholly intelligent and sensitively-drawn, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? is an important investigation into the hearts and minds of young Arab-Americans. This significant and eminently readable work breaks through preconceptions and delivers a fresh take on a unique and vital community. Moustafa Bayoumi's voice is refreshingly frank, personable, and true. --Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Origin, Crescent, and The Language of Baklava

An eye-opening look at how young Arab- and Muslim-Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy

Just over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classic The Souls of Black Folk How does it feel to be a problem? Now, Moustafa Bayoumi asks the same about America's new problem-Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Bayoumi takes readers into the lives of seven twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn, home to the largest Arab-American population in the United States. He moves beyond stereotypes and clichés to reveal their often unseen struggles, from being subjected to government surveillance to the indignities of workplace discrimination. Through it all, these young men and women persevere through triumphs and setbacks as they help weave the tapestry of a new society that is, at its heart, purely American.

An investigative journalist uncovers a hidden custom in Afghanistan that will transform your understanding of what it means to grow up as a girl.

An astonishingly clear picture of this resourceful, if imperfect, solution to the problem of girlhood in a society where women have few rights and overwhelming restrictions.--The Boston Globe

In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as dressed up like a boy) is a third kind of child--a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. Jenny Nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times, constructs a powerful and moving account of those secretly living on the other side of a deeply segregated society where women have almost no rights and little freedom.

The Underground Girls of Kabul is anchored by vivid characters who bring this remarkable story to life: Azita, a female parliamentarian who sees no other choice but to turn her fourth daughter Mehran into a boy; Zahra, the tomboy teenager who struggles with puberty and refuses her parents' attempts to turn her back into a girl; Shukria, now a married mother of three after living for twenty years as a man; and Nader, who prays with Shahed, the undercover female police officer, as they both remain in male disguise as adults.

At the heart of this emotional narrative is a new perspective on the extreme sacrifices of Afghan women and girls against the violent backdrop of America's longest war. Divided into four parts, the book follows those born as the unwanted sex in Afghanistan, but who live as the socially favored gender through childhood and puberty, only to later be forced into marriage and childbirth. The Underground Girls of Kabul charts their dramatic life cycles, while examining our own history and the parallels to subversive actions of people who live under oppression everywhere.

A New York Times Editors' Choice - Finalist for the California Book Award - Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction - Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, Los Angeles Times

In this brilliantly argued and deeply personal work, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S.citizen, using her own story as a starting point for an exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth--such as national origin, race, and gender--that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today, poignantly illustrating how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation. Weaving together her experiences with an examination of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture, Lalami illuminates how conditional citizens are all those whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.

Through the story of the universal tree, representing the complete human being, and the four birds, representing the four essential aspects of existence, Ibn 'Arabi explains his teaching on the nature and meaning of union with God. Providing an excellent initiation into the often complex works of Ibn 'Arabi, this brief, delightful tale is the first English translation of an important, early work, complete with Arabic text, commentary, and notes.

No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.

Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.

The definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country ... a well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale. -- Washington Post Book World

Using research undertaken in twenty countries on four continents, Los Angeles Times correspondent Terry McDermott provides gripping, authoritative portraits of the main players in the 9/11 plot. With brilliant reporting and thoughtful analysis, McDermott brings us a clearer, more nuanced, and in some ways more frightening, understanding of the landmark event of our time.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were a calamity on a scale few had imagined possible. In their aftermath, we exaggerated the men who perpetrated the attacks, shaping hasty and often mistaken reporting into caricatures we could comprehend--monsters and master criminals equal to the enormity of their crime. In reality, the 9/11 hijackers were unexceptional men, not much different from countless others. It is this ordinary enemy, not the caricature, that we must understand if we are to have a legitimate hope of defeating terrorism.

An updated and expanded look at how under the shadow of authoritarian rule, ordinary people can make meaningful change through the practices of everyday life in the Middle East.

In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of conspicuous signs of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all.

Joan Wallach Scott, the renowned pioneer of gender studies, argues that the law is symptomatic of France's failure to integrate its former colonial subjects as full citizens. She examines the long history of racism behind the law as well as the ideological barriers thrown up against Muslim assimilation. She emphasizes the conflicting approaches to sexuality that lie at the heart of the debate--how French supporters of the ban view sexual openness as the standard for normalcy, emancipation, and individuality, and the sexual modesty implicit in the headscarf as proof that Muslims can never become fully French. Scott maintains that the law, far from reconciling religious and ethnic differences, only exacerbates them. She shows how the insistence on homogeneity is no longer feasible for France--or the West in general--and how it creates the very clash of civilizations said to be at the root of these tensions.

The Politics of the Veil calls for a new vision of community where common ground is found amid our differences, and where the embracing of diversity--not its suppression--is recognized as the best path to social harmony.

Embark on a scholarly exploration of Prophetic Medicine (Ṭibb al-nabawī), an intriguing Islamic genre of religious medical literature that flourished in Damascus between the 11th and 14th centuries. Delve into the pages of this thesis, which challenges conventional perspectives by urging a contextual understanding of Prophetic Medicine in its author's own terms.

While modern scholarship has often focused on the interplay between Prophetic Medicine and Greco-Islamic medical theory, this thesis asserts the need to reevaluate this genre within the dynamic intellectual and cultural milieu of Seljūk and early Mamlūk rule. Rather than framing it as a mere response to Hellenistic medicine, the narrative unfolds against a backdrop of intellectual stimulation and a call, by certain scholars, to return to a more original version of Islam

Providing a precious glimpse into the real practice of the mystical life within the Sufi tradition, this volume marks the first time any of Ibn 'Arabi's prayers have been translated into another language. The 14 prayers include not only the most astounding expressions of devotion and contemplation, but also an unparalleled depth of knowledge of union. The very structure of the prayers is itself a mode of contemplation, making for a unique spiritual experience.

Powerful and disturbing, this version of the Hamlet story is set in a modern Middle Eastern state whose leader has just died, to be replaced by his brother, a ruthless, Westernized dictator who juggles petro-dollars, arms dealers, and democratic slogans in an attempt to quell the rising tides of Islamic extremism. Presenting a composite of many Arab concerns that affect peoples from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond, it is a concrete and poetic formulation of an Arab viewpoint, combining aspects of the Arab oral-poetry tradition with the rhetoric of modern-day politics. It is Hamlet as pure, dangerous politics.

Some sixty-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, the popular conception of Palestinian refugees still emphasizes their fierce commitment to exercising their right of return. Exile has come to seem a kind of historical amber, preserving refugees in a way of life that ended abruptly with the catastrophe of 1948 and their camps--inhabited now for four generations--as mere zones of waiting. While reducing refugees to symbols of steadfast single-mindedness has been politically expedient to both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict it comes at a tremendous cost for refugees themselves, overlooking their individual memories and aspirations and obscuring their collective culture in exile.

Refugees of the Revolution is an evocative and provocative examination of everyday life in Shatila, a refugee camp in Beirut. Challenging common assumptions about Palestinian identity and nationalist politics, Diana Allan provides an immersive account of camp experience, of communal and economic life as well as inner lives, tracking how residents relate across generations, cope with poverty and marginalization, and plan--pragmatically and speculatively--for the future. She gives unprecedented attention to credit associations, debt relations, electricity bartering, emigration networks, and NGO provisions, arguing that a distinct Palestinian identity is being forged in the crucible of local pressures.

What would it mean for the generations born in exile to return to a place they never left? Allan addresses this question by rethinking the relationship between home and homeland. In so doing, she reveals how refugees are themselves pushing back against identities rooted in a purely nationalist discourse. This groundbreaking book offers a richly nuanced account of Palestinian exile, and presents new possibilities for the future of the community.

A remarkable look at an understudied feature of the Iranian justice system, where forgiveness is as much a right of victims as retribution

Iran's criminal courts are notorious for meting out severe sentences--according to Amnesty International, the country has the world's highest rate of capital punishment per capita. Less known to outside observers, however, is the Iranian criminal code's recognition of forgiveness, where victims of violent crimes, or the families of murder victims, can request the state to forgo punishing the criminal. Forgiveness Work shows that in the Iranian justice system, forbearance is as much a right of victims as retribution. Drawing on extended interviews and first-hand observations of more than eighty murder trials, Arzoo Osanloo explores why some families of victims forgive perpetrators and how a wide array of individuals contribute to the fraught business of negotiating reconciliation.

Based on Qur'anic principles, Iran's criminal codes encourage mercy and compel judicial officials to help parties reach a settlement. As no formal regulations exist to guide those involved, an informal cottage industry has grown around forgiveness advocacy. Interested parties--including attorneys, judges, social workers, the families of victims and perpetrators, and even performing artists--intervene in cases, drawing from such sources as scripture, ritual, and art to stir feelings of forgiveness. These actors forge new and sometimes conflicting strategies to secure forbearance, and some aim to reform social attitudes and laws on capital punishment.

Forgiveness Work examines how an Islamic victim-centered approach to justice sheds light on the conditions of mercy.

Professor Julie Peteet believes that the concept of mobility is key to understanding how place and space act as forms of power, identity, and meaning among Palestinians in Israel today. In Space and Mobility in Palestine, she investigates how Israeli policies of closure and separation influence Palestinian concerns about constructing identity, the ability to give meaning to place, and how Palestinians comprehend, experience, narrate, and respond to Israeli settler-colonialism. Peteet's work sheds new light on everyday life in the Occupied Territories and helps explain why regional peace may be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.

In this wide-ranging collection of insightful, controversial, and often-witty essays, the renowned author of Why I Am Not a Muslim has created a representative selection of his best work on the Koran and various problems posed by the interaction of Islam with the West. The title of the collection comes from an article that originally appeared in the London Guardian on recent textual studies of the Koran. This research suggests that, contrary to a longstanding Muslim belief about the afterlife, a harem of beautiful virgins may not be waiting for the faithful male departed in heaven. For the many readers of his books who have wondered about his background, the author begins with a charming personal sketch about his upbringing in England and his unabashed Anglophilia. A section on Koranic criticism includes excerpts from two of his books, What the Koran Really Says and Which Koran? No stranger to controversy and polemics, the author devotes two sections to articles that consider the totalitarian nature of contemporary political Islam and explore the potential for an Islamic Reformation comparable to the Protestant Reformation in the West. The concluding section is composed of Ibn Warraq's journalism, including a critique of reputed Muslim reformer Tariq Ramadan, a defense of Western culture (Why the West Is Best), an article about the Danish cartoons that provoked widespread Muslim outrage, and even a commentary on heavy metal music in a Muslim setting. This thoughtful, engaging collection on diverse topics will interest both longtime readers of Ibn Warraq and those new to his work.

A riveting, real-life equivalent of The Kite Runner--an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world.

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor. They are still in hiding.

Despite a decade of American good intentions, women in Afghanistan are still subjected to some of the worst human rights violations in the world. Rod Nordland, then the Kabul bureau chief of the New York Times, had watched these abuses unfold for years when he came upon Zakia and Ali, and has not only chronicled their plight, but has also shepherded them from danger.

The Lovers will do for women's rights generally what Malala's story did for women's education. It is an astonishing story about self-determination and the meaning of love that illustrates, as no policy book could, the limits of Western influence on fundamentalist Islamic culture and, at the same time, the need for change.

A Digital Bundle explores the potential of online and digital technologies to serve Indigenous resurgence by contributing to the goals of Indigenous nation building. Based on interviews and discussions with active users of Four Directions Teachings, a website created by Jennifer Wemigwans, A Digital Bundle makes a case for a new online social movement that embraces Indigenous perspectives. Key to this movement is the redefinition of online Indigenous knowledge projects as digital bundles, thus elevating the cultural protocols and responsibilities that come with such a designation and grounding these projects within an Indigenous epistemological paradigm. A Digital Bundle is an important contribution to the field of internet activism and a must-read for Indigenous educators.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Islamic Publications Ltd.

The Huthi rebels in Yemen are a resistance movement going back decades. Their coup against Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in 2015 - and the subsequent Yemeni civil war and the intervention of the Arab coalition in support of Hadi - has brought absolute devastation to the country. But who are the Huthis and how can we understand the group away from armed conflict and war? What has motivated their social movement to fundamentally re-shape Yemen, and what are the group's local and regional ambitions?

This book provides the first comprehensive critical analysis dedicated to the Huthis. Across four parts and 17 chapters, the book examines how the movement is challenging traditional religious authority, re-shaping tribal values and roles in Yemen, constructing new collective memories and identities, and infusing Yemen's mediascape with their ideological creed. In examining the movement's specific ways of thinking and beliefs, the book also highlights its foreign policy within a regional policy of resistance to the United States, and it points towards what its impact on both Yemen and the security of the Arab Gulf region will be. The book brings together the leading experts on Yemen from diverse disciplines to provide readers with a nuanced and multi-layered approach to understanding the Huthi movement.

One of the most prosperous and influential dynasties of the Muslim world, the Fatimids (909-1171) were distinguished by their Imam-caliphs, who asserted religious as well as political authority in direct descent from the family of the Prophet. Their conquest of Egypt in 969 marked the inception of a burgeoning Mediterranean empire. From there, they refined their systems of administration, judiciary, and governance, instilling principles of inclusion which contributed to stability during their caliphate. Fatimid Cairo flourished as a vibrant cultural and intellectual centre through patronage of the arts, architecture, and scholarship.
This book continues the story of the Fatimids from their newly founded capital of Cairo. Introducing the figures who moulded the empire, Shainool Jiwa charts the Fatimids' expansion, the reasons behind their ultimate fall by the hand of Saladin, and the legacy that continues with the living Ismaili communities today. This lively and engaging work, including maps and colour images, draws on a broad range of primary sources to lead readers through two centuries that witnessed the triumphs and trials of the only sustained Shi'i caliphate to rule across the medieval Islamic world.

The Takkiyya Mu'avin al-Mulk is a building complex in the city of Kermanshah in western Iran, dedicated to the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn ibn 'Ali at the Battle of Karbala in 680, an event of seminal significance to Shi'i Islam. Private takkiyyas built by social elites were a phenomenon of the Qajar period, with their construction motivated by a political quest for legitimacy.

This book examines the intersection of art and architecture, popular piety, and the politics of legitimation. Through an examination of the building and its decorative programme, it addresses issues of patronage, Shi'i iconography and popular religious practices during the early 20th century in Iran. It further argues for the role of takkiyyas in creation of a sense of community and group identity; the formative stage of the emergent idea of nationhood at the time, amongst those who frequented them.