Engagingly written, drawing from the author's own research and other studies, and stocked with maps and photographs, original documents, and an abundance of supplementary materials, The Modern Middle East: A History will provide both novices and specialists with fresh insights into the events that have shaped history and the debates about them that have absorbed historians."--Pub. desc.

A collection of essays examining the role and power of images from a wide variety of media in today’s Middle Eastern societies. This timely book examines the power and role of the image in modern Middle Eastern societies. The essays explore the role and function of image making to highlight the ways in which the images “speak” and what visual languages mean for the construction of Islamic subjectivities, the distribution of power, and the formation of identity and belonging. Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East addresses aspects of the visual in the Islamic world, including the presentation of Islam on television; on the internet and other digital media; in banners, posters, murals, and graffiti; and in the satirical press, cartoons, and children’s books. “This volume takes a new approach to the subject . . . and will be an important contribution to our knowledge in this area. . . . It is comprehensive and well-structured with fascinating material and analysis.” —Peter Chelkowski, New York University “An innovative volume analyzing and instantiating the visual culture of a variety of Muslim societies [which] constitutes a substantially new object of study in the regional literature and one that creates productive links with history, anthropology, political science, art history, media studies, and urban studies, as well as area studies and Islamic studies.” —Walter Armbrust, University of Oxford

A History of the Modern Middle East offers a comprehensive assessment of the region, stretching from the fourteenth century and the founding of the Ottoman and Safavid empires through to the present-day protests and upheavals. The textbook focuses on Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries of the Middle East, as well as areas often left out of Middle East history—such as the Balkans and the changing roles that Western forces have played in the region for centuries—to discuss the larger contexts and influences on the region's cultural and political development. Enriched by the perspectives of workers and professionals; urban merchants and provincial notables; slaves, students, women, and peasants, as well as political leaders, the book maps the complex social interrelationships and provides a pivotal understanding of the shifting shapes of governance and trajectories of social change in the Middle East. Extensively illustrated with drawings, photographs, and maps, this text skillfully integrates a diverse range of actors and influences to construct a narrative that is at once sophisticated and lucid. A History of the Modern Middle East highlights the region's complexity and variation, countering easy assumptions about the Middle East, those who governed, and those they governed—the rulers, rebels, and rogues who shaped a region.

Roger Owen has fully revised and updated his authoritative text to take into account the considerable developments in the Middle East in the 1990s.

Middle Eastern societies and ordinary people's lives / Edmund Burke III and David N. Yaghoubian -- Precolonial lives -- Assaf: a peasant of Mount Lebanon / Akram F. Khater and Antoine F. Khater -- Shemsigul: a circassian slave in mid-nineteenth-century Cairo / Ehud R. Toledano -- Journeymen textile weavers in nineteenth-century Damascus: a collective / Sherry Vatter -- Ahmad: a Kuwaiti pearl diver / Nels Johnson -- Mohand N'Hamoucha: Middle Atlas Berber / Edmund Burke III -- Bibi Maryam: a Bakhtiyari tribal woman / Julie Oehler -- Colonial lives -- The Shaykh and his daughter: coping in colonial Algeria / Julia Clancy-Smith -- Izz al-Din al-Qassam: preacher and mujahid / Abdullah Schleifer -- Abu Ali al-Kilawi: a Damascus qabaday / Philip S. Khoury -- M'hamed Ali: Tunisian labor organizer / Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar -- Hagob Hagobian: an Armenian truck driver in Iran / David N. Yaghoubian -- Naji: an Iraqi country doctor / Sami Zubaida -- Post-Colonial lives -- Migdim: Egyptian bedouin matriarch / Lila Abu-Lughod -- Rostam: Qashqai rebel / Lois Beck -- An Iranian village boyhood / Mehdi Abedi and Michael M. [ths] J. Fischer -- Gulab: an Afghan schoolteacher / Ashraf Ghani -- Abu Jamal: a Palestinian urban villager / Joost Hiltermann -- Haddou: a Moroccan migrant worker / David Mcmurray -- Contemporary lives -- Nasir: Sa'idi youth between Islamism and agriculture -- Fanny colonna -- Ghada: village rebel or political protestor? / Celia Rothenberg -- Khanom gohary: Iranian community leader / Homa Hoodfar -- Nadia: mother of the believers / Baya Gacemi -- June leavitt: West Bank settler / Tamara neuman -- Talal Rizk: a Syrian engineer in the Gulf / Michael Provence.

Before the deluge : the Middle East, 1945-2011 -- The Arab uprisings and their fallout -- The Syria imbroglio -- The rise and decline of ISIS -- Patrons, proxies, and freelancers : the international relations of the new Middle East -- Human security in the new Middle East

A century ago, as World War I got underway, the Middle East was dominated, as it had been for centuries, by the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, its political shape had changed beyond recognition, as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the insistent claims of Arab and Turkish nationalism and Zionism led to a redrawing of borders and shuffling of alliances—a transformation whose consequences are still felt today. This fully revised and updated second edition of The Makers of the Modern Middle East traces those changes and the ensuing history of the region through the rest of the twentieth century and on to the present. Focusing in particular on three leaders—Emir Feisal, Mustafa Kemal, and Chaim Weizmann—the book offers a clear, authoritative account of the region seen from a transnational perspective, one that enables readers to understand its complex history and the way it affects present-day events.

Bernard Lewis looks at the new era in the Middle East. With the departure of imperial powers, the region must now, on its own, resolve the political, economic, cultural, and societal problems that prevent it from accomplishing the next stage in the advance of civilization. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other, he explains, to provide the basis for an advance toward freedom in the true sense of that word.

In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization. To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.

From the fall of the Ottoman Empire through the Arab Spring, this title offers a classic treatise on the making of the contemporary Middle East remains essential reading for students and general readers who want to gain a better understanding of this diverse region.