The Arab at Home


Book Description




The Arab at Home


Book Description

Paul W. Harrison's "The Arab at Home" is a fascinating view of the Arab world between the wars, before the discovery of oil transformed the region. Harrison's ten years experience as a medical missionary in the region come through in his insight into the social relations, economy, and character of the region and its people.




Arabs at Home and in the World


Book Description

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the United States, the Middle East, and North Africa, to discuss and critically analyze the intersection of gender and human rights laws as applied to individuals of Arab descent. It seeks to raise consciousness at the intersection of gender, identity, and human rights as it relates to Arabs at home and throughout the diaspora. The context of revolution and the destabilizing impact of armed conflicts in the region are used to critique and examine the utility of human rights law to address contemporary human rights issues through extralegal strategies. To this end, the volume seeks to inform, educate, persuade, and facilitate newer or less-heard perspectives related to gender and masculinities theories. It provides readers with new ways of understanding gender and human rights and proposes forward-looking solutions to implementing human rights norms. The goal of this book is to use the context of Arabs at home and throughout the diaspora to critique and examine the utility of human rights norms and laws to diminish human suffering with the goal of transforming the structural, social, and cultural conditions that impede access to human rights. This book will be of interest to a diverse audience of scholars, students, public policy researchers, lawyers and the educated public interested in the fields of human rights law, international studies, gender politics, migration and diaspora, and Middle East and North African politics.




The House of Wisdom


Book Description

For centuries following the fall of Rome, western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse of the scientific advances coming from Baghdad, Antioch, or the cities of Persia, Central Asia, and Muslim Spain. T here, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge and revitalizing the works of Plato and Aristotle. I n the royal library of Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom, an army of scholars worked at the behest of the Abbasid caliphs. At a time when the best book collections in Europe held several dozen volumes, the House of Wisdom boasted as many as four hundred thousand. Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, thirsty for knowledge, traveled to Arab lands and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. I n this brilliant, evocative book, Lyons shows just how much "Western" culture owes to the glories of medieval Arab civilization, and reveals the untold story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.




The Arab World Today


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When We Were Arabs


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WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.




The House of Wisdom


Book Description

A myth-shattering view of the Islamic world's myriad scientific innovations and the role they played in sparking the European Renaissance. Many of the innovations that we think of as hallmarks of Western science had their roots in the Arab world of the middle ages, a period when much of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness. Jim al- Khalili, a leading British-Iraqi physicist, resurrects this lost chapter of history, and given current East-West tensions, his book could not be timelier. With transporting detail, al-Khalili places readers in the hothouses of the Arabic Enlightenment, shows how they led to Europe's cultural awakening, and poses the question: Why did the Islamic world enter its own dark age after such a dazzling flowering?




Arab Nahdah


Book Description

Explores the influences that triggered the Arabic awakening, the 'nahdah', from the 1700s onwards. To understand today's Arab thinking, you need to go back to the beginnings of modernity: the nahdah or Arab renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Abdulrazzak Patel enhances our understanding of the nahdah and its intellectuals, taking into account important internal factors alongside external forces.Patel explores the key factors that contributed to the rise and development of the nahdah, he introduces the humanist movement of the period that was the driving force behind much of the linguistic, literary and educational activity. Drawing on intellectual history, literary history and postcolonial studies, he argues that the nahdah was the product of native development and foreign assistance and that nahdah reformist thought was hybrid in nature. Overall, this study highlights the complexity of the movement and offers a more pluralist history of the period.




The Dream Palace of the Arabs


Book Description

From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.




Arab Women's Lives Retold


Book Description

Examining late twentieth-century autobiographical writing by Arab women novelists, poets, and artists, this essay collection explores the ways in which Arab women have portrayed and created their identities within differing social environments. The collection goes well beyond dismantling standard notions of Arab female subservience, exploring the many ways Arab women writers have learned to speak to each other, to their readers, and to the world at large. Drawing from a rich body of literature, the essays attest to the surprisingly lively and committed roles Arab women play in varied geographic regions, at home and abroad. These recent writings assess how the interplay between individual, private, ethnic identity and the collective, public, global world of politics has impacted Arab women’s rights.