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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them.
The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things, and had many names. She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive. She was a girl who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes, and without looking for it found what
she had always lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose, politics, friends. She found a dark-eyed man called Bilal, who taught her to resist; who tried to save her when it was already too late.
Nahr sits in the Cube, and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal, who isn't there; Bilal, who may not even be alive, but who is her only reason to get out.
This book provides a detailed history of Hindu goddess traditions
with a special focus on the local goddesses of Andhra Pradesh, past
and present. The antiquity and the evolution of these goddess
traditions are illustrated and documented with the help of
archaeological reports, literary sources, inscriptions and art.
Tracing the symbols and images of goddess into the brahmanical
(Saiva and Vaisnava), Buddhist, and Jaina religious traditions, the
book argues effectively how and with what motivations goddesses and
their symbolizations were appropriated and transformed. The book
also examines the evolution of popular Hindu goddesses such as
Durga and Kali, discussing their tribal and agricultural
backgrounds. It also deals extensively with how and in what
circumstances women are deified and shows how these deified women
cults share characteristics with the village goddesses.
Thinking through anti, post, and decolonial theories, this book
examines, analyses, and conceptualises 'visibly Muslim' Lebanese
women's lived experiences of discrimination, assault, wounding, and
erasure. Based on in-depth research alongside over 100 Sunni and
Shia participant between 2017 and 2019 it situates these
experiences at the intersection of the local and the global and
argues for their conceptualisation as a form of structural and
lived anti-Muslim racism. In doing this, it discusses the
convergences and divergences of anti-Muslim racism in Lebanon with
anti-Muslim racism in other parts of both the global north and the
global south. It examines the production of this racialisation as
well as its workings across spheres of public, private, work, and
state - including an analysis of internalised self-hate. It further
explores various forms of resistance and negotiation and the
contemporary possibilities and impossibilities of working beyond
the epistemic framework of Eurocentric modernity. As the first
in-depth and extensive study of anti-Muslim racism within
Muslim-majority and Arab-majority spaces, it offers an urgent and
timely redress to multiple gaps and biases in the study of the
Muslim-majority and Arab-majority worlds as well as racialisation
broadly and Islamophobia specifically.
Chris Hughes, the "Daily Mirror's" defence correspondent, was the
first western reporter into Iraq after 9/11, the first into
Saddam's secret bunker and the only one to visit Osama bin Laden's
mountain lair. He was also the only western journalist present when
American Marines killed and wounded unarmed demonstrators in
Fallujah, sparking the savage insurgency. He's survived carjackings
and missile attacks, watched mothers weep over the skeletons of
sons dragged from mass graves and joined mercenaries flying crates
of guns out of Baghdad. Hughes has been to every major troublespot
in Iraq in a dozen visits, mixing with the SAS, British mercenaries
and ordinary Iraqis; in "Road Trip To Hell", he tells their stories
with wit and irreverence in a very readable style. He admits he's
no expert on the Middle East - 'I wanted to call this book
"Clueless in Gaza",' he writes, 'but George W Bush rarely invades
places with potential for witty literary allusion' - but he has a
fine eye for detail and black humour and gives a unique insight
into a terrible, crazy war.
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