Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East:"Modernities" in the Making is an edited volume that seeks to deepen and broaden our understanding of various forms of change in Middle Eastern and North African societies during the Ottoman period. It offers an in-depth analysis of reforms and gradual change in the longue duree, challenging the current discourse on the relationship between society, culture, and law. The focus of the discussion shifts from an external to an internal perspective, as agency transitions from "the West" to local actors in the region. Highlighting the ongoing interaction between internal processes and external stimuli, and using primary sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, the authors and editors bring out the variety of modernities that shaped south-eastern Mediterranean history. The first part of the volume interrogates the urban elite household, the main social, political, and economic unit of networking in Ottoman societies. The second part addresses the complex relationship between law and culture, looking at how the legal system, conceptually and practically, undergirded the socio-cultural aspects of life in the Middle East. Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East consists of eleven chapters, written by well-established and younger scholars working in the field of Middle East and Islamic Studies. The editors, Dror Ze'evi and Ehud R. Toledano, are both leading historians, who have published extensively on Middle Eastern societies in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods.

A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year "A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events." -Times Literary Supplement "Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews." -Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post-World War I period, the nation's annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. "A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering." -Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

One Land, Two States is a bold restructuring of an idea that remains at the heart of international diplomacy after generations of conflict. A pioneering effort to preserve the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, the book imagines new paradigms in policy designed to disrupt the turmoil and disharmony that have gripped the region. This groundbreaking book is authored by a group of leading Palestinian and Israeli scholars and officials who deliver an innovative framework for viewing and providing solutions to the region's conflict. "If the land cannot be shared by geographical division, and if a one-state solution remains unacceptable," they ask, "can the land be shared in some other way?" The contributors seek to unravel these questions by examining a utopian world where seemingly irreconcilable constructs allow Israel to remain in the West Bank and maintain its military dominance and security position while Palestinians are given a right of return. By radically transforming the nature and stakes of the Israel-Palestine conflict and envisioning a Jerusalem that is transformed into a capital of full equality and independence, this book explores themes related to security, resistance, sovereignty, diaspora, globalism, religion, and new forms of political and economic power that are not dependent on land ownership. Written to inform policy makers, scholars, and researchers interested in the Middle East and related areas, this book and its solutions and presentation could be used as a practical model for resolution of conflicts worldwide.

One Land, Two States is a bold restructuring of an idea that remains at the heart of international diplomacy after generations of conflict. A pioneering effort to preserve the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, the book imagines new paradigms in policy designed to disrupt the turmoil and disharmony that have gripped the region. This groundbreaking book is authored by a group of leading Palestinian and Israeli scholars and officials who deliver an innovative framework for viewing and providing solutions to the region's conflict. "If the land cannot be shared by geographical division, and if a one-state solution remains unacceptable," they ask, "can the land be shared in some other way?" The contributors seek to unravel these questions by examining a utopian world where seemingly irreconcilable constructs allow Israel to remain in the West Bank and maintain its military dominance and security position while Palestinians are given a right of return. By radically transforming the nature and stakes of the Israel-Palestine conflict and envisioning a Jerusalem that is transformed into a capital of full equality and independence, this book explores themes related to security, resistance, sovereignty, diaspora, globalism, religion, and new forms of political and economic power that are not dependent on land ownership. Written to inform policy makers, scholars, and researchers interested in the Middle East and related areas, this book and its solutions and presentation could be used as a practical model for resolution of conflicts worldwide.

""Producing Desire is a major, highly original, and often surprising presentation of sexual attitudes and practices in the Ottoman Middle East. The author uses a wide variety of contemporary sources to shed new light and draw original conclusions regarding changing attitudes toward sexuality in the Ottoman Empire before and after western influences. These influences are shown to have inhibited forms of male sexual expression that had occurred more freely in an earlier period. I recommend it enthusiastically for students, faculty, and the general public."--Nikki R. Keddie, author of "Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution
"Using the concept of multiple scripts, Dror Ze'evi brings together into a powerfully analytical focus several sexual discourses to give us a historically grounded and nuanced story about Ottoman sexual thought and practices. No other work brings these 'scripts' together the way Ze'evi has attempted and successfully accomplished."--Afsaneh Najmabadi, author of "Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
"As a broad treatment of questions of sexuality over four centuries, "Producing Desire not only takes up a topic that no one else has treated systematically, but also aims ambitiously to talk about change over time, and in particular to describe the ambiguous and uneasy outlook of the nineteenth century, when various discourses about sex were challenged."--Leslie Peirce, author of "Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab