Many students learn about the Middle East through a sprinkling of information and generalizations deriving largely from media treatments of current events. This scattershot approach can propagate bias and misconceptions that inhibit students' abilities to examine this vitally important part of the world. Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East moves away from the Orientalist frameworks that have dominated the West's understanding of the region, offering a range of fresh interpretations and approaches for teachers. The volume brings together experts on the rich intellectual, cultural, social, and political history of the Middle East, providing necessary historical context to familiarize teachers with the latest scholarship. Each chapter includes easy- to-explore sources to supplement any curriculum, focusing on valuable and controversial themes that may prove pedagogically challenging, including colonization and decolonization, the 1979 Iranian revolution, and the US-led 'war on terror.' By presenting multiple viewpoints, the book will function as a springboard for instructors hoping to encourage students to negotiate the various contradictions in historical study.

Exploring the multifaceted nature of gender and sexuality within Islamic societies in a trans-disciplinary and trans-regional fashion, this collection addresses the following questions: What are the principal methodologies for studying gender and sexuality in Islam? What is Islamic feminism? How do we understand the role of gender in the Islamic revival movements that have emerged since the last quarter of the twentieth century? How have historical forces and political projects-colonialism, nationalism, and modernity-constituted gender relations? How have sexual ideologies and practices transformed in Muslim majority societies in the modern era? What is the relationship between the global circulation of LGBTQ identities and queer and sexual counter-publics in the Islamic world? Gender and Sexuality in Islam highlights methodologically innovative work while covering an expansive geographical range that includes the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and Europe and North America. The volumes cover: Gender and the Ethical Subject; Gender, Empire, and Nation; Sexualities, Intimacy, and the Body; and Gender, Sexuality, and Representation. The set will be of use to scholars, students, and general readers.

The first in-depth look at how postwar thinkers in Egypt mapped the intersections between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn 'Arabi--al-la-shu'ur--as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. In The Arabic Freud, Omnia El Shakry challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement. Drawing on scholarly writings as well as popular literature on self-healing, El Shakry provides the first in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology--or "science of the soul," as it came to be called--was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. She explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, she shows, debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros. This provocative and insightful book invites us to rethink the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in the modern era. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.

"The Great Social Laboratory" charts the development of the human sciences--anthropology, human geography, and demography--in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, this book examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum to architectural designs to that pinnacle of social scientific research--"the article."
Omnia El Shakry explores the interface between European and Egyptian social scientific discourses and interrogates the boundaries of knowledge production in a colonial and post-colonial setting. She examines the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in the Egyptian colonial context, uncovering the new modes of governance, expertise, and social knowledge that defined a distinctive era of nationalist politics in the inter- and post-war periods. Finally, she examines the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians.

The first in-depth look at how postwar thinkers in Egypt mapped the intersections between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn 'Arabi-al-la-shu'ur-as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. In The Arabic Freud, Omnia El Shakry challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement. Drawing on scholarly writings as well as popular literature on self-healing, El Shakry provides the first in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology-or "science of the soul," as it came to be called-was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. She explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, she shows, debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros. This provocative and insightful book invites us to rethink the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in the modern era. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.

The Great Social Laboratory charts the development of the human sciences—anthropology, human geography, and demography—in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, this book examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum to architectural designs to that pinnacle of social scientific research—"the article." Omnia El Shakry explores the interface between European and Egyptian social scientific discourses and interrogates the boundaries of knowledge production in a colonial and post-colonial setting. She examines the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in the Egyptian colonial context, uncovering the new modes of governance, expertise, and social knowledge that defined a distinctive era of nationalist politics in the inter- and post-war periods. Finally, she examines the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians.

This special issue stages an encounter between psychoanalysis and the Middle East by reopening the psychoanalytic canon to consider key concepts through unexpected interlocutors, religious traditions, and intellectual formations. This includes bringing Islamic philosophical concepts of the Cloud to bear on conceptions of causality and après coup; and thinking from the point of view of the Last Judgment in dialogue with the therapeutic work of a Moroccan imam and the Lacanian analyst Fouad Benchekroun. Authors also recover lesser known histories of psychoanalytic theory: in the work of Egyptian psychoanalyst Sami-Ali, who developed a distinctly expansive theory of the imaginary influenced by Islamic apophatic theology and his own clinical work; and in Iraqi sociologist ʿAli al-Wardi’s critical reevaluation of the unconscious, via the Islamic revolutionary tradition, as a source of the miraculous. Moving to the contemporary era, chapters tackle the various uses of psychoanalysis in `dialogue initiatives’ that delegitimize Palestinians’ use of violence in Palestine/Israel; and in efforts to `lay on the couch’ the figure of the jihadi in contemporary France in the service of a secular modernizing project. Engaging critical theory, history, anthropology, and Islamic studies, this special issue will be of interest to all those concerned with psychoanalysis in relation to a geopolitical elsewhere. The special issue joins a growing literature on psychoanalysis and the Middle East. It stands out insofar as it brings together ethnographic, historical, literary, and theological perspectives in a single volume. Prominent scholars of psychoanalysis and Islam, including Joan Copjec and Stefania Pandolfo, provide a contextually-informed, theoretically rich account of psychoanalysis in the Middle East and in Islam. This body of work demonstrates the extent to which the relationship between Europe and the Middle East has been a site of productive engagement for psychoanalysis. Challenging assumptions of Europe as the metropolitan source of psychoanalytic concepts and thought, chapters contribute to a move away from Eurocentric histories and theoretical perspectives towards a global and transnational account of psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary special issue will be of interest to scholars of psychology, psychoanalysis, Middle Eastern studies, Islamic studies, religious studies, history, anthropology, sociology, and postcolonial studies.