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Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics with Roxanne L. Euben (Princeton UP, 2025)
2026/09/25
Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.
Roxanne L. Euben is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge; Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism; and (with Muhammad Qasim Zaman) Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (all Princeton).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
YouTube Channel: here
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James A Harmon et al., "A Daring Enterprise: The US, Post-Revolutionary Egypt, and a Partnership That Defied the Odds" (American U in Cairo Press, 2026)
2026/09/23
What happens when the United States launches an unconventional foreign aid program in the aftermath of a national uprising? In this behind-the-scenes account of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund--a private investment fund created by the U.S. Congress to jumpstart Egypt's private sector after the 2011 Egyptian revolution--A Daring Enterprise: A Us-Egyptian Partnership and the Case for Soft Power (American University in Cairo Press, 2026) by James A Harmon, Cornelius Queen, and Mark Warren tells the story of one of the most effective, yet little known, U.S. foreign policy programs today in the Middle East.
Through the firsthand account of the Fund's chairman James Harmon, a veteran investment banker and former Clinton administration official, the authors reveal how a small, U.S.-backed investment fund partnered with Egyptians to spark investment, create jobs, and expand opportunities for women in the Arab world's largest country--all against a backdrop of political instability, anti-Americanism, and Washington dysfunction.
At a time when America's budget deficit is rising and foreign aid is being scaled back, A Daring Enterprise reveals how a new model of foreign assistance can tackle urgent development challenges while delivering real returns for U.S. taxpayers. Most importantly, it is a powerful reminder of the value of foreign aid and why smart foreign investment is key to America's future prosperity.
Cornelius W. Queen is senior vice-president at the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund. Previously, he worked on the Syrian Crisis Response in Lebanon for a local NGO and before as a Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill covering trade and foreign policy issues. From 2011-2012, he served as a core staff member for the Carter Center on its international election observation mission for Egypt’s first parliamentary and presidential elections after the 2011 revolution. He is a Middle East Policy Council 40 under 40 awardee. He earned an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and his BA from the Johns Hopkins University.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
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Abi Bae and Hamza Hamouchene eds., "Towards Palestinian Liberation: Global Perspectives on Anti-Colonial Resistance and Solidarity" (Daraja Press, 2026)
2026/09/19
The book Towards Palestinian Liberation: Global Perspectives on Anti-Colonial Resistance & Solidarity (Daraja Press, 2026), published by Daraja Press, portrays a collection of solidarity movements around the world, highlighting the interconnectedness of global struggles with Palestine. It situates Palestine in a wider, historical decolonial liberation movement. By examining the role of economic and political interests, it critically assesses the opportunities and challenges that these movements face. This book is an amazing new addition to the critical literature on Palestine.
Abi Bae is a Korean researcher and activist currently working at the Transnational Institute. Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher-activist, commentator and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA).
The host of this episode is Sarah Vogelsanger. Sarah Vogelsanger is a feminist researcher and writer based in London.
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Sarah Trad, "A House in the Lebanese Mountains: Recipes & Stories from Beit Trad" (Thames & Hudson, 2026)
2026/09/18
High in the Lebanese mountains above Beirut sits Beit Trad, an eighteenth-century family home that Sarah Trad transformed into a guesthouse devoted to Levantine hospitality. The house brings together family history, Lebanese design, food, and the belief that welcoming someone into your home is an essential part of life.
In A House in the Lebanese Mountains: Recipes & Stories from Beit Trad (Thames & Hudson, 2026), Trad tells the story of Beit Trad and the family who shaped it, alongside recipes for the generous Lebanese food served around its tables. Part memoir, part cookbook, and part portrait of a remarkable house, the book captures interiors that mix Eastern and Western influences and reflect the layered identity of the Levant.
The recipes range from Beit Trad’s elaborate breakfasts to vegetable dishes, stews, meats, fish, and sweets. Throughout, Trad explores hosting as both an art and a practice: making guests feel completely at home while recognizing the work and dedicated team required to make that sense of ease seem effortless.
Sarah Trad joins New Books Network to discuss Levantine hospitality, her family’s house and its transformation into a guesthouse, and her mother’s influence on her understanding of hosting. She also talks about what it takes to run Beit Trad, the relationship between beauty and appetite, and recipes including Pasta B Laban – a decidedly non-Italian spaghetti dish with garlic and yogurt that is pure Lebanese comfort food – and a strawberry and orange salad that showcases the magic of orange blossom water.
Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at VittlesVamp.com.
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Mehmet Çelik, "Empire and Nation in the City: Rusçuk from Ottoman Rule to Bulgarian Statehood" (Syracuse UP, 2026)
2026/09/15
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mehmet Çelik about his new book, Empire and Nation in the City: Rusçuk from Ottoman Rule to Bulgarian Statehood, published by Syracuse University Press in 2026.
The book tells the story of Rusçuk — known today as Ruse, in northern Bulgaria — a cosmopolitan port city on the Danube that, within the span of just fifteen years, passed through three entirely different political systems: a modernized Ottoman provincial administration, a Russian military provisional government, and a newly independent Bulgarian national state. Through this one city, Çelik offers a striking new account of how empires end and nations begin — and how much continuity lies beneath the surface of what looks like rupture.
At the heart of the book is the Tanzimat reform era, when Governor Midhat Pasha turned Rusçuk into a laboratory of Ottoman modernization. The city became home to the first provincial municipality in Ottoman history, the first agricultural credit cooperatives, a bilingual newspaper, secular mixed schools, and elected councils in which Muslim and Bulgarian Christian representatives sat side by side. Çelik shows that the Ottoman Empire, at its most ambitious, offered Bulgarians a genuine political alternative to nationalism — and that many took it, among them the chorbaci, the Bulgarian Christian notables who invested in and co-governed the Ottoman system, and who have been largely written out of Bulgarian national memory ever since.
When Russia invaded in 1877–78, Rusçuk surrendered peacefully — a telling sign of how deeply the city's diverse population had been woven into the Ottoman fabric. What followed was equally surprising: the Russian provisional government preserved the Ottoman institutional framework almost entirely, relabeling its councils and offices rather than dismantling them. The Bulgarian national government that came next did much the same, adopting Ottoman tools of minority management — including the military exemption tax and millet-style community administration — at the very moment it was defining itself in opposition to the Ottoman past.
Çelik also uncovers a remarkable story of religious conversion under Bulgarian rule: while some Muslims and Catholics converted pragmatically to Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity to secure the rights of the dominant group, Protestant conversion driven by the long-standing American Methodist Episcopal mission quietly gained new ground. In one of the book's most unexpected findings, a small community of Orthodox Bulgarians, Muslim Turks, Jews, and Armenians formed a lasting bond through their shared Protestant identity.
Drawing on Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, British, French, and Austrian archives — as well as prison registers, consular reports, missionary records, and the bilingual provincial newspaper Tuna/Dunav — Çelik bridges two historiographies that rarely speak to each other. Ottoman historians tend to stop at 1877; Bulgarian historians tend to start there. Empire and Nation in the City insists on the continuity that both fields have missed.
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Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference
2026/09/05
Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers (U Toronto Press, 2024) sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability. The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized – a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detected by the antennas of the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Roy makes a case for such alterity for Romani people and other groups in the region. Analysing intimate ethnographic scenes through anthropological theories of kinship, psychoanalysis, social theory from the Global South, and more, the book reveals how alterity in the Middle East does not adhere to rigid identitarian categories.
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Elizabeth Anne Davis, "Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing" (Duke UP, 2023)
2026/09/02
In Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (Duke University Press,
2023), Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers,
scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and
state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using
forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize
conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot
communities. Davis follows forensic archaeologists and anthropologists
who attempt to locate, identify, and return to relatives the remains of
Cypriots killed in those conflicts. She turns to filmmakers who use
archival photographs and footage to come to terms with political
violence and its legacies. In both forensic science and documentary
filmmaking, the dynamics of secrecy and revelation shape how material
remains such as bones and archival images are given meaning. Throughout,
Davis demonstrates how Cypriots navigate the tension between an ethics
of knowledge, which valorizes truth as a prerequisite for recovery and
reconciliation, and the politics of knowledge, which renders evidence as
irremediably partial and perpetually falsifiable.
Elizabeth Anne Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe,
a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re
highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring
authors from across the field, including winners of the William A.
Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.
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Robin Whelan, "Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
2026/08/24
How did the state become Christian in late antiquity? Many scholars
have traced the Christianization of the Roman world in the centuries
following the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312 CE. Robin
Whelan, however, turns his attention away from the usual suspects in
such accounts-emperors, empresses, bishops, ascetics, and other holy
people-to consider a surprisingly understudied set of late ancient
Christians: those who served the state as courtiers, bureaucrats, and
governors. By tracing the requirements of regimes, the expectations of
subjects, and patterns of engagement with churches and churchmen, he
argues that that those who served the state in late antiquity could be
seen-and indeed, could see themselves-as distinctly Christian authority
figures-just as much as the emperors and kings whom they served, and the
bishops and ascetics whom they governed. Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review
Robin Whelan is Reader in Mediterranean History at the University of Liverpool.
Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston
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Emily Sibley, "The Poetics of Incivility: Satire and Subversion in Modern Arab Culture" (Cornell UP, 2026)
2026/08/20
The Poetics of Incivility: Satire and Subversion in Modern Arab Culture (Cornell UP, 2026) explores impolite modes of expression—satire, crude humor, and rudeness—as a critical lens for both aesthetic innovation and sociopolitical critique. In the Arab world—from Cairo's Tahrir Square and the thoroughfares of Beirut to war-torn Gaza—political demands have been framed by satirical cartoons and graffiti or in subversive poetry and song. Emily Sibley shows that these forms of resistance are not new to Arab culture but return to mid-nineteenth-century debates over literary propriety.
In case studies concerning women's education in 1850s' Beirut, the satirical press in colonial Egypt, colloquial theater in the era of decolonization, street art and graphic novels during and after the 2011 Egyptian protests, Sibley follows the threads of an expressive culture that announces and celebrates its own impropriety. Concluding with analyses of Gaza poetry on the internet as a space where the stakes of incivility are acutely visible, The Poetics of Incivility offers a timely consideration of incivility as an aesthetic resource for authors and artists engaging with some of the most controversial issues of their times—and ours.
Emily Sibley is Senior Research Associate at Whitman College.
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Amihai Mazar and Nava Panitz-Cohen, "Tel Rehov: A Bronze and Iron Age City in the Beth-Shean Valle" (The Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University, 2020)
2026/08/17
This interview with Professor Amihai Mazar was conducted by Željko Stanojević for the New Books Network. The conversation focuses on Tel Reḥov: A Bronze and Iron Age City in the Beth-Shean Valley, especially Volume V, where the report turns from architecture and pottery to smaller objects and scientific evidence that help reconstruct life at the site.
Amihai Mazar is a leading archaeologist of ancient Israel. His research examines the Bronze and Iron Ages, archaeology and biblical history, ancient Near Eastern art and architecture, and historical geography. Tel Reḥov is especially important because it offers a rich archaeological sequence from the Beth-Shean Valley and evidence for the social, economic, and environmental history of northern Israel.
Volume V is particularly revealing because it asks what can be learned from material that might appear secondary beside monumental architecture. Its first part examines clay, bone, stone and gypsum vessels; grinding stones and other stone implements; metal objects and metallurgical evidence; beads; objects connected with textile production; scale weights; and lithics. Together, these finds illuminate household work, craft activity, exchange, measurement, and technology.
The volume also analyzes the spatial distribution of finds in a distinctive group of ninth-century BCE buildings in Area C. Archaeology is also about understanding where objects were found and how groups of finds functioned together. Distribution patterns can help reconstruct activities within buildings and suggest how work, storage, production, and daily routines were organized. It also includes Assyrian-period burials and later Islamic-period material, showing the site's long history.
The second part of Volume V brings natural-science methods directly into the archaeological interpretation. Radiometric dating contributes to chronology. Studies of animal and fish remains, molluscs, and botanical material offer evidence for diet, agriculture, environment, trade, and the use of local and non-local resources. A soil-flotation project recovers small botanical remains that might otherwise disappear from the archaeological record. These studies show how modern archaeology depends on collaboration between excavators and natural-science specialists.
One striking example is the paleomagnetic study of tilted walls in Area C, Stratum V. Instead of treating damaged architecture only as a descriptive feature, the researchers used physical evidence to investigate seismic destruction. This demonstrates a central strength of Volume V: interpretation is built by combining objects, context, chronology, biological remains, geology, and physical-science methods.
Our discussion with Professor Mazar therefore uses Volume V to ask a larger question: how do small finds and scientific analyses change the historical picture created by excavation? The volume shows that understanding an ancient city requires more than identifying buildings or connecting archaeological horizons with historical narratives. It requires reconstructing technologies, food systems, craft production, movement of goods, environmental conditions, patterns of use within buildings, and the events that transformed them.
Željko Stanojević is a host with the New Books Network and President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, Belgrade. He is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, an international Diamond Open Access journal supporting research in Hebrew, biblical, Jewish, linguistic, historical, and related studies. He also coordinates the European Hebrew Journal International Online Conference, New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies. Authors of recent academic books are welcome to contact him regarding possible New Books Network interviews.
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Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri eds., "Palestine in Transition: Frank Scholten's Visual Archive of the British Mandate Period" (CEU Press, 2026)
2026/08/17
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) talks with Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri, the editors of Palestine in Transition: Frank Scholten's Visual Archive of the British Mandate Period. They discuss who Frank Scholten was, the breadth and depth of the images he took in Palestine, and the archival holdings themselves.
You can browse Frank Scholten’s images here.
Follow the City Sarha Instagram account to be updated on when the app exploring Jerusalem’s modern cultural history will launch.
You can purchase a copy here. The book is also available Open Access here.
The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.
Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more.
Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.
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Zvi Yehuda and Marian Scheuer Sofaer, "The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption" (Brill, 2024)
2026/08/15
In this episode we spoke with Marian Scheuer Sofaer, Esquire, and Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman about The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption (Brill, 2024), by Dr. Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Sofaer.
Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel
as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete
a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding
and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage
Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with
former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project
of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the
United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German
and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing
the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman,
together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion.
The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a
more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research
identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth
centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq;
the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead
descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews
from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct
Judeo-Arabic dialect.
Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948,
Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that
followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive
import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and
mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said
was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a
plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of
citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan
refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory.
Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the
expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a
deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their
assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs
thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists
to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi
journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the
wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.
Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and
dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one
million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth
century—a history Yehuda insisted be established on primary evidence
rather than inherited assumption.
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Hossam el-Hamalawy, "Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso Books, 2026)
2026/08/14
Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi's New Republic (Verso Books, 2026) is a rare and comprehensive examination of the structures, hierarchies, and methods of the military, police, and intelligence agencies. Drawing on meticulous research, it reveals the strategies deployed to suppress the revolutionary wave, from propaganda and surveillance to mass arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. El-Hamalawy traces the power dynamics within these institutions to show how their uneasy unity was both a response to the revolution and a determinant of its eventual fate.
Hossam el-Hamalawy is a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organisers of the 2011 uprising. He has been involved in the labour movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt. He holds a PhD in political science from Freie Universität Berlin and is the recipient of the 2011 Anna Politkovskaya Journalism Award. He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics at 3arabawy.substack.com.
Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) researching the political economy of nitrogen fertilizer supply chains.
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Younus Y. Mirza, "The Islamic Mary: Maryam Through the Centuries" (Fortress Press, 2025)
2026/08/12
Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been historically revered throughout the Islamic tradition. This began already in the Qur'an, where she is called by the name "Maryam." The Islamic Mary: Maryam Through the Centuries (Fortress Press, 2025) examines the varied appearances of Maryam in different Islamic cultural and theological contexts. The chapters in this history extend from Maryam's scriptural mentions in the Qur'an and the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, her appearances in medieval debates regarding prophecy, citations of her virtuous model in Sufi discussions of piety, presentations in art and film, through to her role in modern interfaith relations.
Younus Y. Mirza is the Founding Director of the Barzinji Institute for Global Virtual Learning at Shenandoah University. He defended his dissertation in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University and has taught at Millsaps and Allegheny Colleges. His research focuses on the relationship between the Bible and the Qur’an and the shared stories between them
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
YouTube Channel: here
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Daniel Majchrowicz, "A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910" (Indiana UP, 2025)
2026/08/10
Descended from Mughal nobility, Akhtar al-Nisa Begum Nawab Sarbuland Jung grew up in Hyderabad in southern India, where she lived a quiet, private, and privileged life at the heart of the state's royal court. In 1896, at the age of 20, she married Nawab Muhammad Hamidullah Khan Sarbuland Jung, a prominent lawyer and the scion of a leading Muslim reformist movement. In 1909, the wealthy couple embarked on a four-month journey through the Middle East and Europe, performing the hajj in Mecca and sitting for tea with the future king and queen of England.
A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025) provides
the first full English translation of Begum Sarbuland's Urdu travel
diary from this journey, of which only three original copies remain.
Originally intended for circulation among friends and family and later
published, her informal entries not only reveal the everyday practices
of an Indian woman of her time, but also detail her impressions and
reactions as she explored the world alongside her husband. As Begum
Sarbuland encountered other women and Muslims during her travels, those
encounters shaped her reassessment of her own identity as a Muslim
woman. Her observations hold continued significance for readers
interested in critical questions about gender, Islam, and identity.
Daniel Majchrowicz has thoroughly annotated his translation and paired
it with rich appendices, including a biographical sketch of Begum
Sarbuland and excerpts from Hamidullah Khan's own accounts of their
journey.
Engagingly written and enriched with years of original research, archival work, and family interviews, A Journey to Mecca and London
restores the nearly forgotten narrative of one of India's first Muslim
women travel writers to its rightful place in Indian and Islamic
history.
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