UC Press Blog

Palestinian writing imagines the nation, not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into a distinct set of formations. Novel Palestine: Nation through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah examines these imaginative structures so that we mig...

By Hamid Dabashi, author of The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West So often we hear allusion to this idea of “Islam and the West.” A product of colonialism, this false and dangerous binary has created ongoing enmity and an illusion of two divided worlds. What do we even mean wh...

Kaveh Hemmat is Assistant Professor of History, Professional Faculty, in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Theology at Benedictine University. His research focuses on perceptions and representations of East Asia in premodern Islamicate culture. The great Persian epic known ...

By Reyhan Durmaz, author of Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond We all tell stories to create meaning. A far-gone event in a distant time and place often works as a lens through which we remember the past, interpret...

By Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture I made my first trip to Guantánamo in July 2010 after years of researching the fight against US torture during the “war on terror.” At the time, Guantánamo’s well-deserved description as a “legal black ho...

“Music and politics are hardly separable . . The title of this book was uttered by Zakaria Ibrahim, the founder of the renowned Egyptian folklore group El Tanbura, late one night. . . Reflecting on the political, musical, and financial struggles his band has had to endure over several de...

A pioneering work of Ottoman Turkish literature, Prisoner of the Infidels brings the seventeenth-century memoir of Osman Agha of Timişoara—slave, adventurer, and diplomat—into English for the first time. The sweeping story of Osman’s life begins upon his capture and subsequent enslavement...