Global Middle East

Localities, countries, and regions develop through complex interactions with others. This striking volume highlights global interconnectedness seen through the prism of the Middle East, both “global-in” and “global-out.” It delves into the region’s scientific, artistic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual formations and traces how they have taken shape through a dynamic set of encounters and exchanges.
 
Written in short and accessible essays by prominent experts on the region, Global Middle East covers topics including God, Rumi, food, film, fashion, music, sports, science, and the flow of people, goods, and ideas. The text explores social and political movements from human rights, Salafism, and cosmopolitanism to radicalism and revolutions. Using the insights of global studies, students will glean new perspectives about the region.

Asef Bayat is Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East and Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring.
 
Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet and coeditor of Wired Citizenship and Cultures of Arab Schooling.

List of Illustrations
Preface

Part One: Introduction
1 • Global Middle East
Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera

Part Two: Nations without Borders
2 • God

Ebrahim Moosa
3 • Algebra, Alchemy, Astronomy
Robert Morrison

4 • Rumi, the Bridge Builder
Fatemeh Keshavarz

5 • On Nations without Borders
Hamid Dabashi

Part Three: Home and the World
6 • Reflections on Exile
Edward Said

7 • Mo Salah, a Moral Somebody?
Amro Ali

8 • Gamal Abdel Nasser 
Khaled Fahmy

Part Four: Food, Film, Fashion, Music
9 • Circuits of Food and Cuisine
Sami Zubaida

10 • Pictures in Motion
Kamran Rastegar

11 • Musical Journeys
Michael Frishkopf

12 • The Kufiya
Ted Swedenburg

Part Five: Geopolitics of Goods
13 • Water of Vulnerability
Jeannie Sowers

14 • Cycle of Oil and Arms
Timothy Mitchell

15 • Cotton, Made in Egypt
Ahmad Shokr
16 • Ports of the Persian Gulf
Laleh Khalili

Part Six: Human Flows
17 • Touring Exotic Lands
Waleed Hazbun

18 • Outsiders of the Oil States
Ahmed Kanna

19 • The Levant in Latin America
John Tofik Karam

Part Seven: Politics and Movements
20 • Global Tahrir
Asef Bayat

21 • Islamizing Radicalism
Olivier Roy

22 • Global Movement for Palestine
Ilana Feldman

23 • Human Rights, Indigenous and Imperial
Lori Allen

24 • Cosmopolitan Middle East? An Interview with Seyla Benhabib
Linda Herrera

Contributors
Index