{"title":"Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Paradigms","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into critical perspectives on the Middle East with this thought-provoking series. Challenging conventional wisdom, these works offer fresh insights and alternative frameworks for understanding the region's complexities.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"literary-optics-book-maha-abdelmegeed-9780815638285","title":"Literary Optics","description":"Offers a compelling alternative to the traditional mode of analysing Arabic literature through an encounter between Arabic narrative forms and European ones. 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The authors trace the sociopolitical, economic, and intellectual transformation of the Shi‘ites of Lebanon from 1920 during the French colonial period until the late twentieth century. They shed light on the relationship of contemporary Islamic militancy with traditions of religious modernism and leftism in both Lebanon and Iraq. Analyzing the interaction between sacred and secular features of modern Shi‘ite society, the authors clearly follow the group’s turn toward religious revolution and away from secular activism. 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Similar misinformation circulated in the eighteenth century when European male travellers to Egypt, documenting their observations, depicted harem women as sexual objects, deprived of autonomy, and held captive by their husbands. Fay’s Unveiling the Harem offers a persuasive corrective to this distorted view of Middle Eastern women.    Instead of the odalisque of nineteenth-century painting and the fevered imaginings of European travellers, historical research reveals that elite women in powerful, wealthy households exercised their rights under Islamic law, property rights in particular, to become owners of lucrative real estate in Cairo as well as influential members of their families and the wider society. One such woman, Sitt Nafisa, who was literate in several languages, commissioned a public water fountain and a Qur’anic school that still stands today. 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