Russian-Arab Worlds

Russian-Arab Worlds

Author: Eileen Kane

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0197605761

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"The Soviet Arabist Kulthum 'Awda-Vasilieva was born in 1892 to Orthodox Christian parents in Nazareth, in Ottoman Palestine. She died in Moscow in 1965, leaving autobiographical writings that help explain how this unwelcome fifth daughter of Palestinian peasants went on to become a distinguished Arabist in the USSR and possibly the first Arab female university professor anywhere. As she tells it in an essay translated in this book, luck played a role: the opening of an Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (Russian acronym IPPO) missionary school in Nazareth in 1885 helped lift a girl her own mother considered "ugly" and lacking prospects into a world of educational opportunities and social and geographic mobility. After Nazareth 'Awda received a scholarship to the IPPO women's seminary in Beit Jala and mastered Russian. As a young teacher back in Nazareth she met and married Ivan Vasiliev, a doctor at the IPPO hospital. On a summer 1914 visit to Vasiliev's parents in Kronstadt, the couple was stranded by World War I and stayed. After his death during the Russian Civil War the young widow, now called Klavdia Viktorovna Ode-Vasilieva, supported her three daughters by teaching hygiene and Russian literacy to peasants in Ukraine, before moving to what soon became Leningrad to work with the great Arabist Ignatii Krachkovskii. She would live in Russia for the next half century"--


A Tale of Four Worlds

A Tale of Four Worlds

Author: Marina Ottaway

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0190061715

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About the separate trajectories of the Levant, the Gulf, Egypt and the Maghreb after the Arab Spring uprisings


What Is Russia Up To in the Middle East?

What Is Russia Up To in the Middle East?

Author: Dmitri Trenin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-11-10

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1509522344

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The eyes of the world are on the Middle East. Today, more than ever, this deeply-troubled region is the focus of power games between major global players vying for international influence. Absent from this scene for the past quarter century, Russia is now back with gusto. Yet its motivations, decision-making processes and strategic objectives remain hard to pin down. So just what is Russia up to in the Middle East? In this hard-hitting essay, leading analyst of Russian affairs Dmitri Trenin cuts through the hyperbole to offer a clear and nuanced analysis of Russia's involvement in the Middle East and its regional and global ramifications. Russia, he argues, cannot and will not supplant the U.S. as the leading external power in the region, but its actions are accelerating changes which will fundamentally remake the international system in the next two decades.


Hamlet's Arab Journey

Hamlet's Arab Journey

Author: Margaret Litvin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-10-23

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0691137803

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For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, Margaret Litvin also illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike. On the Arab stage, Hamlet has been an operetta hero, a firebrand revolutionary, and a muzzled dissident. Analyzing productions from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, Litvin follows the distinct phases of Hamlet's naturalization as an Arab. Her fine-grained theatre history uses personal interviews as well as scripts and videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian Hamlets. The result shows Arab theatre in a new light. Litvin identifies the French source of the earliest Arabic Hamlet, shows the outsize influence of Soviet and East European Shakespeare, and explores the deep cultural link between Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and the ghost of Hamlet's father. Documenting how global sources and models helped nurture a distinct Arab Hamlet tradition, Hamlet's Arab Journey represents a new approach to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation.


Shakespeare and the Arab World

Shakespeare and the Arab World

Author: Katherine Hennessey

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-07-17

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1789202604

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Offering a variety of perspectives on the history and role of Arab Shakespeare translation, production, adaptation and criticism, this volume explores both international and locally focused Arab/ic appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. In addition to Egyptian and Palestinian theatre, the contributors to this collection examine everything from an Omani performance in Qatar and an Upper Egyptian television series to the origin of the sonnets to an English-language novel about the Lebanese civil war. Addressing materials produced in several languages from literary Arabic (fuṣḥā) and Egyptian colloquial Arabic (‘ammiyya) to Swedish and French, these scholars and translators vary in discipline and origin, and together exhibit the diversity and vibrancy of this field.


Fractured Lands

Fractured Lands

Author: Scott Anderson

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0525434445

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From the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a piercing account of how the contemporary Arab world came to be riven by catastrophe since the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq. In 2011, a series of anti-government uprisings shook the Middle East and North Africa in what would become known as the Arab Spring. Few could predict that these convulsions, initially hailed in the West as a triumph of democracy, would give way to brutal civil war, the terrors of the Islamic State, and a global refugee crisis. But, as New York Times bestselling author Scott Anderson shows, the seeds of catastrophe had been sown long before. In this gripping account, Anderson examines the myriad complex causes of the region’s profound unraveling, tracing the ideological conflicts of the present to their origins in the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 and beyond. From this investigation emerges a rare view into a land in upheaval through the eyes of six individuals—the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family; a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties; a Kurdish physician from a prominent warrior clan; a Syrian university student caught in civil war; an Iraqi activist for women’s rights; and an Iraqi day laborer-turned-ISIS fighter. A probing and insightful work of reportage, Fractured Lands offers a penetrating portrait of the contemporary Arab world and brings the stunning realities of an unprecedented geopolitical tragedy into crystalline focus.


Russian Hajj

Russian Hajj

Author: Eileen Kane

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-11-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1501701304

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In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.


Spies and Scholars

Spies and Scholars

Author: Gregory Afinogenov

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674246578

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A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation. Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires. Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.


Russia's Restless Frontier

Russia's Restless Frontier

Author: Dmitri V. Trenin

Publisher: Carnegie Endowment

Published: 2010-04

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0870032941

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The conflict in Chechnya, going through its low- and high-intensity phases, has been doggedly accompanying Russia's development. In the last decade, the Chechen war was widely covered, both in Russia and in the West. While most books look at the causes of the war, explain its zigzag course, and condemn the brutalities and crimes associated with it, this book is different. Its focus lies beyond the Caucasus battlefield. In Russia's Restless Frontier, Dmitri Trenin and Aleksei Malashenko examine the implications of the war with Chechnya for Russia's post-Soviet evolution. Considering Chechnya's impact on Russia's military, domestic politics, foreign policy, and ethnic relations, the authors contend that the Chechen factor must be addressed before Russia can continue its development.


The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties

The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties

Author: Chen Jian

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 1351366106

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‘This extraordinary collection is a game-changer. Featuring the cutting-edge work of over forty scholars from across the globe, The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties is breathtaking in its range, incisive in analyses, and revolutionary in method and evidence. Here, fifty years after that iconic "1968," Western Europe and North America are finally de-centered, if not provincialized, and we have the basis for a complete remapping, a thorough reinterpretation of the "Sixties."’ —Jean Allman, J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities; Director, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis ‘This is a landmark achievement. It represents the most comprehensive effort to date to map out the myriad constitutive elements of the "Global Sixties" as a field of knowledge and inquiry. Richly illustrated and meticulously curated, this collection purposefully "provincializes" the United States and Western Europe while shifting the loci of interpretation to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. It will become both a benchmark reference text for instructors and a gateway to future historical research.’ —Eric Zolov, Associate Professor of History; Director, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Stony Brook University ‘This important and wide-ranging volume de-centers West-focused histories of the 1960s. It opens up fresh and vital ground for research and teaching on Third, Second, and First World transnationalism(s), and the many complex connections, tensions, and histories involved.’ —John Chalcraft, Professor of Middle East History and Politics, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science ‘This book globalizes the study of the 1960s better than any other publication. The authors stretch the standard narrative to include regions and actors long neglected. This new geography of the 1960s changes how we understand the broader transformations surrounding protest, war, race, feminism, and other themes. The global 1960s described by the authors is more inclusive and relevant for our current day. This book will influence all future research and teaching about the postwar world.’ —Jeremi Suri, Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs; Professor of Public Affairs and History, The University of Texas at Austin As the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 approaches, this book reassesses the global causes, themes, forms, and legacies of that tumultuous period. While existing scholarship continues to largely concentrate on the US and Western Europe, this volume will focus on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. International scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds explore the global sixties through the prism of topics that range from the economy, decolonization, and higher education, to forms of protest, transnational relations, and the politics of memory.