Suggested Reading

The bibliographies below are the product of a joint project by our Center's Teaching Lab and the UCLA recipients of GAANN (Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need) Fellowships. The bibliographies represent a wide range of disciplines and topics and are prepared by GAANN graduate fellows in their areas of study as a part of their year-long Middle East pedagogy training workshops. The bibliographies provide an introductory list of must-read books mostly in English for anyone who would like to learn more about the Middle East.

History of the Modern Middle East

  • Anderson, Betty S. A History of the Modern Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues. 2016.
  • Beinin, Joel. Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East. 6th edition. Boulder: Westview Press, 2016.
  • Gelvin, James L. The Modern Middle East: A History. 4th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010.
  • Hourani, Albert et al. (eds.) The Modern Middle East. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004.
  • Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire: 1700-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Modern Middle East Anthropology

  • Abu El Haj, Nadia. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
  • Abu-Lughod, Lila. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  • Deeb, Lara. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 
  • Hamdy, Sherine. Our bodies belong to God: organ transplants, Islam, and the struggle for human dignity in Egypt. Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 2012.
  • Massad, Joseph. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Critical Education and the Middle East

  • Arnove, Robert F. et al. (eds.) Comparative education: The dialectic of the global and the local. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.
  • Bevis, Teresa B. Higher Education Exchange Between America and the Middle East Through the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  • Fleming, Mike et al. (eds.) Education for intercultural citizenship: concepts and comparisons (Vol. 13). Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2006.
  • Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Kellner, Douglas. Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the post-modern. New York: Routledge, 2003.
  • Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

Introduction to Islam

  • Algar, Hamid. Sufism: Principles & Practice. New York: Oneonta, 1999.
  • Brown, Jonathan. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009.
  • Ernst, Carl. Following Muhammad. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
  • Esack, Farid. The Qur’an: A User’s Guide: a guide to its key themes, history, and interpretation. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005.
  • Miskawayh, Ahmad b. Muhammad. Refinement of Character: An English translation of Tahdhib al-Akhlaq. Beirut: University of Beirut, 1968.
  • Hallaq, Wael. Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • Shavit, Uriya. Sharī‘a and Muslim Minorities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Winter, Tim (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Islamic Law

General Studies

  • Hallaq, Wael B. Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Hallaq, Wael B. Shari’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • Vikor, Knut S. Between God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Weiss, Bernard G. The Spirit of Islamic Law. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Islamic law in the West and Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat

  • Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and Barbara Freyer Stowasser, (eds.) Islamic Law and the Challenges of Modernity. New York: Alta Mira Press, 2004.
  • Hassan, Said Fares. Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt: History, Development, and Progress. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
  • March, Andrew F. Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • Moore, Kathleen M. The Unfamiliar Abode: Islamic Law in the United States and Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Gender and Islam

  • Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
  • Badran, Margot. Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. London: Oneworld Publications, 2009.
  • Esposito, John and Natana DeLong Bass. Women in Muslim Family Law. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.
  • Moghadam, Valentine. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. Boulder: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2013.
  • Wadud, Amina. Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Introduction to Eastern Christianities

  • Albert, Micheline et al. (eds.) Christianismes Orientaux: introduction à l’étude des langues et des littératures. Paris: Éd. du Cerf., 1993.
  • Angold, Michael (ed.) The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 5: Eastern Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  • Brock, Sebastian. An Introduction to Syriac Studies, rev. 2nd ed. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006.
  • Dadoyan, Seta, The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World, 3 vols. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011-2014.
  • Griffith, Sidney. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Hittite History

  • Bryce, Trevor. Kingdom of the Hittites. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Bryce, Trevor. Life and Society in the Hittite World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • Haas, Volkert. Geschichte der hethitischen Religion. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
  • Genz, Hermann and Dirk Paul Mielke (eds.) Insights into Hittite History and Archaeology. Leuven: Peeters, 2011.
  • Hoffner, Harry A. Jr. and H. Craig Melchert. A Grammar of the Hittite Language. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008.
  • Sagona, Antonio and Paul Zimansky. Ancient Turkey. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.

Mamluk History

  • Berkey, Jonathan. The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education. Albany: SUNY, 1994.
  • Chamberlain, Michael. Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  • Irwin, Robert. The Middle East in the Middle Ages: the Early Mamluk Sultanate, 1250-1382. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
  • Lapidus, Ira. Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
  • Sabra, Adam. Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt (1250-1517). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Africa and Colonialism

  • El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: a history of slavery, race, and Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  • Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.
  • Mamdani, Mahmood. Saviors and survivors: Darfur, politics, and the War on terror. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009.
  • Mbembe, Achille. On the postcolony. Johannesburg: University of Wits Press, 2015.
  • Pierre, Jemima. The predicament of blackness: postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race. 2013.
  • Simone, A. M. For the city yet to come: changing African life in four cities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Empire, Insurgency, and Nationalism in Modern Iraq

  • Brubaker, Rogers. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
  • Faust, Aaron. The Ba’thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
  • Sassoon, Joseph. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Migration in the Middle East

  • Brettell, Caroline and James Hollifield. Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Massey, Douglas et al. Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
  • Zolberg, A. R., Suhrke, A., & Aguayo, S. Escape from violence: Conflict and the refugee crisis in the developing world. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Example Cases

  • Gardner, Andrew. City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain. Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 2010.
  • Khosravi, Shahram. Illegal Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. London & NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
  • Pearlman, Wendy. We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled. NY: Harper Collins, 2017.

Arabic Literature, Colonialism, and Modernity

  • Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim A. The Arab rediscovery of Europe: a study in cultural encounters. London: Saqi. 2011.
  • Hafez, Sabry. The genesis of Arabic narrative discourse: a study in the sociology of modern Arabic literature. London: Saqi Books. 1993.
  • Holt, Elizabeth M. Fictitious capital: silk, cotton, and the rise of the Arabic novel. New York: Fordham University Press. 2017.
  • Patel, Abdulrazzak. The Arab Nahdah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
  • Selim, Samah. The novel and the rural imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985. London: Routledge. 2010.

Palestinian Art History

  • Ali, Wijdan. Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
  • Ankori, Gannit. Palestinian Art. London: Reaktion, 2006.
  • Boullata, Kamal, and John Berger. Palestinian Art 1850-2005. London; Berkeley, Calif.: Saqi, 2009.
  • Halaby, Samia. Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Painting and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century. New York: H.T.T.B. Pub., S.A. Halaby, 2001.
  • Makhoul, Bashir, and Gordon Hon. The Origins of Palestinian Art. 2013.
  • Shabout, Nada M. Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
  • Shammout, Ismail. Palestinian National Art. Beirut: Dept. of Information and Culture, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1980