Women's transgressive behaviors and perspectives are challenging societal norms in the Arab world, giving rise to anxiety and public debate. Simultaneously, however, other Arab women are unwillingly finding themselves labeled "bad" as authority figures attempt to redirect scrutiny from serious social ills such as patriarchy and economic exploitation, or as they impose new restrictions on women's behavior in response to uncertainty and change in society. Bad Girls of the Arab World elucidates how both intentional and unintentional transgressions make manifest the social and cultural constructs that define proper and improper behavior, as well as the social and political policing of gender, racial, and class divisions. The works collected here address the experiences of women from a range of ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who live in the Arab world and beyond. They include short pieces in which the women themselves reflect on their experiences with transgression; academic articles about performance, representation, activism, history, and social conditions; an artistic intervention; and afterwords by the acclaimed novelists Laila al-Atrash and Miral al-Tahawy. The book demonstrates that women's transgression is both an agent and a symptom of change, a site of both resistance and repression. Showing how transnational forces such as media discourses, mobility and confinement, globalization, and neoliberalism, as well as the legacy of colonialism, shape women's badness, Bad Girls of the Arab World offers a rich portrait of women's varied experiences at the boundaries of propriety in the twenty-first century.

Queering the Medieval Mediterranean analyzes the forgotten exchange of sexualities that was brought forth through the Mediterranean and its bordering landmasses. It highlights the importance of queerness and sexuality developed on the Mediterranean trade routes.

"This is an essential reference tool for all folklore and Arabic literature collections." -- Choice "Hasan El-Shamy's work on folklore is absolutely outstanding, a monumental piece of scholarship." -- Digest of Middle East Studies "... reflects superior scholarship. Preparing a motif-index of folk literature requires a special kind of scholar with depth in a cultural area and breadth in international folklore studies... El-Shamy, I am pleased to report, is one of them." -- Ronald Baker This two-volume guide will be an important research tool in comparative folklore studies as well as in Arabic studies.

The study aims primarily at exploring the images of Swahili women as depicted in taarab songs in Zanzibar and factors that shape these images at different epochs or points in time. A secondary concern of the book is to highlight the history of taarab songs in Zanzibar and to identify the relationship between this art of songs and the Egyptian song. The author adopted a holistic approach, concentrating on sung lyrics. The analysis is descriptive and utilizes perspectives of literary theories of orature as well as insights from gender, cultural, structural, and functional theories.

In an updated and expanded edition of their classic, "The Arab World", Robert and Elizabeth Fernea revisit the Middle Eastern towns and cities they have known since the 1950s in light of the cataclysmic social and political upheavals that have occurred since the book's original publication. The authors reveal the human face of the Arab world as they revisit and talk with newsmakers and colleagues, old friends and new. photos.

Secondary edition statement from table of contents.

Every 3rd issue is a quarterly cumulation.

The ultimate manifestation of jihad began with the attack against New York. From Egypt to the Emirates, I made observations and extracted confessions.