What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.

This is the very first handbook to offer a comprehensive survey of mass media in 21 Middle Eastern countries. Knowledgeable Middle Eastern media experts unfold the little known but timely information about the region and compendiously discuss communication philosophies, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, motion pictures, media regulations, ownership patterns, news agencies, new technologies, external media services, and the role of media in national development in 21 country chapters. In addition to providing information about domestic and international media services, broadcast programming (domestic and imported), and print media contents, each chapter integrates geographical, social, political, religious, and economic factors to enhance our understanding of each country's mass media structure. Undergraduate and graduate students, educators, researchers, journalists, international media consultants, and media specialists will find this premier handbook an invaluable resource.

Oil is running out. What's more, its final depletion, once relegated to a misty future, now seems imminent. In all the more or less apocalyptic discussions of oil and similar depleted resources, nature, labor, and time converge. This volume focuses on how resources, resource-making, and resource-claiming are entangled with experiences of time. Particular expressions of "resource imaginations" often have a strongly temporal aspect: they frame the past, present, and future in certain ways; they propose or preclude certain kinds of time reckoning; they inscribe teleologies; they are imbued with affects of time: nostalgia, hope, dread, spontaneity, and so on. Examining resources as various as silver in Mexico, "diversity" in an American university, and historical documents in Indonesia, the contributors to this volume ask several questions: Under what conditions and with what consequences do people find something to be a resource? What kinds of temporal experiences, concepts, or narratives does thinking of things as resources entail? How does the making and imagining of resources assume or condition particular understandings of past, present, and future? How do understandings of time shape the ways resources are named, managed, or allocated?

Examining the economic and organizational structure and operation of Arab mass media, Rugh (president, America-Mideast Educational and Training Services, Inc.) categorizes Arab print media into five subtypes, describing and analyzing them in separate chapters. Syria, Sudan, Libya, and pre-2003 Iraq

Reconstructing the development of the term 'political Islam' and looking in detail at the current transcultural space between Islam and the West, this book offers valuable insights for those interested in cross-cultural relations and in Islam's changing political roles.