Modern Middle East Monograph Series

Shorter works of a specialized nature are dealt with in this paperback series, which is published under the imprint of the Center.

13. Asmahan's Secrets: Woman, War, and Song
by Sherifa Zuhur (2000)

The great Arab singer Asmahan was the toast of Cairo song and cinema in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as World War II approached. She remained a figure of glamour and intrigue throughout her life and lives on today in legend as one of the shaping forces in the development of Egyptian popular culture. In this biography, author Sherifa Zuhur does a thorough study of the music and film of Asmahan and her historical setting.

A Druze princess actually named Amal al-Atrash, Asmahan came from an important clan in the mountains of Syria but broke free from her traditional family background, left her husband, and became a public performer, a role frowned upon for women of the time.

This unique biography of the controversial Asmahan focuses on her public as well as her private life. She was a much sought-after guest in the homes of Egypt's rich and famous, but she was also rumored to be an agent for the Allied forces during World War II.

Through the story of Asmahan, the reader glimpses not only aspects of the cultural and political history of Egypt and Syria between the two world wars, but also the change in attitude in the Arab world toward women as public performers on stage. Life in wartime Cairo comes alive in this illustrated account of one of the great singers of the Arab world, a woman who played an important role in history.

12. Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique
by Mohammed 'Abed al-Jabri, translated by Aziz Abbassi (1999)

The distinguished Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, in this summary of his own work, examines the status of Arab thought in the late twentieth century. Al-Jabri rejects what he calls the current polarization of Arab thought between an imported modernism that disregards Arab tradition and a fundamentalism that would reconstruct the present in the image of an idealized past.

Both past and present intellectual currents are examined. Al-Jabri first questions the current philosophical positions of the liberals, the Marxists, and the fundamentalists. Then he turns to history, exploring Arab philosophy in the tenth and twelfth centuries, a time of political and ideological struggle. In the writings of Ibn Hazm and Averroâs, he identifies the beginnings of Arab rationalism, a rationalism he traces through the innovative fourteenth?century work of Ibn Khaldun.

Al-Jabri offers both Western readers and his own compatriots a radical new approach to Arab thought, one that finds in the past the roots of an open, critical rationalism which he sees as emerging in the Arab world today.

11. The Islamic Movement in North Africa,
Second Edition, by François Burgat and William Dowell (1997)

10. The Islamic Movement in North Africa
by François Burgat and William Dowell (1992)

9. Algerian Reflections on Arab Crises
by Ali El-Kenz, translated by Robert Stookey (1991)

8. By the Pen
by Jalal al-e Ahmad, translated by M.R. Ghanoonparvar (1988)

7. Istanbul Boy, The Autobiography of Aziz Nesin, Part 2
translated by Joseph S. Jacobson (1979) (out of print)

6. Haji Agha, Portrait of an Iranian Confidence Man, by Sadeq Hedayat
translated by G. M. Wickens (1979) (out of print)

5. Oil, OECD, and the Third World, A Vicious Triangle?
by Hossein Askari and John Thomas Cummings (1978) (out of print)

4. Hedayat's "The Blind Owl" Forty Years After
edited by Michael Hillmann (1977) (out of print)

3. Istanbul Boy, The Autobiography of Aziz Nesin, Part I
translated by Joseph S. Jacobson (1977) (out of print)

2. Women in the Middle East and North Africa, An Annotated Bibliography
by Ayad Al-Qazzaz (1977)

1. Catalysts of Change, Marxist versus Muslim in a Turkish Community
by Arnold Leder (1976) (out of print)

The above books in this series are available through the University of Texas Press.

The Iraqi Revolution of 1958, edited by Robert Fernea and Roger Louis (1990)
(Available through Tauris Press, London, and St. Martin's Press, New York.)