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What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which actors experiment with various forms of modernity, continuing a long-standing Arab preoccupation with specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity. Women and youth take center stage in this process. Against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval in the Middle East, this book challenges the notion of a monolithic 'Arab Street' and offers an original perspective on Arab media, shifting attention away from a narrow focus on al-Jazeera, toward a vibrant media sphere that compels broad popular engagement and contentious political performance.

This work is a collection of essays on Islamism and global opinion surveys, focusing on their implications for the future of Arab countries. Much of Western academia and the media still seem to be unable to come to terms with the real challenges posed by Islamism two decades after 9/11 and half a decade after the horrendous Paris 2015 terror attacks. What is at stake is the question of whether moderate Islamist political movements can and should be a partnered with the West. President Obama personally issued the Presidential Study Directive 11 (PSD-11) in 2010, ultimately concluding that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting \"stability\" in the Middle East and North Africa to a policy of backing moderate Islamic political movements. The present book squarely contradicts this perspective. Bassam Tibi maintains that only liberal Islam approves of democracy, while Islamism absolutely does not. The empirical basis of the book is based on estimates of the development of civil society in the Arab World by using comparative opinion survey data based on the evaluation of the World Values Survey and other global and regional surveys. Variables of trust, non-violence, gender justice and tolerance towards homosexuals indicate some of existing deficits in the development of civil societies in the region. Thus, Inglehart and Norris correctly foresaw that the real distinguishing parameter for Huntington's theory is not his opinion on democracy, but his societal opinion on gender issues. This perspective is followed up with an empirical analysis of the gender ideology of Islamism and its gender values, all based on World Values Survey data. Muslim feminism, which implies the rejection of Islamism and the veil, and the democracy movement in the Muslim world are closely interrelated. In a chapter on Islamism and anti-Semitism, the book identifies the extent of relationships between anti-Semitism, the current economic and social situation, religious data, and opinions on terrorism among the global Muslim society. Islamism is deeply connected to anti-Semitism. The book also explores which factors contribute to the approval of terroristic acts, measured by such variables as opinions on suicide bombing and the favorability of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The book shows how wrong it is to neglect the underlying ideological radicalism which characterizes the support of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in the region. Along with most radicalized factions of Islamist terrorism, they share intense hatred of Jews and Free Masons and Western civilization. In a concluding chapter, the book analyzes globalization, the environment in the Arab World and the future \"greening\" of Arab politics.

Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture.

Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the \"East\"--witness the popularity of the stories of theArabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, and even the antics of fez-topped Shriners. In this captivating volume, Susan Nance provides a social and cultural history of this highly popular genre of Easternized performance in America up to the Great Depression.According to Nance, these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of theArabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities, Nance argues. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define \"the American dream.\"The recent success of Disney'sAladdinmovies suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This abundantly illustrated account is the first by a historian to explain why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.

How do ordinary men and women in Muslim-majority societies create religion-informed views of political topics such as democracy and economics? Beyond Piety and Politics provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the depth and variety of political attitudes held by people who consider themselves to be pious Muslims. Using survey data on religious preferences and behavior, the authors argue for the relevance and importance of four outlook categories-religious individualist, social communitarian, religious communitarian, and post-Islamist-and use these to explore complex and nuanced attitudes of devout Muslims toward issues like democracy and economic distribution. They also reveal how intrafaith variation in political attitudes is not due simply to doctrinal differences but is also a product of the social aspects of religious association operating within political contexts. By highlighting the dynamic societal and political implications of religious devotion, Beyond Piety and Politics offers a fascinating new theoretical perspective on Islam and politics.

This article traces the development of antisemitism in the Arab world, outlining major clusters of the phenomenon—Islamic anti-Jewish motifs; classic Western antisemitic tropes; and major themes in Holocaust discourse. It also highlights Arab voices critical of Arab antisemitic discourse, bigotry, and incitement against Jews—a subject largely neglected in the scholarly literature thus far. As in other societies, Arab antisemitism is not a phenomenon that is isolated from other social and political trends, but is part and parcel of the ongoing debate between competing worldviews.

Zionism in Arab discourses presents a ground-breaking study of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through analyses of hundreds of texts written by Arab Islamists and liberals from the late-nineteenth century to the 'Arab Spring', the book demonstrates that the Zionist enterprise has played a dual function of an enemy and a mentor. Islamists and liberals alike discovered, respectively, in Zionism and in Israeli society qualities they sought to implement in their sown homelands. Focusing on Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian political discourses, this study uncovers fascinating and unexpected Arab points of views on different aspects of Zionism; from the first Zionist Congress to the First Lebanon War; from gardening in the early years of Tel Aviv to women's service in the Israeli Defence Forces; from the role of religion in the creation of the state to the role of democracy in its preservation. This study presents the debates between and within contesting Arab ideological trends on a conflict that has shaped, and is certain to continue and shape, one of the most complicated regions in the world.

This text looks at the ways in which Jews, Muslims and the conflict between them has been covered in the modern media. Both Jews and Muslims generally receive a 'bad press'. This book will try to reveal why. The media have clearly played a pro-active role in the Middle East conflict, the coverage of which is obscured by the contrasting images of Jew and Muslim in western thought.

With the razor pen and keen intellect that have won him numerous loyal readers for his previous books, Egyptian economist Galal Amin here takes on the terms of the debate between the Arab world and the west. Amin deconstructs in his own inimitable style the language and underlying assumptions with which the west habitually assails Arab countries and politics. He applies his sharp wit and powers of observation to notions of freedom, democracy, human rights, terrorism (of course), and more, all of which fare the worse for falling under his gaze. In Amin's view, the western concepts of progress and backwardness as they apply to the Arab world are wrong-headed, and continuing to deploy them as theoretical tools leads into all sorts of blind alleys. True to form, Amin's analysis is laced with scholarly research, much humanity, and sly, subtle humor. His critique of the much-discussed UNDP Arab Human Development Report represents a welcome and reasoned Arab reply to this document that has been too frequently used as a cudgel to bash the Arab world. Accompanied by the gently humorous illustrations of Samir Abd al-Ghani, The Illusion of Progress in the Arab World is a deftly argued critique of the way Arab societies are judged by the west.

Contents -- Preface -- 1 The Illusion of Progress -- 2 Economic Development -- 3 Human Development -- 4 Freedom -- 5 Democracy -- 6 Capitalism -- 7 Human Rights -- 8 The Information Revolution -- 9 Ethics -- 10 Terrorism -- 11 Progress Backward? -- 12 Modernization or Reform? -- Notes