Over recent years, Arabic popular culture has become a focal point of West Asian and North African studies. Most of the new research dealing with it concentrates on the ?popular? as opposed to an intellectual ?high? culture far from the harsh and hierarchically organized reality many Arabic-speaking societies face today. Popular cultural practices are thus seen as a rejection of the elite and a stance against those who have ?something to loose? within paralyzed and conservative communities. Albeit not denying the subversive political potential associated with these practices, this volume intends to take a more nuanced and broader perspective. Arabic popular culture might engage with emancipatory claims, but it might as easily follow the capitalist rulebook of global marketing. It might fight against oppressive authorities, yet it can equally become their symbol.0Approaches to Arabic Popular Culture therefore closely looks at the aesthetic implications of a topic ranging from Lebanese hip hop over Algerian pop novels to jihadi chants in the ?Islamic State? as well as from Egyptian mahraganat music over sarcastic stories about hash dens and time travel in downtown Cairo to Saudi-Arabian YouTube-influencers. Thus, the theoretical scope widens and the reader is taken on a delightful journey to the unsettling pleasures of contemporary Arabic art and culture.

This volume explores Arab cultural life since World War II. Chapters cover topics such as radio/TV, the press, cinema, music, theatre, popular religion, belly dance, western consumerism, sport and the Arabic language.

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim. With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.

Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in seventh and thirteenth-century Syria and Eygpt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, this extraordinary study combines approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies, with a particular focus on two well-known texts: Abu Shama’s The Book of the Two Gardens, and Ibn Wasil’s The Dissipater of Anxieties. These texts describe events during the life of the sultans Nur-al-Din and Salah al-Din, who are primarily known in modern times as the champions of the anti-Crusade movement. Hirschler shows that these two authors were active interpreters of their society and has considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social environment and the shaping of their texts. Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies.

This book explores the body and the production process of popular culture in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, and Iran in the first decade of the 21st century, and up to the current historical moment. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and cultural issues in film, cartoons, music, dance, photo-tattoos, graphic novels, fiction, and advertisements. Contributors to the volume span an array of specializations ranging across literary, postcolonial, gender, media, and Middle Eastern studies and contextualize their views within a larger historical and political moment, analyzing the emergence of a popular expression in the Middle East and North Africa region in recent years, and drawing conclusions pertaining to the direction of popular culture within a geopolitical context. The importance of this book lies in presenting a fresh perspective on popular culture, combining media that are not often combined and offering a topical examination of recent popular production, aiming to counter stereotypical representations of Islamophobia and otherness by bringing together the perspectives of scholars from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines. The collection shows that popular culture can effect changes and alter perceptions and stereotypes, constituting an area where people of different ethnicities, genders, and orientations can find common grounds for expression and connection.

The first book to explore how Arab pop culture has succeeded in helping forge a pan-Arab identity, where Arab nationalism has failed. Pop Culture Arab World! is the first volume to explore the full scope of Arab cultural life since World War II. The book reveals a homogeneous yet richly diverse culture across the Arab nations. In-depth chapters feature radio/TV (particularly the satellite revolution, which has fostered a shared Arab identity), the press (vibrant and controversial), cinema (once thriving, now in crisis), music (the beating heart of modern Arabness), theater (a largely assimilated Western import), popular religion, belly dance (originating in the Arab world), Western consumerism, sport, and the Arabic language (for Muslims, the tongue of God's final revelation). At a time when almost all we see of the Middle East is violence, oppressive nationalism, dangerous zealotry, and despair, this book is a vivid reminder of the humanity of the region's diverse people.

Explores the full scope of Arab cultural life since World War II. The book reveals a homogeneous yet richly diverse culture across the Arab nations.