Understanding Arabs

Author: Margaret K. Nydell
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey
ISBN: 0983955816
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Book Description
NEW 6TH EDITION NOW AVAILABLE This Fifth Editon of the highly successful guide to arab society - published in line with the Arab Spring. The perfect introduction to contemporary Arab culture for those who want to understand today's headlines and the complex events playing out on the world stage. From the rise of fundamentalism to the historically uneasy relationship between the Arab World and the West, Margaret Nydell has expanded her highly respected book to bring today's complex issues into clearer focus. Understanding Arabs introduces the elements of Arab culture and Islam in an even-handed, unbiased style. The book covers such topics as beliefs and values; religion and society; the role of the family; friends and strangers; men and women; social formalities and etiquette; and communication styles.

Understanding Arabs

Author: Margaret K. Nydell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781473653085
Category : Arabs
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
A counter-point to prevailing assumptions about Arab culture, the 6th edition of this seminal work is a timely, lucid, and engaging guide to the values and cultures of the Arab world, based on Dr. Nydell's decades of working and living in the region, and her training as a professional linguist for the US State Department.

Understanding 'sectarianism'

Author: Fanar Haddad
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197510620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
Much has been published on sectarianism in the Middle East but few writers have separated received wisdom from the facts, as Haddad does in this book.

Desiring Arabs

Author: Joseph A. Massad
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226509605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
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. “A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report “In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times

Understanding Arabs, 6th Edition

Author: Margaret K. Nydell
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey
ISBN: 1473690897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
The definitive guide to understanding Arab culture for three decades. For nearly three decades, diplomats, students, business people and governments have relied on Dr. Margaret Nydell's seminal work as the essential guide to comprehending an immensely varied culture. Covering all aspects of Arab life, from religion and society to social norms and communication styles, this all-encompassing guide reveals what the often misunderstood Arab culture is really like. Each chapter, including the examples, all statistics and charts, and each country overview has been extensively updated to reflect current events. This candid and readable guide for non-specialists promotes understanding between modern-day Arabs and Westerners without pushing a political agenda. It beautifully captures the contrasts and characteristics of a great, largely misunderstood civilization and brings them vividly to life. This highly anticipated sixth edition features completely new material in the following sections: Introduction: "Patterns of Change," Chapter 5, "Men and Women" - changes in women's rights Chapter 11, "Islamic Fundamentalism," and the inclusion of ISIS Chapter 12, "Anti-Americanism," including implications for Europe Chapter 13, "Arabs and Muslims in the West" Chapters 14, 15, and 16, "Arab Countries"

Understanding the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Author: Michael Rydelnik
Publisher: Moody Publishers
ISBN: 0802426239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
The authors place the Arab-Israeli conflict in its biblical, historical, and prophetic contexts; and maintains that the true story behind the crisis has not been reported by the media.

Arabs

Author: Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030018235X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 681

Book Description
A riveting, comprehensive history of the Arab peoples and tribes that explores the role of language as a cultural touchstone This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia. Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developments—from pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammad’s use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabic—have helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and investigates how, even in today’s politically fractured post–Arab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.

When We Were Arabs

Author: Massoud Hayoun
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620974584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.

Arabs in the Shadow of Israel

Author: Tony Maalouf
Publisher: Kregel Academic
ISBN: 9780825493638
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
(Foreword by Eugene H. Merrill) A compelling call for Christians to rethink the role of Arabs—also descendents of Abraham and recipients of his blessing.

Arabs and Muslims in the Media

Author: Evelyn Alsultany
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814738141
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
After 9/11, there was an increase in both the incidence of hate crimes and government policies that targeted Arabs and Muslims and the proliferation of sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media. Arabs and Muslims in the Media examines this paradox and investigates the increase of sympathetic images of “the enemy” during the War on Terror. Evelyn Alsultany explains that a new standard in racial and cultural representations emerged out of the multicultural movement of the 1990s that involves balancing a negative representation with a positive one, what she refers to as “simplified complex representations.” This has meant that if the storyline of a TV drama or film represents an Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, then the storyline also includes a “positive” representation of an Arab, Muslim, Arab American, or Muslim American to offset the potential stereotype. Analyzing how TV dramas such as The Practice, 24, Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and Sleeper Cell, news-reporting, and non-profit advertising have represented Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans during the War on Terror, this book demonstrates how more diverse representations do not in themselves solve the problem of racial stereotyping and how even seemingly positive images can produce meanings that can justify exclusion and inequality.