The papers in this collection have a common theme in the question of modernity and mass culture. Two papers, those by Chaney and Featherstone respectively, discuss aspects of this theme in a general, global context, all the others are concerned more specifically with the regional context of the Middle East. All the articles in this collection were

This book explores the current historical moment through works of popular culture produced in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa region, Turkey, and Iran. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and other issues in film, cartoons, talk shows, music, dance, blogs, graphic novels, fiction, fashion, and advertisements.

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.

Over the past two decades, Israel has been remaking itself in line with the commercial models of Western market societies. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in private consumption patterns. Most Israelis crave parity with Western lifestyles - private automobiles, mobile phones, spacious housing fashionably furnished, accessibility to shopping malls and leisure travel abroad. Alongside these new aspirations, internationally branded commodities and franchises such as McDonald's, Office Depot, Benetton, IKEA and Toys 'R' Us increasingly feature in the Israeli landscape, and advertising has emerged as a primary vehicle for persuasion, competition and cultural expression. This book is the first to explore fully the significance of these transformations. The authors show how different groups - kibbutzniks, Israeli Arabs, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, new immigrants and middle-class Israelis - alternately exhibit a suspicion towards and enthusiasm for the enhanced individual freedoms of a consumer market society. Lifestyle consumerism is recognized as an alien import, potentially disruptive of the ethos of communality, common destiny and national purpose. At the same time, because consumption helps unite diverse groups to the greater whole of the nation, the globe, and modernity, it conveys a sense of normalcy and affluence in a time of major social transition and political turmoil. Consumption and Market Society in Israel is not only innovative in its research, but it is a timely contribution to a hotly debated topic.

In this groundbreaking book, Tarik Sabry is seeking out the terrain for best understanding the experience of being modern in transitional societies. He adopts a dynamic, ethnographically based approach to the meanings of 'modernness' in the Arab context and, within a relational framework, focuses on structures of thought, everydayness and self-referentiality to explore the process of building a bridge that rejoins the 'modern' in Arab thought with the 'modern' in Arab lived experience. In bringing together modernity as a philosophical category with the bridging spaces of Arab everyday life, Sabry is offering fresh methods of comprehending the question of what it means to be modern in the Arab world today.

In this book, leading international scholars examine the way new media is reshaping lives and politics. Covering topics from women's rights to terrorism, and countries from Israel to Saudi Arabia, these authors explore the global and regional ramifications of the proliferation of communication technologies and the information they disseminate.

This collective volume provides an integrative historical and contemporary discussion of Sunni EulamaE3/4 in the Middle East in both an urban and a semi-tribal context. The various chapters reinforce a renewed interest in the position of the EulamaE3/4 in modern times and offer new insights as to their ideological vitality and contribution to the public discourse on moral and sociopolitical issues.