This book provides first-hand, solid information about who Arabs are, how they interact within Arab society, their mores, customs, habits, cultural obligations, and taboos. This is a must-read for Americans in the post-September 11 era to understand Arab perceptions of Americans, what they find positive and admirable about the West, and what they find offensive and unacceptable. Book jacket.

An accessible and wide-ranging survey of modern Arab culture covering political, intellectual and social aspects.

This book traces the history of conflict and contact between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Ottoman Middle East prior to 1914.

This handbook is designed to specifically provide the trainer a 'hip pocket training' resource. It is intended for informal squad or small group instruction. The goal is to provide soldiers with a basic overview of Arab culture. It must be emphasized that there is no "one" Arab culture or society. The Arab world is full of rich and diverse communities, groups and cultures. Differences exist not only among countries, but within countries as well. Caveat: It is impossible to talk about groups of people without generalizing. It then follows that it is hard to talk about the culture of a group without generalizing. This handbook attempts to be as accurate and specific as possible, but inevitably contains such generalizations. Treat these generalizations with caution and wariness. They do provide insight into a culture, but the accuracy and usefulness will depend on the context and specific circumstances.

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

This book introduces the reader to Arabic heritage, with a particular focus on the post-Abbasid era up to the nineteenth century, often labelled a period of decadence (‘aṣr al-inḥiṭaṭ). It will be a valuable resource for students, as well as researchers and academics wanting to see the larger picture of this period. This book introduces the reader not only to the literature of this era, but also to the different aspects of the heritage of Arabic civilization. The volume comprises seven chapters covering a range of topics, including Arab history, language and identity, Arab-Islamic science, al-Andalus, political and religious movements, Arabic literature, and al-Nahda.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. Offering key insights into critical debates on the construction, management and destruction of heritage in Muslim contexts, this volume considers how Islamic heritages are constructed through texts and practices which award heritage value. It examines how the monolithic representation of Islamic heritage (as a singular construct) can be enriched by the true diversity of Islamic heritages and how endangerment and vulnerability in this type of heritage construct can be re-conceptualized. Assessing these questions through an interdisciplinary lens including heritage studies, anthropology, history, conservation, religious studies and archaeology, this pivot covers global and local examples including heritage case studies from Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and Pakistan.