2021
Winning titles
Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties
Zeina Maasri
(Cambridge University Press)
Exploring the intersections of visual culture, design and politics in Beirut from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, this compelling interdisciplinary study critically examines a global conjuncture in Lebanon's history, marked by anticolonial struggle and complicated by a Cold War order. Against a celebratory reminiscence of the 'golden years', Beirut's long 1960s is conceived of as a liminal juncture, an anxious time and space when the city held out promises at once politically radical and radically cosmopolitan. Zeina Maasri examines the transnational circuits that animated Arab modernist pursuits, shedding light on key cultural transformations that saw Beirut develop as a Mediterranean site of tourism and leisure, a nexus between modern art and pan-Arab publishing and, through the rise of the Palestinian Resistance, a node in revolutionary anti-imperialism. Drawing on uncharted archives of printed media this book expands the scope of historical analysis of the postcolonial Arab East.
‘Zaina Maasri’s book is unique in terms of its originality and scope. She provides a counterpoint to Western-centric histories and theories of design and visual culture and adds to growing scholarship examining the processes of decolonisation in the region.’
‘For the field of Middle East Studies, many new ideas and theories related to design, aesthetics and cultural production are introduced in a clear and well-referenced way. Moreover, the reproduction of source material as illustrations and plates in the book serve as useful visual tools and reference points for the reader, especially in the absence of holdings of much of this material in institutional libraries and archives. And they make the book very visually appealing.’
Anonymous reviewer
Zeina Maasri is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. Before taking up her post at Brighton, she was both an independent graphic designer and an academic at the American University of Beirut (1999 – 2016) in Lebanon.
The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue
Marina Rustow
(Princeton University Press)
The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer.
Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology.
Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artefacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.
‘This is a book unparalleled in Islamic studies and in the field of medieval history as a whole. It sets the standard on how history should be written …
‘The range of sources, primary and secondary, employed in The Lost Archive is spectacular. The methodology is unparalleled.
‘The contributions this books make to the field are countless, it will remain a must-read for decades to come for anyone interested in the history of pre-modern states and empire, scribes and scribal practices, the history of the discipline, decolonizing the field, the introduction of new technologies (paper making), to name only a few.
‘Not only is this book well-written, it is fascinating in the true sense of the word. I could hardly put it down.’
Anonymous reviewer
Marina Rustow is Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East andProfessor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, working with a relatively neglected type of source: documents, especially sources from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 folio pages and fragments preserved in an Egyptian synagogue.
Shortlisted Titles
Ahmed El Shamsy
Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition
(Princeton University Press)
Wolfram Lacher
Libya's Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict
(IB Tauris)
Michael Christopher Low
Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj
(Columbia University Press)
Richard Tapper with Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper (Editors)
Afghan Village Voices: Stories from a Tribal Community
(IB Tauris)
