James Barr is the author of A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (2011). Since reading modern history at Oxford he has worked in politics, journalism, finance and diplomacy. He is a visiting fellow at King’s College London.
Marilyn Booth is the Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor of the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford and a Governing Body Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2014–15 she was Senior Humanities Research Fellow at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and prior to that held the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her most recent book is Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2015). She has translated over a dozen novels, short-story collections and memoirs from the Arabic.
Dawn Chatty is University Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and the former director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House), University of Oxford. Her research interests include forced settlement and forced migration, nomadic pastoralism and conservation, gender and development, health, illness and culture, and coping strategies of refugee youth. Among her most recent books are Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East (edited with Gillian Lewando-Hundt, 2005), Handbook on Nomads in the Middle East and North Africa (2006) and Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (2010).
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction who lives in London. Born in Scotland, she grew up between Saudi Arabia, England and Kuwait. She has also lived in Bahrain, Egypt, the West Bank and France. Her short stories have been published by Granta, International PEN, Wasafiri and the British Council. Her first novel, Out of It, featuring the lives of youth from PLO families returning to Gaza, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011 and was listed as a Guardian Book of the Year in 2011 and 2012. Her first radio play, The Brick, set in the West Bank and Jerusalem, was produced by BBC Radio 4 in January 2014 and nominated for a 2015 Imison Award. She is currently working on her second novel.
Khaled Fahmy is Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. He taught for five years at Princeton University, then for eleven years at New York University, before joining AUC in September 2010. He is currently Arcapita Visiting Professor at Columbia University. His research interests lie in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt. He has published a book on the social history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the nineteenth century (All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1997), a biography on Mehmed Ali (Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt, 2008) and a collection of articles on the history of law and medicine in nineteenth-century Egypt (The Body and Modernity, 2004). He is currently finishing a book on the social and cultural history of Egypt in the nineteenth century, as well as editing one on the history of Egyptian law from the Mamluks to the present. Since the outbreak of the 25 January revolution, he has been a regular contributor to local and international media.
Malu Halasa is a writer and editor based in London. Her books include Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline (edited with Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mafoud, 2014), Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations (2009) and Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images (2004), The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design (2008), Kaveh Golestan: Recording the Truth in Iran (2007) and Creating Spaces of Freedom: Culture in Defiance (2002).
Penny Johnson is an associate editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly (Institute of Palestine Studies). She began working at Birzeit University, Palestine, in 1982 for the university’s human rights and prisoners committee and was a founding member of the university’s Institute of Women’s Studies, writing on Palestinian women, family and social relations in Palestinian society. With Raja Shehadeh, she edited Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home (2013), which won the 2013 Palestine Book Award.
Justin Marozzi is a writer and historian. His most recent book, Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (2014), won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize in 2015. He is the author of a number of books about the Middle East and Arab world, including a study of the fourteenth-century warlord Tamerlane. For more information, see his website at www.justinmarozzi.com and follow him on Twitter@justinmarozzi.
Mai al-Nakib is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Kuwait University. Her research addresses a wide range of issues linked to cultural politics in the Middle East, from Arab feminism to the ethical question of Palestinians in Kuwait. Her book The Hidden Light of Objects (2014) won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award in 2014, the first short-story collection to win the award. She is currently writing her first novel.
Ramita Navai is an Emmy Award-winning British-Iranian journalist and author. She was the Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003 to 2006. Her first book, City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran, won the Debut Political Book of the Year at the Paddy Power Political Book Awards 2015 and was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction.
Alev Scott was born to a Turkish mother and a British father in London. After studying classics at university, she worked in theatre in London before moving to Istanbul, where she is now based. In 2014 her first book, Turkish Awakening, was published by Faber and Faber and was shortlisted for Debut Political Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, the Guardian, the Financial Times and The Times, among other publications. She is currently working on a book tracing the minority communities uprooted during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Raja Shehadeh is a writer and lawyer. His books include Strangers in the House (2002), When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege (2003), Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007), for which he won the 2008 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle (2010). Shehadeh, who lives in Ramallah, is a founder of the pioneering human rights organisation Al Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. His most recent book is Language of War, Language of Peace: Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justice (2015).
Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College and Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Politics of Partition (1990), The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000; new expanded edition, 2014), Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007) and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009).
Salim Tamari is Professor of Sociology at Birzeit University, Palestine, and editor of Jerusalem Quarterly (Institute of Palestine Studies). His book Year of the Locust (2011) examines the diaries of First World War soldiers who fought on the Ottoman side and includes his edited translation of the diary of a reluctant Palestinian recruit, Ihsan Turjman. He also co-edited and translated the late-Ottoman and Mandate-era diaries of Jerusalem bon vivant and musician Wasif Jawihariyyeh, published as The Storyteller of Jerusalem (2014), which won the 2014 Palestine Book Award.
Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of the novel The Road to Damascus (2011). He is a co-editor and regular contributor to PULSE, recently listed by Le Monde Diplomatique as one of its five favourite websites. He is working on a second novel set in the Syrian revolution and has recently contributed to Syria Speaks and to Beta-Life: Short Stories from an A-Life Future. His journalism on Syria has appeared in the Guardian, National and Foreign Policy, and he has been on radio and television, including the BBC, Channel 4 and al-Jazeera. With Leila al-Shami, he is writing a non-fiction book on the Syrian revolution and counter-revolutions for Pluto Press. His visits to Syria were part of the Zeitouna programme for Syrian refugee children, sponsored by the Karam Foundation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks first to the Edinburgh International Book Festival where our writers initially voiced the pe
rspectives developed in Shifting Sands and, above all, to the Festival’s engaged audiences, who discuss books and ideas with both passion and civility, creating a vibrant ‘republic of letters’ in Charlotte Square. Our warmest appreciation to the Festival’s (amazingly calm) director, Nick Barley, and to Profile Book’s (not always calm) Andrew Franklin, who sat with us in the authors’ yurt at the Festival and hatched the idea of this book. The editors also extend their warmest appreciation to the contributors to Shifting Sands, who turned their excellent presentations into incisive and lively essays – and all within tight deadlines, meeting every editorial suggestion and query with goodwill and hard work. Thanks also to the team at Profile, particularly Penny Daniel and Lesley Levene, who graciously but firmly steered this book to completion.
ALSO BY RAJA SHEHADEH
Language of War, Language of Peace
Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justice
ISBN 978 1 78125 376 2
eISBN 978 1 78283 121 1
Occupation Diaries
ISBN 978 1 78125 017 4
eISBN 978 1 84765 852 4
A Rift in Time
Travels With My Ottoman Uncle
ISBN 978 1 84668 330 5
eISBN 978 1 84765 273 7
Strangers in the House
Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine
ISBN 978 1 84668 250 6
eISBN 978 1 84765 412 0
Palestinian Walks
Notes on A Vanishing Landscape
ISBN 978 1 86197 899 8
eISBN 978 1 84765 129 7
Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East Page 19
