Islam, the Humanities and the Human

Join us for a conversation about Dr. Amir Moosavi’s recently published book Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War. The book is the first comparative study of Arabic and Persian literature from the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). It traces the ways in which writers from both countries have wrestled with state-sponsored narratives of war … Read More

In this ethnography, El Zein listens to the experiences of rappers and their audiences in Amman, Beirut, and Ramallah as they search for ways to engage the political beyond the framework of resistance. Her recently published book, Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic, theorizes an interdisciplinary approach to political agency rooted the feeling … Read More

In the immediate aftermath of the 1963 Iraqi Ba'ath Party-led coup d’état of the Republic of Iraq and assassination of its democratically elected Prime Minister, Abd al-Karim Qasim, several prominent artists began producing new artworks and public art exhibitions. Iraqi artists drew upon transnational anticolonial symbols and common motifs of the heroic worker, farmer, and revolutionary to visualize … Read More