1516: The Year That Changed the Middle East

This is a collection of papers from a conference entitled “Political Identity in the Arab East in the Twentieth Century," hosted by the Center for Arab and Middle East Studies of the American University of Beirut. Scholars and students alike with an interest in the Middle East will find the topics treated, the perspectives adopted, and the conclusions of continuing interest and pertinence. The volume includes contributions from the following authors: Ahmad Dallal, David Commins, Thomas Philipp, Samir Seikaly, Rashid Khalidi, Fred Lawson, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Roger Owen, and Hazem El-Beblawi.

​​This volume presents the study of conflict and conflict management in the Middle East through a variety of case studies. This is a collection of twenty papers prepared for a 1993 conference entitled “Conflict Resolution in the Arab World: Theory and Practice," organized by AUB and held in Larnaca, Cyprus. The essays cover the general subjects of conflict resolution in Islam, the sociological roots of conflict resolution in the Arab world, and conflict resolution and the Arab State. They include several case studies focusing on Sudan, Somalia, Kuwait, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Two introductory chapters deal, respectively, with western perspectives on conflict resolution and a critique of those perspectives from a non-western viewpoint. Some of the many traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution are discussed, along with how they are being undermined by the profundity and rapidity of social change in the region.​

​​Over the last two centuries, the French dimension of Arab history has loomed large. The Arab world equally has played a major role in recent French history. Franco-Arab Encounters treats the many aspects of this interaction, tracing not just the political, but also the cultural, social, and intellectual. Twenty authors present these “encounters" in seven sections covering the Arab world, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, over the past two hundred years. The book is dedicated to the memory of David C. Gordon, a pioneer and leader in this field of scholarship, who taught history at AUB from 1949 to 1955 and 1958 to 1975.

This volume provides the first comprehensive survey of land tenure in the Middle East over several millennia up to modern times. Its thirty-two papers bring to this theme an interdisciplinary approach and enable the reader to follow the various threads – historical, social, economic, political, legal – related to the evaluation and development of land tenure systems in the Middle East. Land tenure is a vital element in social transformation; it is quite literally the backdrop to history. Where the Middle East is concerned this theme has not received the concentrated and collective treatment it richly deserves. This volume is of great importance to all who are interested in the history, society, economy, and agriculture of the Middle East, and scholars of land tenure in other regions of the world will find in it ample material for comparative interpretation.

These thirty-four papers, explore the many ways that notions of liberty and justice have informed current and past encounters between American and the Middle East and North Africa. The contributions include various perspectives, including literature, film, foreign policy, education, religion, and human rights. This book is the result of the proceedings of the Second International Conference Sponsored by The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut.

​The author examines the rural politics of the provinces of Damascus and Tripoli in Ottoman Syria in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He considers the various kinds of rural leadership as represented by the most powerful dynasties that dominated various regions of the Ottoman Empire, and focuses on six specific Syrian dynasties, from origin to decline. This work draws on archival material from Istanbul and Damascus, together with Ottoman and Syrian chronicles, biographical and travel literature, and other Turkish, Arabic, and Western contemporary sources. The first two centuries of the Ottoman period in Syria have been little known before the publication of this work, which sheds important light on Syria at that time.

Malcolm Kerr was the ninth AUB president, serving only eighteen months before being assassinated in January 1984. This volume is a collection of essays in the memory of Dr. Kerr whose own scholarship centered on the politics and history of the Middle East and Islam. The studies are divided into three parts: Lebanon, past and present; the politics of the modern Middle East; and Islamic legacy. Under these sections a wide range of topics are covered, from the origin of the name Lebanon, to the Camp David negotiations, and the archaeology of early Islam.

This volume comprises the proceedings of the 4th international conference of The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) at the American University of Beirut. Its twenty-two articles explore various forms of transnational communication and politics as articulated through performance art, hip-hop, music videos, poetry, and literature. They address the mutually dependent relationship between the US and the Arab world, and how American activity in the region is viewed from the perspective of the Arab world.​