Summer reading from DUMESC Faculty

Timur Kuran: Freedoms Delayed: Political Legacies of Islamic Law in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press) July 2023

Kuran, professor of economics and political science, and Gorter Family professor of Islamic Studies, explores the lasting political effects of the Middle East's lengthy exposure to Islamic law. He suggests that Islam's rich history carries within it the seeds of liberalization on many fronts and that the Middle East has already established certain prerequisites for a liberal order. 

Mbaye Lo: I Cannot Write My Life (The University of North Carolina Press) August 2023

Lo, associate professor of the practice of Asian and Middle Eastern studies and international comparative studies, is a co-author of this book that examines the writings of Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said. Said spent more than fifty years enslaved in the North Carolina household of James Owen, brother of Governor John Owen. 

Adam Mestyan: Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East(Princeton University Press) August 8, 2023

Mestyan, associate professor of history, researches and teaches the history of empires and subordinated states in the Arabic-speaking world. In this book, he argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.”