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Kategorie: EUME

Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) is a multi-disciplinary research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien. The guiding idea of EUME is to explore the historical, political, religious, social and cultural interconnections and demarcations that link and divide Europe and the Middle East. In contrast to thinking in terms of opposites and dichotomies, the diverse processes of reception and translation, common historical legacies, and the mobility of persons, ideas, and societies are to be brought into focus.

Editors: Georges Khalil, Claudia Pfitzner und Rashof Salih

Conversations / EUME

When Writing Stutters: Adania Shibli and Zeina Halabi in Conversation

Listening to Adania Shibli, one feels herself in the presence of a storyteller like no other. The writer begins by diving into an idea and supplements it with a story in which she summons thinkers and turns them into fictional characters, then casts a light on marginal figures that places them at the core of the historical event. Shibli effortlessly moves between the written and the aural, between abstraction and narration, and she does it ever so playfully, ultimately distilling narrative into theory. A Conversation with Zeina G. Halabi.

EUME / Reviews

The Questions that Remain: Conjectures on Cultivating a Relationship to the Published Book

By Maha AbdelMegeed. While the author’s relationship to their work in-progress is fluid with murky boundaries between what is intended and what is actually there, situating an author in position to their published work is just as tricky. Whenever I am asked to write or speak about my recently published first monograph Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda (SUP, 2024), I take it as an invitation to cultivate a relationship to the work anew.

EUME / Issues

Friendship in Dark Times: Fragments on Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Literatures

By Zahiye Kundos. “Now, as a group of people who are obsessed with the idea that history matters, we can agree that in the last few months, the aforementioned big hopes have been receiving a series of electric shocks. Thereafter, the word ‘return’ and the question mark disappeared, leaving ‘exile’ standing alone, naked on an empty stage. By then, and while becoming perplexed about the title’s orientation and the exact concepts to tackle, our hosts first suggested talking about “Rethinking Jewish Politics: Between Exile and Sovereignty” and then changed it to “Between State and Exile: Rethinking Jewish Politics.”

EUME / Reviews

In Search of an Exiled Past: A Review of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s Toda’at Mishnah, Toda’at Mikra

By Aaron Wander. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s Toda’at Mishnah, Toda’at Mikra: Tzefat Ve-HaTarbut Ha-Tzionit (Biblical Consciousness, Mishnah Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture) is an act of recollection. At the center of the book stands the 16th-century Kabbalistic community of Safed, with its poets, mystics, hermits, and halakhists. In Raz-Krakotzkin’s telling, historic Safed offers an alternative vision of Jewish living and flourishing in the land of Israel to that historically proposed by Zionism, shedding critical light on the cultural, moral, and political choices that Zionism has made. A review.

EUME / Narratives of Health and Illness: Care and Power Within, Against and Beyond Medicine

Medicine and Modernity in Middle Eastern Literatures: Towards Non-Eurocentic Comparative Approaches in Medical Humanities

By C. Ceyhun Arslan. This blog essay examines the relationship between medicine and modernity in three Middle Eastern narrative sources. The author argues that these texts depicted medicine as something that not only heals bodies but also reforms entire societies and brings modernity to their communities. They also emphasized that medical doctors should not only keep up with the Western science; they should also have a good understanding of the local customs.

Conversations / EUME / Reviews

“The story has not ended yet”: Home is Struggle and Achievement – A Conversation with Wendy Pearlman

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University where she specializes in Middle East politics, social movements, and narrative approaches to understanding conflict and displacement. She has been EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien during the summers of the years 2016-2018 and 2021-2022. She is the author of “The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora” (Liveright Books, 2024)

EUME / Reviews

The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures: Personal and Scholarly Reflections on My Book

C. Ceyhun Arslan introduces his recently published book “The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures” which challenges assumptions about the modernization of Arabic and Turkish literatures, examining their evolution into national literatures comparable to Western ones. The book explores how Ottoman authors navigated multilingual influences, shaping literary traditions and national identities in the Middle East and North Africa. It highlights how late Ottoman and post-Ottoman scholars integrated and reinterpreted classical texts, revealing the complex cultural and literary dynamics that formed modern Arabic and Turkish literary canons.

EUME / Narratives of Health and Illness: Care and Power Within, Against and Beyond Medicine

Navigating Bureaucratic Hurdles: Tuberculosis and Healthcare Access in Republican Istanbul

By Zehra Betül Atasoy. Tuberculosis, often referred to as consumption or phthisis, was one of the most dreaded diseases of the 19th and 20th centuries on a global scale. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the period on which this piece focuses, tuberculosis claimed a significant number of lives each year in Turkey. The absence of a structured and centralized TB treatment and prevention system left countless individuals grappling with the disease alone. However, one of the reasons for the lack of access to treatment was the cumbersome bureaucratic processes, exacerbating social class disparities.

Comment / EUME

Gaza through a Mother’s Lens

By Zahyie Kundos. Since Gaza was set on fire, once again, I am asking myself: When will I manage to bring myself to language, to carry the duty of recording the apocalyptic scenes of death, and to imagine a way for rebirth thereof? The least of interventions from my safe place in the diaspora: bringing self to letters. Imagine. But I haven’t been able to, and I am troubled to understand why not. Why is the distance between myself and the act of translating feelings into letters so big this time?

EUME / Narratives of Health and Illness: Care and Power Within, Against and Beyond Medicine

The COVID-19 Crisis, New Communities, New Narratives: A Snapshot  from Turkey

By Özlem Şendeniz and Elif E. Akşit. Could the COVID-19 crisis, which we currently perceive as something that belongs to the past, be an opportunity to go beyond anthropocentric thinking? Can narratives about new forms of community that complement our physical existence be constructed with animals and even with the AI via social media? This blog piece is the story of some points extracted from the online survey we conducted with a Turkish-speaking sample at the very beginning of the crisis, and the narratives that emerged around the exploratory survey.