Bøger af Dror Ze'evi

This textbook explores the histories of royal women in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that by dint of an unprecedented conjunction of historical shifts and powerful personalities, it was these women, and not men, who sat at the helm of global politics; moreover, it was they who in truth steered our world's transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Organized into chapters devoted to each of the era's great states, the book sets out to challenge several historical premises. First, it shows that women were the actual, if not always formally crowned, sovereigns of these states, or at least played a decisive role in shaping their policies. Second, the book dissolves the conventional dichotomy between East and West, showing that in both Christian Europe and Islamdom, women achieved their high status by means of similar strategies and at similar periods in history. Third, by demonstrating that there was a precedent for female authority long before the first harbingers of the women's movement in the eighteenth century, the book calls into question received ideas about historical progress and the evolution of women's liberation.

From 1894 to 1924 three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities. Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi's impeccably researched account is the first to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population and create a pure Muslim nation.

This highly original book brings into focus the sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of little-studied source material-medical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream interpretation manuals, shadow theater, and travelogues-in a nuanced, wide-ranging, and powerfully analytic exploration of Ottoman sexual thought and practices from the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Following on the work of Foucault, Gagnon, Laqueur, and others, the premise of the book is that people shape their ideas of what is permissible, define boundaries of right and wrong, and imagine their sexual worlds through the set of discourses available to them. Dror Ze'evi finds that while some of these discourses were restrictive and others more permissive, all treated sex in its many manifestations as a natural human pursuit. And, he further argues that all these discourses were transformed and finally silenced in the last century, leaving very little to inform Middle Eastern societies in sexual matters. With its innovative approach toward the history of sexuality in the Middle East, Producing Desire sheds new light on the history of the Ottoman Empire, on the history of sexuality and gender, and on the Islamic Middle East today.