Moves away from common orientalist foundations that have dominated the West's understanding of the modern Middle East. By presenting multiple viewpoints, this book is a springboard for instructors hoping to encourage students to negotiate the contingencies and contradictions in the region's history.

Omnia El Shakry is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt and the editor of Gender and Sexuality in Islam.