Assistant Professor
About
Dr. Hussein's work focuses on the intellectual and cultural intersections between Jews and Arabs in modern Israel/Palestine and the Middle East. In particular, he is interested in the manner in which Arabo-Islamic culture contributed to the development of Jewish thought in Palestine/Israel during the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. He also examines various perceptions of Jews in the Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and the evolution of Jewish imageries from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries.
Dr. Hussein's current research centers around a book project with the working title "Islam and Jewish Culture in Palestine, 1881-1948." The book offers a fresh perspective on the influence of Arabo-Islamic civilization on the development of Jewish thought during the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries in Palestine.The book focuses on how Jewish intellectuals drew from Islamic and Arabic sources to create a unique Jewish culture, and argues that several Jewish scholars found it essential to engage with Arabo-Islamic civilization as the dominant culture in the region during the process of nation-building in Palestine. However, the role of indigenous culture in this process has often been overlooked. Dr. Hussein's study provides a new understanding of how Arabo-Islamic civilization, in its various forms, shaped the development of Jewish thought in Palestine. Moreover, it offers a lens through which to re-examine and enrich the history of the encounter between Jews and Arabo-Islamic culture in the evolution of nationalist movements in the modern Middle East.
Dr. Hussein has recently finished working on an a new book titled: "Refiguring Loss: Jews Remembered in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Cultural Production" (Penn State University Press, forthcoming) with his colleague Brahim El Guabli.
Refiguring Loss places loss as a new conceptual approach to the study of Jewish-Muslim memories. It draws on the remarkable literary and cinematographic output of the last twenty years to examine how literature and film address the loss of hundreds of thousands of local Jews in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Shrouded in taboos, myths and inter-statal secrecy, the emigration of Maghrebi and Middle Eastern societies deprived their original societies from any form of mourning or healing from the loss of their Jewish self for six decades. However, creative writers and filmmakers have broken the taboo and brought attention to the impossible closure to the impact Jewish emigration had on the internal evolution of North African and Middle Eastern societies. Instead of projecting the Jew as the enemy and the perpetual foe, the Jew is represented as the lost part of a self whose ability to mourn has been foreclosed. The various interventions in North African and Middle Eastern cultural production open up an entire scholarly avenue for a novel investigation of the place of Jews in contemporary cultural memory. Resisting both nostalgia and conflict as the primary frameworks that have been used thus far to conceptualize Muslim responses to Jewish emigration after 1948, Refiguring Loss complicates these binaries and offers a more productive theorization of the complexity of Jewish existence in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern collective memories. In adopting loss as a conceptual framework for scholarly study of the variety of ways in which Jews have reemerged in literature and film, Refiguring Loss places emphasis on the larger societal and mnemonic implications of the absence of Jews from the daily lives of communities in which they existed for millennia.
Selected publications:
“The Integration of Arabo-Islamic Culture into the Emergent Hebrew Culture in Late Ottoman Palestine,” Jewish Quarterly Review Vol. 109, No. 3, Summer 2019, pp. 464-469.
“Scholarship on Islamic Archaeology between Zionism and Arab National Movements,” in The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism, ed. Susannah Heschel and Amr Ryad (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019)
“Intertwined Landscape: The Integration of Arabo-Islamic Culture in Pre-State Palestine,” Israel Studies Review, Vol 33, Issue 2, Autumn 2018: 51-65.
“A Palimpsest: On Judeo-Islamic and Israel-Palestine Studies,” in AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies, (fall 2018), 22-24
“Arabian Nights, Hebrew Nights: On the Influence of Alf Laylah wa-Laylah on the Jewish Culture in Palestine/Israel,” The Journal of Levantine Studies, Vol. 8, No.2, Winter 2018: 125-146.
“The Cultural Landscape of the Holy Land,” The Frankel Institute Annual, Israeli Histories, Societies, and Cultures, volume 2017, pp 26-29.
“Arabic World Hebrew,” Mikan Ve’eylakh, II, 2017, 49-52. (Hebrew)
Hussein, M. (2020). Hebrew on the Nile: The Rise of Jewish Studies in Egypt. Haaretz.
