Reviews
Examining the newest publications on the Middle East.
on :
Saturday, 25 May, 2013
In the first frenzied hours following the Boston bombings, a young Saudi man was mistakenly reported to be a suspect. “Investigators have a suspect—a Saudi Arabian national,” shrieked the New York Post, while Fox News fanned the flames of rumor, naming the Saudi student as a “person of interest” in the investigation. The individual was later revealed to be a witness, not a suspect. But for several long hours, it seemed that all the hard work that had gone into improving Saudi Arabia...
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on :
Tuesday, 9 Apr, 2013
There is a story from the Mubarak era about a Cairo shopkeeper who had a portrait of each of Gamal Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak decorating the wall of his shop. A passing tourist asked the shopkeeper about the portraits and he replied, “The first led the 1952 revolution, the second led Egypt in the 1973 war and the third—he is the father of Ala'a, my business partner.” This tale reveals as much about the Egyptian sense of humor as it does about the rising discontent that swept th...
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The Mediterranean stands torn between renewal and crisis. New political, social and cultural realities struggle through the pain of birth. Both north and south of the sea, ther...
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Friday, 22 Mar, 2013
Ten years ago the world witnessed massive protests against the US and UK-led invasion of Iraq, with up to sixty countries standing in solidarity with the Iraqi people. In Londo...
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on :
Wednesday, 13 Mar, 2013
Syria was the first modern Arab state to come into existence and the first Arab republic to elect its president, and it had the first Arab army to procure arms from the Sov...
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on :
Saturday, 23 Feb, 2013
Few scholars have had a better view of the catastrophic car crash that is modern Iraq than the British academic Toby Dodge. Originally one of a small group of experts called ...
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Thursday, 21 Feb, 2013
Huzur [hoo-ZOOR] n. tranquility, calm
In a famous 1978 essay, the Islamist poet İsmet Özel suggested that the traditionalist, conservative character of contemporary Turk...
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Tuesday, 22 Jan, 2013
With his first book for a popular audience, Fooled by Randomness (2001), the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb quickly became the new century’s favorite skeptic: We li...
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Tuesday, 8 Jan, 2013
In a steamy University of Damascus classroom, Arabic language students attempt to translate Samar Yazbek’s novel Cinnamon. Heads are buried inside diction...
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on :
Wednesday, 2 Jan, 2013
At nearly 73 years of age, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is one of the most famous Iranian novelists. Some critics have even praised him as Iran’s Tolstoy, Balzac, or Kafka. In truth, ...
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