Middle Eastern History

A concise history of the enormously powerful and influential Shi'i caliphate. The Fatimids (909-1171), one of the most significant and intriguing Islamic dynasties, built an empire that included North Africa, Egypt, and parts of Sicily, Syria, Palestine, and Arabia. Theirs is the only Muslim dynasty known by a female's name, Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter. The Fatimids promoted women to...

Using an impressive array of material from literature, archaeology and social theory, Edward Said explores the profound implications of Freud's Moses and Monotheism for Middle-East politics today. The resulting book reveals Said's abiding interest in Freud's work and its important influence on his own. He proposes that Freud's assumption that Moses was an Egyptian undermines any simple ascription of a...

In 1953, Iran was at loggerheads with the US and UK, after Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalised Iran’s oil reserves. By 1968, under the autocratic rule of the Shah, Iran was a booming export economy, benefiting from high oil prices and consumer demand. It had unambiguously become a modern industrial economy. Sifting through primary and secondary sources, Ali Rahnema charts Iran’s...

An urgent and compelling graphic memoir about a Pakistani investigative journalist at odds with his fundamentalist family and the Pakistani military that attempts to kidnap him. In Islamabad in 2018, Pakistani investigative journalist Taha Siddiqui is kidnapped at gunpoint and barely escapes being killed. He flees the country on the first plane to France with questions left unanswered: What motivated...

In this extensively updated edition of a book that was widely praised on its first publication nearly a decade ago, the acclaimed foreign correspondent and author, Charles Glass, brings the story of Syria up to date. In these pages, he looks at how the Assad government emerged victorious from a conflict that has left the country in ruins, wide swathes...

Our American Israel is masterful and deserves a larger audience." -Ta-Nehisi Coates An essential account of America's most controversial alliance, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time. In 1945, it was not inevitable that a global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees,...

An inside look at al-Qaeda from 9/11 to the death of its founder—told through the words of Bin Laden and his closest circle. As seen on 60 Minutes “A comprehensive, meticulously constructed and eye-opening look at bin Laden as husband, father and leader-in-hiding. . . . An engaging and persuasive read.”—Karen J. Greenberg, Washington Post “Never less than gripping. ....

First published in 1962, Men in the Sun is both a classic of Arab literature and what Kanafani himself would term 'resistance literature'. Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Their driver, a jaded, fat, former freedom fighter, living with his own compromises and contradictions,...

The early sixteenth century saw the rise of two Mediterranean empires—the Christian Habsburgs, based in Spain and Austria, and the Muslim Ottomans, centred in the Balkans and Anatolia—with strikingly similar ambitions. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) and Sultan Süleyman (1495–1566) each pursued grand universalist visions, seeking to unite Islam and Christendom under a universal monarchy that would resolve wars...

The United States's superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the...

From the award-winning writer and thinker, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe's civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel's...

The story of the ancient world's most spectacular library, and the civilization that created it When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen- the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient...

A major new history of the epic siege of the island fortress of Malta Even as the great siege began it was understood by both sides to be an epic - a potentially decisive encounter between an uneasy assortment of soldiers, native Maltese, adventurers and Knights Hospitaller on a strategically crucial but near waterless island and a vast, seemingly all-powerful...

In the two decades following the Nakba, Palestinian writers faced an impossible task: preserve their language, culture, and heritage under occupation. This groundbreaking anthology, edited by legendary writer and militant Ghassan Kanafani, stands as an unyielding act of cultural and political endurance.Bringing together the voices of Mahmud Darwish, Hanna Abu Hanna, Samih al-Qasim, and many others, this is a defiant...

Iraq is where civilisation was born, where East and West have mixed and clashed since long before Alexander, and it was here by the waters of Babylon where Judaism was born and the Sunni-Shia schism took its bloody shape. Inspired by extensive reporting from the region and a decade delving deep into its history, Land Between the Rivers chronicles Iraq's...

'If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.'This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvellous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family.The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his...

The world's leading forensic scholar exposes international duplicity and complicity in theGazagenocide.Methodically debunking the claims of its apologists, Norman Finkelstein has for decades laid bare the cynical politics behind Israel's high-tech killing sprees in Gaza.Since October 7, 2023, he has been a unique voice in not just condemning Israel's onslaught but also providing original and acute insight into it.Now, inGaza's...

In 2022, in response to the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in police custody after being arrested for not wearing her hijab, thousands of Iranians - mostly women - took to the streets in protest. Fatemeh Jamalpour had just returned to the country after working in London and, despite the threat of imprisonment or...

A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Muhammad to the birth of the modern era. This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth...

A powerful, definitive account of modern Syria and its fate. Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was then brutally ruled by France. This French 'mandate' carved out new borders with equally provisional neighbours in a process that pulled apart families,...

The life story of the Judean queen Berenice, descendant of Herod the Great, who became a player on the stage of Roman conquest and politics. Berenice (born ca. 28) was the most notorious Jewish woman in the Roman Empire of her time. Multiple marriages, rumours of incestuous relations with her brother (Agrippa II of the Herodian dynasty), and her scandalous...

A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person's soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? Winner of the Heinrich Heine Prize for Literature A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person's soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the...

The 4,000-year history of the city of Jerusalem unfolds in an exceptional graphic narrative that touches on the birth of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, as well as famous conquerors and mighty empires, and more. Four thousand years ago, Jerusalem was a small, isolated village perched on a ridge line between the Mediterranean and the desert. Today it is a bustling...

What is a homeland? When does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the...

Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has drawn on Zionism, the movement behind its creation, to provide a sense of self and political direction. In this groundbreaking new work, Ilan Pappe looks at the continued role of Zionist ideology. The Idea of Israel considers the way Zionism operates outside of the government and military in areas such as the country's...

The Assassins' Gate is the main entrance to the Green Zone, the fortified enclave of Saddam's former palaces that now houses the US military and political leadership in Baghdad. George Packer's remarkable book is an account of how America found itself in occupation of Iraq, using the country as a laboratory for the dissemination of democracy in the Middle East....

Fully incorporates Pahlavi Iran into the global history of the 1960s and '70s, when Iran mattered far beyond its borders. The reign of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941–79), marked the high point of Iran's global interconnectedness. Never before had Iranians felt the impact of global political, social, economic, and cultural forces so intimately in their national...

Argo meets Spotlight, as New York Times bestselling author Craig Unger reveals his thirty-year investigation into the secret collusion between Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and Iran, raising urgent questions about what happens when foreign meddling in elections goes unpunished. Argo meets Spotlight, as New York Times bestselling author Craig Unger reveals his thirty-year investigation into the secret collusion between...

Offers a broad and unique look at Ancient Egypt during its long age of imperialism. Written for enthusiasts and scholars of pharaonic Egypt, as well as for those interested in comparative imperialism, this book provides a look at some of the most intriguing evidence for grand strategy, low-level insurgencies, back-room deals, and complex colonial dynamics that exist for the Bronze...

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent...

In The Eloquent Tyrant, Pamela Klasova presents a cultural history of speech in the early Islamic empire, examining the relationship between the spoken word and power through the oratorical practice of the powerful governor of Iraq, al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī (d. 714). The governor is remembered both as one of the most eloquent rulers of his age and as one...

A human history of one of the planet's most iconic lakes, and the civilisations that surrounded its shores The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most life forms. Even so, civilisations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its...

In the midst of profound political changes in late seventh-century Egypt, after the end of Roman hegemony and during Islamic rule, a bishop named John from the city of Nikiu sat down to pen a chronicle. It is a puzzling and fascinating work that reimagines the established Roman genre of Christian world history as a dialectic between a Roman state...

Yemen is the dark horse of the Middle East. Every so often it enters the headlines for one alarming reason or another—links with al-Qaeda, kidnapped Westerners, explosive population growth—then sinks into obscurity again. But, as Victoria Clark argues in this riveting book, we ignore Yemen at our peril. The poorest state in the Arab world, it is still dominated by...

How our understanding of the ancient Egyptian afterlife was shaped by Christianity. Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians' obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. However, as Rune Nyord shows, even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms....

It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial powers unilaterally imposed artificial borders on the post-Ottoman world in postwar agreements. Worldmaking in the Long Great War offers a new account of how the Great War unmade and then remade the political order of the...

"The wonders and curiosities of the Islamic imagination await discovery by a new generation of readers in this superb and very enjoyable book by Travis Zadeh."-Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The astonishing biography of one of the world's most influential books. During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyā' Qazwīnī authored what became one...

Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel is a synthetic reconstruction of women’s religious engagement and experiences in preexilic Israel. “This monumental book examines a wealth of data from the Bible, archaeology, and ancient Near Eastern texts and iconography to provide a clear, comprehensive, and compelling analysis of women’s religious lives in preexilic times.” —Carol Meyers, Duke University Throughout the...

This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In Women and Gender in Islam, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the...

An ambitious revisionist history of the modern Middle East What Really Went Wrong offers a fresh and incisive assessment of American foreign policy's impact on the history and politics of the modern Middle East. Looking at flashpoints in Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese history, Fawaz A. Gerges shows how postwar U.S. leaders made a devil's pact with potentates, autocrats, and...

Winner of an English PEN Award 2021 During the 1948 war, more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba—which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe'—lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight. Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a...

Palestine Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Winner 2022 Roy is humanely and professionally committed in ways that are unmatched by any other non-Palestinian scholar - Edward W. Said Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the...

From its earliest days, the dominant history of the Turkish Republic was told as a triumphant narrative of national self-determination and secular democratic modernisation. In that officially sanctioned account, the years between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Turkish state marked an absolute rupture, and the Turkish nation formed an absolute unity. In recent years,...

How denial sustains the liberal imagination of a progressive and democratic Israel. The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite—an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and...

How denial sustains the liberal imagination of a progressive and democratic Israel. The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and...

An analysis of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne from multiple historical, economic, and social perspectives. The last of the post-World War One peace settlements, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, departed from methods used in the Treaty of Versailles and took on a new peace-making initiative: a forced population exchange that affected one and a half million people. Like its German...

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a generation of Ottoman Greeks was caught up in radical social and political changes, including the period of reforms known as Tanzimat. The Ottoman Greek press was both a product and an agent of these changes. The Uses of Oppression follows the development of the Ottoman Greek press from its birth in...

Written for those who want to know more about the Middle East than the mainstream media is willing or able to tell, this book begins by examining a question that has been asked by numerous commentators since September 11, 2001: "Why do they hate us?" The Unmaking of the Middle East by Jeremy Salt offers the background essential for understanding...

Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution. Having lived in Syria for over fifteen years, Yasser Munif is an expert in exploring the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed,...

A history of the postal system that once connected the Ottoman Empire Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system. Every empire had one—including the Ottoman Empire. In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles...

A lively new biography of Tutankhamun—published for the hundredth anniversary of his tomb’s modern discovery The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 sparked imaginations across the globe. While Howard Carter emptied its treasures, Tut-mania gripped the world—and in many ways, never left. But who was the “boy king,” and what was his life really like? Garry J. Shaw tells the...

The Siege of Acre, 1189-1191 is the first comprehensive history of the most decisive military campaign of the Third Crusade and one of the longest wartime sieges of the Middle Ages. The two-year-long siege of Acre (1189–1191) was the most significant military engagement of the Third Crusade, attracting armies from across Europe, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Maghreb. Drawing on...

Israeli settlements are proliferating in Palestinian territory, and if they are annexed, the possibility of a future Palestinian state is virtually impossible. Could it have been otherwise? Can it still be? These are the questions Jerome M. Segal poses in The Olive Branch from Palestine. Carefully argued and highly informative, this book is centred on an original strategy that Segal...

Spanning decades and encompassing war, mass exodus, epic migrations, and the search for individual and collective identity, The Last Earth tells the story of modern Palestine through the memories of those who have lived it. Ordinary Palestinians have rarely narrated their own history. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed author Ramzy Baroud draws on dozens of interviews to produce vivid, intimate,...

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Stewart Ross is the essential guide to the extraordinarily complicated and developing situation in Israel/Palestine. Fully updated to reflect the tense and troubling changes in the region since 7 October 2023, this book puts the present situation into its broader context. By examining all perspectives, it unravels the origins and development of issues which make the...

On the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution, an essential guide to the momentous war for independence of the Greeks from the Ottoman Empire. The Greek war for independence (1821–1830) often goes missing from discussion of the Age of Revolutions. Yet, the rebellion against Ottoman rule was enormously influential in its time, and its resonances are felt across modern history. The...

Gathers together leading scholars in the field to examine the impact of World War I on the Middle East, which is crucial to understanding the region's current problems and the rise of groups like the Islamic State. In addition to recounting the crucial international politics that drew fierce lines in the sands of the Middle East—a story of intrigue between...

Little is known about Arabia in the sixth century, yet from this distant time and place emerged a faith and an empire that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to India. Today, Muslims account for nearly a quarter of the global population. A renowned classicist, G. W. Bowersock seeks to illuminate this obscure and dynamic period in the history of Islam—exploring...

The Crusader States offers the only full account of life and culture in the twelfth-century crusader states, where religious battles raged and civilizations collided. When the armies of the First Crusade wrested Jerusalem from control of the Fatimids of Egypt in 1099, they believed their victory was an evident sign of God's favour. It was, therefore, incumbent upon them to...

A world-leading military strategist and an IDF insider explain the improbable success of the Israeli armed forces. When the Israel Defense Forces was established in May 1948, it was small, poorly equipped, and already at war. Lacking sufficient weaponry or the domestic industrial base to produce it, the newborn military was forced to make do with whatever it could get...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. At the beginning of the common era, the two major imperial powers of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East were Rome and Parthia. In this book, Jake Nabel analyses Roman-Parthian interstate politics by focusing on a...

Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, a preeminent religious scholar jurist of Medina in the first half of the second century of the Muslim calendar (mid-eighth century CE). Numerous works in different languages have appeared over the past half century to introduce...

The extraordinary true story of Polish-Jewish child refugees who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Iran. More than a million Jews escaped east from Nazi-occupied Poland to Soviet-occupied Poland. There, they suffered extreme deprivation in Siberian gulags and “Special Settlements” and then, once “liberated,” journeyed to the Soviet Central Asian Republics. The majority of Polish Jews who survived the...

In the history of the Ottoman Empire, the seventeenth century has often been considered an anomaly, characterised by political dissent and social conflict. In this book, Aslıhan Gürbüz reveals how the early modern period was, in fact, crucial to the formation of new kinds of political agency that challenged, negotiated with, and ultimately reshaped the Ottoman social order. By uncovering...

Today the West tends to understand the Middle East primarily in terms of geopolitics: Islam, oil, and nuclear weapons. But in the nineteenth century, it was imagined differently. The interplay of geography and politics found definition in a broader set of concerns that understood the region in terms of the moral, humanitarian, and religious commitments of the British Empire. Smyrna's...

As a young man, Meron Benvenisti often accompanied his father, a distinguished geographer, when the elder Benvenisti travelled through the Holy Land charting a Hebrew map that would rename Palestinian sites and villages with names linked to Israel's ancestral homeland. These experiences in Benvenisti's youth are central to this book, and the story that he tells helps explain how, during...

One of the world's foremost experts on Assyriology, Jean Bottéro has studied the religion of ancient Mesopotamia for more than fifty years. Building on these many years of research, Bottéro here presents the definitive account of one of the world's oldest known religions. He shows how ancient Mesopotamian religion was practiced both in the public and private spheres, how it...

In the decades after World War II, the United Nations established a global refugee regime that became central to the lives of displaced people around the world. This regime has exerted particular authority over Palestinian refugees, who are served by a specialised UN body, the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Formed shortly after the 1948 war, UNRWA continues to provide...

This timely and critically important work does what hostilities in the Middle East have made nearly impossible: it offers a measured, internal perspective on Palestinian politics, viewing emerging political patterns from the Palestinian point of view rather than through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Based on groundbreaking fieldwork, interviews with Palestinian leaders, and an extensive survey of Arabic-language writings...

A searing account of the UN resolution to partition Palestine, and its bloody aftermath The 1947 UN resolution to partition Palestine irrevocably changed the political landscape of the Middle East, giving rise to six full-fledged wars between Arabs and Jews, countless armed clashes, blockades, and terrorism, as well as a profound shattering of Palestinian Arab society. Its origins, and that...

A renowned historian eludes the pitfalls of partisanship and tackles one of the world's most perplexing and divisive issues. "What is so striking about Morris's work as a historian is that it does not flatter anyone's prejudices, least of all his own," David Remnick remarked in a New Yorker article that coincided with the publication of Benny Morris's 1948: A...

One Land, Two States imagines a new vision for Israel and Palestine in a situation where the peace process has failed to deliver an end to the conflict. The book asks, "If the land cannot be shared by geographical division, and if a one-state solution remains unacceptable, can the land be shared in some other way?" Leading Palestinian and Israeli...

New under the Sun explores Zionist perceptions of—and responses to—Palestine's climate. From the rise of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Netta Cohen traces the production of climatic knowledge through a rich archive that draws from medicine and botany, technology and economics, and architecture and planning. As Cohen convincingly...

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memories to...

A prominent historian provides an engaging on-the-ground account of the everyday authoritarianism that produced the Arab Spring in Egypt. "A visceral and perceptive study of life under autocracy."—Publishers Weekly An unmatched contemporary history of authoritarian politics and an unflinching examination of the politics of historical authority, My Egypt Archive is at once a chronicle of Egypt in the 2000s and...

This new edition of Frank Ledwidge’s eye-opening analysis of British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan unpicks the causes and enormous costs of military failure. Updated throughout, and with fresh chapters assessing and enumerating the overall military performance since 2011—including Libya, ISIS, and the Chilcot findings—Ledwidge shows how lessons continue to go unlearned. Losing Small Wars is described as, “A brave...

A wealth of new research and thinking on Lawrence, the Arab Revolt, and World War One in the Middle East, providing essential background to today’s violent conflicts. Rarely is a book published that revises our understanding of an entire world region and the history that has defined it. This groundbreaking volume makes just such a contribution. Neil Faulkner draws on...

The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin remains the single most consequential event in Israel's recent history, and one that fundamentally altered the trajectory for both Israel and the Palestinians. In Killing a King, Dan Ephron relates the parallel stories of Rabin and his stalker, Yigal Amir, over the two years leading up to the assassination, as one of...

The first full account of the medieval struggle for Jerusalem, from the seventh to the thirteenth century The history of Jerusalem is one of conflict, faith, and empire. Few cities have been attacked as often and as savagely. This was no less true in the Middle Ages. From the Persian sack in 614 through the bloody First Crusade and beyond,...

A captivating journey through the hidden libraries of Jerusalem, where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. In this enthralling book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem’s libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although...