Middle East Books

Old Testament Times: A Social, Political, and Cultural ContextFor a better understanding of the Old Testament (Bible) read this book and as you read the Bible, you will better understand what the writers were talking about. As you have probably noticed, both the Old and New Testament were written for those who lived in those times and would be familiar with what the writer was talking about or referring to.
Merrill Tenney's New Testament Times is champion to this book and is also well worth reading.

I always suggest this for new students of the Old Testament. It gives them a foothold without drowning them.

Anyone who wants to understand the complexities and nuances
of oil, which is the lifeblood of our economic wellbeing must read three books: The Seven Sisters, The Prize, and ON A CLEAR DAY. Mr. Campbell's book is a logical and timely discussion that takes over where earlier authors have left off or just did not elablorate.

This book thoroughly covers the basics of the history of the Middle East while giving a better understanding to the reader of the complexities of the reasoning of each side.

Mr. Campbell begins with a historical balanced perspective of each of the religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He follows with details of the conflicts among these three religions.

The final chapters examine the current situation in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, and make specific recommendations how the US can best resolve the dilemma of our involvement. Suggestions for decreasing the US dependency on Middle East oil, reducing our military requirements and political solutions for the Israel - Palestine conflict are outlined for consideration.

I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to gain a more thorough understanding of the history and conflicts of the region.

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This book is a joy for the armchair traveler. It takes you back to a place and a time, to a Turkish winter in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Burnaby's style is immediate, and compellingly readable. He lets you feel the mud, the cold, the mood of the times -- and the exotic east. It's great stuff. Crossing Anatolia by horseback in the winter, trying to track down rumors then circulating in Europe of anti-Armenian sentiment among the Turks, Burnaby finds the rumors to be baseless. But through every step of his wild goose chase, while we follow him through village after village, Burnaby describes in colorful detail the environment, and the people he meets. The first three-quarters of this book read like fiction, like a good, rollicking adventure story. It doesn't have a crisis near the end, like an adventure novel would, but Burnaby's story is all the better for being true.

Who in their right mind would voluntarily undertake an expedition on horseback thru Asia Minor in winter...Frederick Burnaby did in the year 1876, a time of intrigue in the Ottoman Empire and Russia where the forces that shaped WWI and 20th century alliances took root. This is an opportunity to travel back into time and traverse Asia Minor prior to the invention of the automobile. You will meet people from all classes and cultures; Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Persian and more. Burnaby tells of his trip with dry humor and with a suprisingly enlightened view of women, considering the times. This is a good read and worth the price of the book. For adventure travelers with time and money on their hands, retracing Burnaby's route on horseback would be a challenge even today.

This is a great book. Due to a number of trends in scholarshipon ancient history over the last two or three hundred years, thehistory of ancient Greece has been grossly distorted. The Near Eastern origin of much of the culture of ancient Greece was a recognized reality in ancient times. Until modern times, the foreign origin of ancient Greece according to ancient sources continued to be acknowledged, but that trend changed with the advent of the European nationalistic tendencies of the eighteenth century, which began increasingly to highlight Greece as the "cradle of civilization."

However, over the last sixty years, these prejudices have undergone a barrage of new findings. It appears that the ancient sources were correct. Walter Burkert, one of the foremost scholars of this century on the culture and religion of ancient Greece, examines the process by which Greece came to be imparted, in fact inundated, with Near Eastern cultural elements. Burkert's is now one of several books which should transform of conception of Greek civilization. I would also recommend the more detailed "The East Face of Helicon" by M. L. West, and "Alien Wisdom" by Arnoldo Momigliano...

First, let's make clear what Burkert does NOT say. This book does not argue that the Greeks are an offshoot of some middle eastern civilization, or that Greek genius was merely a late and relocated flowering of Egyptian or some other oriental genius. Burkert in no way detracts from the greatness and the uniqueness of the Greeks.

What he does is remove them from their isolation. He does this by showing a number of points where the Greeks, in the early Archaic Age, borrowed from the cultures around them or at least shared common beliefs or practices.

The book is divided into three chapters, each organized around a class of people through whom East-West contacts occurred: craftsmen, seers / healers (workers in the sacred), and poets / singers. Burkert in each chapter reviews archaeological, literary and philological evidence for cultural contacts or "continuum". And the evidence is not overwhelming, but it is considerable.

The achievement of _The Orientalizing Revolution_ is not to knock the Greeks off their pedestal. It is to help us better understand the Greeks, by seeing some aspects of their culture in a broader light and by teaching us to apply insights from other lands and peoples to the Greeks. This makes Burkert a worthy heir to Jane Ellen Harrison, for instance, and well worth reading.

Motzki presents one of the best rebuttals to the Schachtian theory, which is that the majority of even the "sahih" hadith must be regarded as forgeries that are back-projected onto their supposed sources. In an extensive analysis of Abd al-Razzaq's Musannaf, Motzki shows how each of its various chains of transmission bears distinctive narrative characteristics, relating, for example, to the extent to which the transmitters restrict themselves to verbatim narrations vs inserting their own reasoning, or the extent to which the transmitters relied upon certain sources vs others. We are given a picture of a great many transmitters, across a spectrum of transmissional chains, each with a unique yet internally consistent narrational profile. In the end, as Motzki argues, it is highly improbable that such a constellation of persons, relationships and profiles could have been artificially created.

Motzki's work has finally been translated from the German almost over ten years after its first original edition. That American scholarship has hitherto tended to neglect his work can evidenced in the absence of any mention of his work in such a recent and excellent work as Dutton's examination of Malik.

Motzki successfully overturns the position of Schacht which has substantially dominated hadith and athar studies for over a half a century. Though objections of Schacht's theses have existed they were either amateurish or piecemeal offering no alternative methodology. Motzki here builds a new methodology employing an early text unavailable to Schacht, 'Abd al-Razzaq's Musannaf, and is thus able to change the tide of scholarship with a much more amiable and optimistic view of how much we can know about Islamic history from the 2nd half of the 1st century A.H. onwards.

Murphey should get an astounding applause for his work. There is an incredible appeal that 'drains' you right into the pages of endless original arguments. The Ottoman Devlet (not Empire if you read the book carefully, I borrowed Maksudoglu terms for the Ottoman) finally received a fair judgement for their history. The research was acurately done with rare details, those which never surfaced before, which cleared out any pontless subjectivity mostly found on previous studies of the Ottomans. 'The sick man' was made 'sick' in the first place.

The rationalization of the Ottoman military might was the best part in the book. I am not surprised if this work becomes a classic.

Rhoads Murphey clears up a lot of mystification brought into the subject by authors who previously relied solely upon Western sources for understanding the Ottoman state. Some, for example, would talk about the Ottoman Empire as the perfect military state, designed around conquest, and others, thinking more of Ottoman decline, of the corruption, inefficiency, and lack of technical skill of their forces. Yet, a study of Ottoman history reveals, naturally, that neither of these extremes were true, and that the Ottomans had to contend with many of the same difficulties, military and administrative, that all of the western European states were attempting to overcome. For someone who really wants to learn how the Ottomans achieved what the did, and failed to achieve some of their more ambitious goals, this book is refreshing in that it teaches rather than obscures.

I read these memoirs with strict concentration on all features of the environment that provided the interesting material to this book.

From childhood of elderly relatives that was somewhat unhappy and bordering on deprivation, the family living off charity, in areas where the primary social groups' life revealed a pattern of neglect, moral [...] , and disregard for law.

I watched a collection of things making people of the same feather sharing a common attribute. Perhaps I should say that a small part of these features I lived myself (1952-56). The message Andre Aciman is giving me is also addressed to every member of a clan feeling alien in the environment in which one was found, and resisted to share.

You are taken back in time to the beginning of the twentieth century until the mid fifties. I never felt strange to uncle Vili, Aunt Clara, or Tante Lotte, like these people exist in the annals of many families' chronological account of events in any successive years.

How much true it is when one had become a success story and thus an object of intense jealousy on the part of his less fortunate confreres. One would definitely feel better off to keep ones apart from ones fellows.
Walking on tight ropes during WWII to keep balance between complete annihilation and survival is not impossible, or unethical, though the uncomplimentary remarks Uncle Vili used to make about the warring parties - about them both - in private, now remained no secret. We all tend to do the same thing when cornered; won't we? This is legitimate quest for survival amid a world run in madness, Uncle Vili appeared uncomplicated enough.

Those were the people we came to know in Egypt in the mid-fifties, their private life, their intimate charm, their gentleness, their direct and affectionate manner, their kindness and modesty which remained unchanged even at the very height of their predicaments.

We knew people like Uncle Vili, their sense of humor, coupled with caustic wit with their servants - Egyptians and/or Sudanese - that their good nature forsook them and their tongue became capable of mordant, wounding remarks. In the company of their intimate friends, they would throw off the habitual reserve they displayed on public occasions and behave like the big boy scouts which they remained in one corner of their personality - Pashas attitudes.

Andre Aciman: I salute you.

Out of Egypt, is a very special memoir about growing up in Alexandria before the author and his family were forced to move from Egypt in 1965 . It's a fascinating memoir of a time and place that no longer exists, and a wonderfully written account .

There are very few contributions to the literature of economic development which bring a totally unique approach to analyze the issues facing a developing economy. Instead of a traditional "economic factors can explain all" hypthesis this book adopts a multi-discipinary approach combining economic and non-economic factors in explaining the Pakistan paradox i.e. high growth rates with poor social developoment.Those who are interested in going beyond simplisitic prescriptions will find this book extremely illuminating. For those who wish to learn about Pakistan and Muslim countries in general this book is a must reading.

The book provides an incisive review of the issues and challenges facing Pakistan's economy on the eve of next millennium, and proposes a rich agenda of changes needed. This is done in the socio-political context of the country and the system of governance, recognizing that economic policy formulation or implementation is deeply rooted in the system of governance. Typically, books on the economy of any country, Pakistan or others, are confined to the tedious chronology and analysis of economic events, sprinkled with a few standard policy prescriptions, which is beyond the attention span of common readers. What makes this book an interesting reading is its underlying theme, that in developing countries like Paksitan, economic progress is simply not a matter of policy formulation. Instead, their success is inextricably intertwined with the institutional processes essential to their implementation and follow-up. In Pakistan, as the book traces out, there has been no dearth of policy formulation or policy advice over the years. From time to time various expert groups were commissioned, but their recommendations are piled up in a mound of massive reports without much progress to show for all the efforts made. Recognizing this, the author goes beyond the routine format of economic reportage and elaborates on the system of governance. The book points out how an elite group consisting of the landed aristocracy, the army, the senior bureaucracy, and a select few rich and resourceful families have kept their stranglehold throughout much of the rather turbulent history of Pakistan. It details how the system of governance has been compromised to sustain the rule of this elite group, and how the organs of government have been shaped or reshaped to this end. It shows how the existing political system has disenfranchised several parts of the Pakistani society giving rise to social unrest and upheavals; and why a large number of the young and educated are turning to protests and violence. Further, the book shows how the leading institutions of the country in critical areas like education and the judiciary have been systematically eroded away from within. The book shows that Pakistan faces rather daunting challenges of rebuilding a society that would be in harmony with the needs of 21st century and outlines an agenda essential to achieve economic and social progress.

Tim Stanley is one of the world's authorities on Islamic art and his depth of knowledge enhances this visually stunning book. Created as a catalogue to accompany a traveling exhibition by the same name that visited the United States in 2004, the myriad works included in this fascinating volume are from the Victoria and Albert Museum, perhaps the finest collection of artifacts and art from the Middle East.

Though many readers will be familiar with the mosques and minarets decorated with the complex geometric designs that have graced art and culture books for years, of greater interest are the 'unknown aspects' of Islamic art. Here are reproduction photographs of astrological clocks, objects of art in ceramics and lusterware, wondrous carpets and the variations of the patterns and designs so important to art history, as well as pages of calligraphy and Arabic scripts.

In a time when controversy shrouds appreciation of Islamic culture, this book becomes even more important in broadening our knowledge and appreciation of a culture and world of art too little known to us. Recommended. Grady Harp, December 05

Magnificent Islamic art from the Victoria and Albert Museum is currently on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition, "Palace and Mosque," is a spiritual experience of stunningly beautiful art-- worth a return trip to see again. The book accompanying the exhibition-- with its delicious array of high-resolution, photographic reproductions-- reveals the full splendor of Islamic art as it offers a perpetual feast for the eye.

An amazing up to date account on the history of the israeli palestinian conflict, albeit a fat fat book!

There have been flashier histories of Israel's war of independence and longer ones, but none as well informed, more sensible, and more compelling that Gelber's magisterial account. Making full use of the archives and blending them into a lively account, he provides enough specifics to make the hostilities come alive without ever bogging down in detail. He also dismisses with grace and ease the "particularly irritating" work of the self-styled New Historians, which he finds "one-sided and incomplete." The book's only defect is being published in a limited edition and at a vastly too-high price; let's hope an inexpensive paperback follows soon.

Gelber argues that the first phase of the war began just one day after the United Nations decision to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947 and continued through to the British retreat on May 15, 1948. During that half-year, a civil war took place within the boundaries of Mandatory Palestine, with the British not willing to expend lives to stop it. The Zionists won this round with an ease that astounded them almost as much as the Arabs, an ease which Gelber attributes not to their greater martial abilities but to the vast infrastructural superiority they enjoyed. He also makes the interesting point that the voluntary Arab flight from the contested areas fit into a cultural pattern; historically by-standers to the wars of their rulers, the farmers and townspeople escaped the hostilities temporary, then returned when the fighting ended. But Zionists came out of a Europe context in which abandoning the land was tantamount to forfeiting it.

The second round began with the Arab armies' invasion on May 15. Those armies were almost as ill-prepared for fighting as the Palestinians had been and, like them, were soundly defeated, with shuddering consequences for all the regimes involved. But don't be satisfied with this potted version - read the full version Gelber so capably recounts in Palestine 1948.