Download or read book Out of the Middle East written by Kamal Shair and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2006-07-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kamal Shair's book is a classic rags to riches story: the village boy, who with determination and education, achieves business success, wealth, more wealth, and then influence and power. What makes it unusual is that it emanates from the Arab world. Rarely among Arabs have individuals from thoroughly modest backgrounds, with no access to links, networks or connections become truly global commercial players. Shair was born in a small town in what was then Transjordan and dragged himself through school (his mother was illiterate), moved to college in Beirut, then sailed off to America (Michigan and Yale) and returned to the Middle East to create a multinational corporate empire engaged in trade, construction and manufacturing. Dar al Handasah - Arabic for House of Engineers - was founded in a small flat in Beirut and today, spans the globe with offices in 37 countries. In its early years, Dar al Handasah fought off competition from established western consultancies to win contracts for prestige engineering throughout the Middle East. Eventually, its activities extended further to Europe, the United States, Africa and Asia. By not following the usual pattern of patronage and favours, Kamal Shair applied a fresh kind of ethic in an environment with a loosely-structured business ethic. In the process, he lived through and witnessed at first hand and at close quarters some of the most dramatic events of the modern Arab world. This is quite an extraordinary tale and a very original prism through which to read the turbulent post-World War II history of the Middle East. At the same time we see the growth, despite all the odds, of one of the world's great engineering and business enterprises in a narrative of epic and inspirational proportions.
Download or read book What Every American Should Know About the Middle East written by Melissa Rossi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The What Every American Should Know series returns with a timely guide to the region Americans need to understand the most (and know the least) The latest edition of Melissa Rossi's popular What Every American Should Know series gives a crash course on one of the most complex and important regions of the world. In this comprehensive and engaging reference book, Rossi offers a clear analysis of the issues playing out in the Middle East, delving into each country's history, politics, economy, and religions. Having traveled through the area over the past year, she exposes firsthand the U.S.'s geopolitical moves and how our presence has affected the region's economic and political development. Topics include: · Why Iran is viewed as a threat by most Middle East countries · What resource is more important than petroleum in regional power plays · What's really behind the fighting between Sunni and Shia · How Saudi Arabia inadvertently feeds the violence in Iraq and beyond · How monarchies like those in Jordan and Qatar are more open and progressive than the so-called republics With answers that will surprise many Americans, and covering a vast history and cultural complexity that will fascinate any student of the world, What Every American Should Know About the Middle East is a must-read introduction to the most critical region of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East written by Christiane Gruber and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-17 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays examining the role and power of images from a wide variety of media in today’s Middle Eastern societies. This timely book examines the power and role of the image in modern Middle Eastern societies. The essays explore the role and function of image making to highlight the ways in which the images “speak” and what visual languages mean for the construction of Islamic subjectivities, the distribution of power, and the formation of identity and belonging. Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East addresses aspects of the visual in the Islamic world, including the presentation of Islam on television; on the internet and other digital media; in banners, posters, murals, and graffiti; and in the satirical press, cartoons, and children’s books. “This volume takes a new approach to the subject . . . and will be an important contribution to our knowledge in this area. . . . It is comprehensive and well-structured with fascinating material and analysis.” —Peter Chelkowski, New York University “An innovative volume analyzing and instantiating the visual culture of a variety of Muslim societies [which] constitutes a substantially new object of study in the regional literature and one that creates productive links with history, anthropology, political science, art history, media studies, and urban studies, as well as area studies and Islamic studies.” —Walter Armbrust, University of Oxford
Download or read book Inside the Middle East written by Avi Melamed and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed Israeli intelligence analyst Avi Melamed has spent more than thirty years interpreting Middle East affairs. His long-awaited Inside the Middle East challenges widely-accepted perceptions and provides a gripping and uniquely enlightening guide to make sense of the events unfolding in the region—to answer how the Arab world got to this point, what is currently happening, what the ramifications will be, how they will affect Israel, and what actions must immediately be undertaken, including how Western leaders need to respond. Melamed considers all the major power players in the Middle East, explains the underlying issues, and creates a three-dimensional picture, an illustration that connects the dots and provides a fascinating roadmap. He elucidates developments such as the Arab Spring, the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood, the rise of ISIS, the epic Sunni-Shiite animosity, the essence of the war in Syria, the role of the Caliphate and Jihad, and the looming nuclear arms race. He also provides a rare opportunity to journey into the psyche of Arab society. Look through the lens of its leaders and its most ruthless terrorists. See what makes them tick and what they want. Discover how they can be overtaken. This unparalleled volume is a milestone in our understanding of the Middle East. It is the untold story of the struggles that will shape the region, and the world, for decades to come, and a groundbreaking guide that will shake you to the core, force you to reevalute your outlook, and give you tips to navigate the future. From author Avi Melamed: The conflicts in the Middle East grow more confusing and dangerous every day. In my encounters with thousands of people from across the world - from global leaders to high school students - I know there is deep and intense thirst for knowledge because today understanding the Middle East is not optional – it’s mandatory. My new book, Inside the Middle East: Making Sense of the Most Dangerous and Complicated Region on Earth is based on my decades of advisory, counterterrorism, education, and intelligence – positions - as well as my intimate connections throughout the Arab world. The book also provides the building blocks and database to understand the contemporary Middle East, offers a unique insight into the Arab world, and is “a GPS to help you navigate the dramatically changing Middle East.” In the book, I also offer an out of the box idea that could lead to a positive breakthrough in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.
Download or read book Master of the Game written by Martin Indyk and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A perceptive and provocative history of Henry Kissinger's diplomatic negotiations in the Middle East that illuminates the unique challenges and barriers Kissinger and his successors have faced in their attempts to broker peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. “A wealth of lessons for today, not only about the challenges in that region but also about the art of diplomacy . . . the drama, dazzling maneuvers, and grand strategic vision.”—Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker More than twenty years have elapsed since the United States last brokered a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. In that time, three presidents have tried and failed. Martin Indyk—a former United States ambassador to Israel and special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013—has experienced these political frustrations and disappointments firsthand. Now, in an attempt to understand the arc of American diplomatic influence in the Middle East, he returns to the origins of American-led peace efforts and to the man who created the Middle East peace process—Henry Kissinger. Based on newly available documents from American and Israeli archives, extensive interviews with Kissinger, and Indyk's own interactions with some of the main players, the author takes readers inside the negotiations. Here is a roster of larger-than-life characters—Anwar Sadat, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Hafez al-Assad, and Kissinger himself. Indyk's account is both that of a historian poring over the records of these events, as well as an inside player seeking to glean lessons for Middle East peacemaking. He makes clear that understanding Kissinger's design for Middle East peacemaking is key to comprehending how to—and how not to—make peace.
Download or read book The End of Modern History in the Middle East written by Bernard Lewis and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernard Lewis looks at the new era in the Middle East. With the departure of imperial powers, the region must now, on its own, resolve the political, economic, cultural, and societal problems that prevent it from accomplishing the next stage in the advance of civilization. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other, he explains, to provide the basis for an advance toward freedom in the true sense of that word.
Download or read book The Middle East Crisis Factory written by Ahmed Gatnash and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is the Middle East a crisis factory, and how can it be fixed? What does the future look like for its 500 million people? And what role should the West play? Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash tell the story of the modern Middle East as a series of broken promises. They chart the entrenchment of tyranny, terrorism and foreign intervention, showing how these systems of oppression simultaneously feed off and battle each other. Exploring demographic, economic and social trends, the authors paint a picture of the region’s prospects that is alarming yet hopeful. Finally, they present ambitious and thoughtful ideas that reject both aggressive military intervention and cynical deals with dictators. This book, written by two children of the region, is about the failures of history, and the reasons for hope. The Middle East Crisis Factory offers a bold vision for those seeking peace and democracy in the Middle East.
Download or read book Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East written by Martin Sieff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-01-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle East is almost never off the front pages, yet most Americans know little about the region. Why? The mainstream media and Ivy League academics, instead of helping, only make matters worse by casting everything in the usual politically correct mold: Arab terrorists are just desperate freedom fighters, and the region's one free democracy -- Israel -- is the oppressor, not least because of its alliance with America. And if Islamic extremism is a problem, the establishment tells us, it's only because it's rooted in that source of all evils: religion. A different strain of political correctness has seeped into some minds on the right -- most notably the Bush administration, which, so ready to buy into the egalitarian myths we are all taught, believed that Western-style democracy could flourish anywhere. Now, in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, veteran Middle East correspondent Martin Sieff puts the lie to all these myths and clichés, giving you everything you need to know about the region to understand its past, its present, and its possible future.
Download or read book The Unmaking of the Middle East written by Jeremy Salt and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics & government.
Download or read book Art of the Middle East written by Saeb Eigner and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Artistic expression in the Middle East is experiencing something of a renaissance. This book provides an overview of modern and contemporary art of the Middle East and Arab world from 1945 to the present, with an emphasis on artists active today"-OCLC
Download or read book The Middle East written by Ellen Lust and published by CQ Press. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 1057 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Fourteenth Edition of The Middle East, Ellen Lust brings important new coverage to this comprehensive, balanced, and superbly researched text. In clear prose, Lust and her outstanding contributors explain the many complex changes taking place across the region. New to this edition is a country profile chapter on Sudan by Fareed Hassan. All country chapters now address domestic and regional conflict more explicitly, and all tables, figures, boxes, and maps have been fully updated with the most recent data and information.
Download or read book Between the Middle East and the Americas written by Ella Habiba Shohat and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora traces the production and circulation of discourses about "the Middle East" across various cultural sites, against the historical backdrop of cross-Atlantic Mahjar flows. The book highlights the fraught and ambivalent situation of Arabs/Muslims in the Americas, where they are at once celebrated and demonized, integrated and marginalized, simultaneously invisible and spectacularly visible. The essays cover such themes as Arab hip-hop's transnational imaginary; gender/sexuality and the Muslim digital diaspora; patriotic drama and the media's War on Terror; the global negotiation of the Prophet Mohammad cartoons controversy; the Latin American paradoxes of Turcophobia/Turcophilia; the ambiguities of the bellydancing fad; French and American commodification of Rumi spirituality; the reception of Iranian memoirs as cultural domestication; and the politics of translation of Turkish novels into English. Taken together, the essays analyze the hegemonic discourses that position "the Middle East" as a consumable exoticized object, while also developing complex understandings of self-representation in literature, cinema/TV, music, performance, visual culture, and digital spaces. Charting the shifting significations of differing and overlapping forms of Orientalism, the volume addresses Middle Eastern diasporic practices from a transnational perspective that brings postcolonial cultural studies methods to bear on Arab American studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Latin American studies. Between the Middle East and the Americas disentangles the conventional separation of regions, moving beyond the binarist notion of "here" and "there" to imaginatively reveal the thorough interconnectedness of cultural geographies.
Download or read book Empires and Anarchies written by Michael Quentin Morton and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil lies at the heart of the modern history of the Middle East. For decades, the world’s largest oil reserves have enriched the region’s nations. But oil wealth has not brought with it universal prosperity. It has, though, transformed the Middle Eastern people and societies—enriching empires and engendering anarchies. Empires and Anarchies is an unconventional history of oil in the Middle East. In Michael Quentin Morton’s account the burnt-out remains of Saddam Hussein’s armaments and the human tragedy of the Arab Spring are as much of the story as the shimmering skylines of oil-rich nations. From the first explorers trudging through the desert to the excesses of the Peacock Throne and the high stakes of OPEC, Morton lays out the history of oil in compelling detail, arguing that oil simultaneously enriched and fractured the Middle East, eroding traditional ways of life, and eventually contributing to the rise of Islamic radicalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the promises and peril of the world’s oil boom.
Download or read book From Resilience to Revolution written by Sean L. Yom and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on comparative historical analyses of Iran, Jordan, and Kuwait, Sean L. Yom examines the foreign interventions, coalitional choices, and state outcomes that made the political regimes of the modern Middle East. A key text for foreign policy scholars, From Resilience to Revolution shows how outside interference can corrupt the most basic choices of governance: who to reward, who to punish, who to compensate, and who to manipulate. As colonial rule dissolved in the 1930s and 1950s, Middle Eastern autocrats constructed new political states to solidify their reigns, with varying results. Why did equally ambitious authoritarians meet such unequal fates? Yom ties the durability of Middle Eastern regimes to their geopolitical origins. At the dawn of the postcolonial era, many autocratic states had little support from their people and struggled to overcome widespread opposition. When foreign powers intervened to bolster these regimes, they unwittingly sabotaged the prospects for long-term stability by discouraging leaders from reaching out to their people and bargaining for mass support—early coalitional decisions that created repressive institutions and planted the seeds for future unrest. Only when they were secluded from larger geopolitical machinations did Middle Eastern regimes come to grips with their weaknesses and build broader coalitions.
Download or read book The Transnational Middle East written by Leïla Vignal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle East has been undergoing new crises since the powerful socio-political uprisings known as the Arab Spring took place in several countries in 2011. Some countries are experiencing a long-term collapse of their political and social structures out of internal conflicts and external interventions. The Transnational Middle East posits that, in the Middle East, the development of regional dynamics, of processes and circulations of all kinds, can be documented. In this regard, the approaches it develops — ‘bottom-up’ regionalisation, ‘globalisation from below’ — allow for a better understanding of the ways in which the Middle East is part of global transformations. The book analyses how, through their practices, Middle East societies elaborate a regional space which is not institutionalised. Based on fieldwork in the Middle East, the book provides venues for further theoretical elaboration on globalisation and contemporary societies, as well as on processes of regionalisation. It draws on the emergence of genuine regional spaces of culture, art, economic activity, human circulation — which supplement and do not contradict other infra-national, national, or global social processes. As in other areas of the world, these transformations are to a large extent the mode of the Middle East’s insertion into globalisation. In this respect, they go against standard narratives of the supposed ‘exceptionalism’ of the region. This book will be a great contribution to comparative politics, Middle Eastern studies, globalisation and international relations.
Download or read book Away from Chaos written by Gilles Kepel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle East is one of the world’s most volatile regions. In recent years, from the optimism and then crushing disappointment of the Arab uprisings through the rise and fall of the Islamic State, it has presented key international security challenges. With the resilient jihadi terror threat, large-scale migration due to warfare and climate change, and fierce competition for control over oil, it promises to continue to be a powder keg. What ignited this instability? Away from Chaos is a sweeping political history of four decades of Middle East conflict and its worldwide ramifications. Gilles Kepel, called “France’s most famous scholar of Islam” by the New York Times, offers a clear and persuasive narrative of the long-term causes of tension while seamlessly incorporating on-the-ground observations and personal experiences from the people who lived through them. From the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war of 1973 to the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Away from Chaos weaves together the various threads that run through Middle East politics and ties them to their implications on the global stage. With keen insight stemming from decades of experience in the region, Kepel puts these chaotic decades in perspective and illuminates their underlying dynamics. He also considers the prospects of emerging from this long-lasting turmoil and for the people of the Middle East and the world to achieve a more stable future.
Download or read book A History of the Middle East written by Peter Mansfield and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the Middle East, now updated in its fifth edition 'The best overall survey of the politics, regional rivalries and economics of the contemporary Arab world' Washington Post Over the centuries the Middle East has confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike. This now-classic book follows the historic struggles of the region over the last two hundred years, from Napoleon's assault on Egypt, through the slow decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the painful emergence of modern nations. It is now fully updated with extensive new material examining recent developments including the aftermaths of the 'Arab Spring', the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict and the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars. 'An excellent political overview' Guardian
