A biography of the founder of modern Turkey that chronicles the ideas that shaped himWhen Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the first president of Turkey in 1923, he set about transforming his country into a secular republic where nationalism sanctified by...

How religion and race―not nationalism―shaped early encounters between Zionists and Arabs in PalestineAs the Israeli-Palestinian conflict persists, aspiring peacemakers continue to search for the precise territorial dividing line that will satisfy both...

Since the first wave of uprisings in 2011, the euphoria of the "Arab Spring" has given way to the gloom of backlash and a descent into mayhem and war. The revolution has been overwhelmed by clashes between rival counter-revolutionary forces: resilient...

One of Israel’s most controversial writers demystifies the “peace camp” liberalsYitzhak Laor is one of Israel’s most prominent dissidents and poets, a latter-day Spinoza who helps keep alive the critical tradition within Jewish culture. In this work he...

"A remarkably readable, judicious and well-researched account" (Financial Times) of World War I in the Middle EastBy 1914 the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and they pulled the Middle East along with them into one of the most...

“Historically incisive, geographically broad-reaching, and brimming with illuminating anecdotes.” ―Max Rodenbeck, New York Review of Books One of America’s leading commentators on current events in the Middle East, Iranian-born scholar Vali Nasr...

In this groundbreaking book, Tarik Sabry is seeking out the terrain for best understanding the experience of being modern in transitional societies. He adopts a dynamic, ethnographically based approach to the meanings of modernness in the Arab context...

Now in its eighth edition, a essential resource on the more than century-old conflict in the Middle EastIn print for nearly half a century, and now in its eighth edition, The Israel-Arab Reader is an authoritative guide to over a century of conflict in...

In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy guides us through recent Iranian history from shortly before the 1979 Islamic revolution through the summer of 2009, when Iranians poured into the streets of Tehran by the hundreds of thousands, demanding free,...

A thrillingly panoramic and incredibly timely account of the rise of Islam, from the acclaimed author of Rubicon and Persian Fire.The evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama,...

“More than ever in the era of 24-hour sound-bite news, events demand the long view if they are to be explicable. With his deep experience of the Levant, that is exactly what Charlie Glass offers the student of the Middle East in this timely, elegant and...

“One of the best informed on-the-ground journalists. He was almost always correct on Iraq.” —Sidney Blumenthal in an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton“Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today.” —Seymour Hersh“Has...

In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading...

Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354-1804 provides an over-all picture of the least studied and most obscured part of Balkan history, the Ottoman period. The book begins with the early history of the Ottomans and with their establishment in...

The contemporary world is increasingly defined by dizzying flows of people and ideas. But while Western travel is associated with a pioneering spirit of discovery, the dominant image of Muslim mobility is the jihadi who travels not to learn but to...

In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and...

When Mohammad Bouazizi sets himself on fire on December 17, 2010, he started a series of extraordinary events that spread across the Middle East with stunning rapidity. In less than a month, President Ben Ali fled Tunisia, ending a twenty-three year...

Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky,...

The intertwined histories of the construction of the gleaming white Bauhaus-inspired city of Tel Aviv and the dismantling of the Arab city of Jaffa.The history of Tel Aviv, presented for a moment as an architectural history, can be seen as a part of a...

The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment―its rise, fall, and enduring legacyIn this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through...