New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

In his new book Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown University Press, 2012), Dr. Allen Fromherz, a professor at Georgia State University, analyzes the cultural and political forces that have shaped Qatar’s history. Going beyond the common focus on Qatar’s oil economy, Dr. Fromherz discusses Qatar’s formation as an independent state, the effect of its large percentage of expatriate workers, the interaction of the various tribes that govern Qatar, and how the Al-Thani tribe emerged as the top amongst equals. Dr. Fromherz argues that there is far more to the past, present, and future of Qatar than its massive oil wealth. Although it is a small nation with a small native population, Qatar has frequently played an influential role in international affairs. Dr. Fromherz details the many ways in which Qatar has exercised influence around the Middle East in the past, and how they continue to do so now. His book fills a large void in the scholarly literature on Qatar, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the forces that have shaped the history of the Middle East, and how they will influence its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

A broad portrait of early Islamic mysticism is fairly well-know. However, there are only a few key figures that have been explored in great detail and their activities shape how we understand this early history of Sufism. Laury Silvers, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, makes a significant contribution to the early development of Sufism by focusing on an influential but lesser-known figure, Abu Bakr al-Wasiti (d. ca. 320 AH/932 CE), the “soaring minaret.” In her new book, A Soaring Minaret: Abu Bakr al-Wasiti and the Rise of Baghdadi Sufism (SUNY Press, 2010), she situates Wasiti and his contributions within the broader historical developments in the formative period of Sufism. By doing so she deepens our knowledge of the development and spread of Baghdadi Ahl al-Hadith culture East to Khurasan, the consolidation of Baghdadi Sufism and the internalization of Khurasani traditions during the formative period. Silvers’ approach is refreshing and useful as she details the historical context as well as the intellectual history of early mystics. Wasiti was one of the first students of the influential teachers Junayd and Nuri, the first to travel east and promote the Baghdadi Sufi tradition in Khurasan, and one of the first mystics to compose a Quran commentary. We are also presented with a detailed analysis of his theological perspective on the divine reality. Silvers thoroughly outlines Wasiti’s understanding of God’s Essence, His Attributes, and His Acts in a readable and accessible manner. Overall, Silvers offers us a comprehensive and comprehensible presentation of the intellectual development of Islamic mysticism and metaphysics within the context of the historical development and spread of Sufism. This new book is highly enjoyable and should be useful for the lay reader and academic, the student and the teacher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Often when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective. In Carool Kersten‘s Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam (Columbia University Press, 2011), we learn about a few modern Muslim thinkers who engage their Islamic intellectual heritage with the philosophical apparatus of contemporary Western thought. Kersten, a professor of Religious and Islamic Studies at King’s College London, has tracked Muslim thinkers for years (follow his blog Critical Muslims), and book reflects a deep understanding of the wider dialogues occurring in contemporary Islamic thought. His analysis also traverses geographical limitations of much of the scholarship on contemporary Islam by discussing figures from both the eastern and western regions of Islam. We are introduced to the thought of Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesia), Hasan Hanafi (Egypt), and Mohammad Arkoun (Algeria). Through these thinkers Kersten explores how phenomenology, hermeneutics, secularization, and postcolonial vocabulary can assist us in approaching religion generally. He frames his work through Russell McCutcheon’s model of theological, phenomenological, and critical-anthropological strategies for engaging religion in order to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in the study of Islam. Altogether, we have the first book length analysis of these important modern Muslim thinkers and their critique of both western scholarship and Muslim intellectualism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

An earlier author described the British invasion of Mesopotamia in 1914 as “The Neglected War.” It no longer deserves that title thanks to the brilliant treatment of the subject by Professor Charles Townshend (University of Keele). His Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia (Harvard University Press, 2011) describes in impressive detail both the political background and the military operations that made modern-day Iraq quite literally hell for the British soldiers engaged there from 1914 to 1918. A parsimonious British administration waged the campaign, seen at the time quite understandably as something of a peripheral concern, on a shoestring, and the absence of the most basic materials, especially shipping and medical supplies, was paid for by the largely Indian soldiery in blood. Using sources ranging from the highest level strategic plans and parliamentary inquiries, to the quasi-anthropological studies of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, to the memoirs and letters of the common soldier, Townshend demonstrates convincingly that British frugality combined with an ideology of rational administration created “mission creep” that drew the British further and further into a theater of war in which they were ill-equipped to fight and led them to make arrangements for the postwar Middle East that reverberate to this day. Townshend is laudably cautious in extrapolating from the experience of 1914-1918 to the present day, but an attentive reader will be in no doubt about the ways in which today’s Iraq is a product of its past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In his new book, A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, describes his time as a Vulcan, one of the elite group of eight foreign policy experts who advised President Bush's presidential campaign, most of whom later served in the Bush administration. Zakheim brings an insider's perspective to the Department of Defense's management of the War on Terror, and is not afraid to call out people who were not up to the job. In our interview, we talked about why it's so hard to get rid of Pentagon weapon systems, what "snowflakes" are, and why so many former Bush Pentagon officials have written books. It's all there, and more, in Zakheim's eye-opening new book.Please become a fan of "New Books in Public Policy" on Facebook, if you haven't already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In their new book, This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), the husband and wife team of Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin recount their experiences working as reporters in Jerusalem during the eventful last decade. Myre, the editor of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and his wife Griffin, Pentagon Correspondent at Fox News, tell gripping stories from individuals involved in the conflict, as well as from their own struggles in raising a young family in the midst of bus bombings and terror attacks. In our interview, we talk about Ariel Sharon’s affinity for Pringles, openly bringing automatic weapons into banks, and kidnappers who let their victims hold their weapons. Read all about it, and more, in Myre and Griffin’s engaging new book. Please become a fan of New Books in Public Policy on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In his new book The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East (Hoover Institution Press, 2011), Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, looks at the push for democracy in the Middle East and suggests that Americans need to back the democratic impulse, even if it is messy. Gerecht, who is also a former Middle East specialist in the Clandestine Service at the Central Intelligence Agency, recognizes that Americans may not like what Middle Eastern democracy looks like, certainly at first, but – echoing Churchill –he says that it is much better that the alternatives. In our interview, we talked about Iran, the Arabs, Turkey, and how America should deal with it all. Read all about it, and more, in Gerecht’s timely new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gladly fight and die for your X-ian brothers and sisters. If, however, you were born and live in the Republic of X and you are not–by self-proclaimed identity–X-ian, then you are, well, a problem. But it wasn’t always so. Prior to the nineteenth century, people generally did not live in a world of nations. They lived in a world of empires. Now in hindsight, we say that these empires were “multinational,” that is, they were made up of nations. But the elites who ran the empires didn’t think so. They saw them as made up of territories where the sovereign’s writ ran, not “nations” that the sovereign ruled (though there was some of that as well). As Michael A. Reynolds points out in his fine book Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge UP, 2011), European imperial elites of the nineteenth century faced a crisis when nations–and the political doctrine that said they should be self-governing, “nationalism”–began to grow in strength. The idea of nations and the program of nationalism were born in Western and Central Europe, where they caused some but not too much difficulty, at least at first (a story we will have to leave aside). When, however, the nation-states of Western and Central Europe began to threaten, territorially speaking, the empires of Eastern Europe, and to export the doctrine of nationalism to those regions, the real trouble began. For Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman elites understood that war and nationalism in the imperial context would likely mean the end of empire. One could not fight external and internal enemies at the same time. They were not wrong in this. As Reynolds shows, they did the best they could, creating alliances with Western and Central European powers to buy time, fostering subversive nationalisms within the borders of their opponents, and, eventually, embracing nationalism and embarking on massive campaigns of ethnic cleansing and killing (most infamously in the case of the Armenians). In one case, they succeeded after a fashion in holding the empire together, at least for a time (Russia); in two others they failed (Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). But they were all victims of war and nationalism, forces they helped create and could not control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t even that, because the people who lived in what we now call “Europe” didn’t think of themselves as “Europeans” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but no matter…). There were, however, other Ages of Exploration. Giancarlo Casale‘s wonderful book is about one of them, one you haven’t heard of. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford UP, 2010) and is about–you guessed it–the Ottoman Age of Exploration. Like their “European” counterparts, the Ottoman explorers were pursuing two interests: spices and salvation. The former were found (largely) in Southern Asia and the latter was of course in Mecca. To ensure access to both, the Ottomans built–nearly from scratch–an large, ocean-going navy and set out to dominate the Indian Ocean. And they almost did it, though they faced fierce competition from the Portuguese, Safavids, and Mughals. Read all about it in Casale’s terrific book. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

If you ask most Americans when the U.S. became heavily involved in the Persian Gulf, they might cite the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1981 or, more probably, the First Gulf War of 1990. Of course the roots of American entanglement in the region run much deeper, as W. Taylor Fain shows in his excellent new book American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). Beginning in the 18th century, the British began to do in the Gulf what the British did in those days: build their empire. British dominance in the region lasted as long as Britain did as a Great Power, that is, until about 1945. At that point, a power vacuum of sorts developed. What is perhaps most interesting about Fain’s book is that the U.S.–which had had strong commercial ties to several Gulf states for decades–was not terribly eager to get politically involved. Britain had significant military assets in the region; the U.S. did not. Britain needed the oil; the U.S. at that time did not. Britain wanted to blunt the forces of Arab nationalism; the U.S. had a rather more favorable attitude toward “self-determination.” The Brits did their best to play up the “special relationship,” but it just wasn’t “special” enough to get the U.S. involved in what seemed to be a plainly imperial endeavor. Americans just aren’t very good at imperialism–they have no stomach for it. In the end, it wasn’t the British who convinced the U.S. to take a strong hand in Gulf affairs, but the Soviets, or rather the fear of the Soviets. The strange cocktail of pan-Arab nationalism and international socialism convinced American policymakers that vital U.S. interests were being threatened in some very out-of-the-way places. Thus the U.S. developed new “special relationships” in the region, notably with Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran–an odd group if ever there were one! So “special” were these ties that they eventually drew the U.S. into war and, recently, occupation. The British empire, so it is said, was built in a “fit of absent mindedness.” The American empire in the Gulf was built against better judgment. Please become a fan of “New Books in Middle Eastern Studies” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies