Middle East category: 7830 books

“This book’s relating of the biblical accounts to the sites of Nazareth that we know today is a welcome contribution.” ~ Ray Pritz Ph.D, former Director, Biblical Society in Israel Although the centre of modern Nazareth has no archaeological evidence of a city in the time of Jesus, the...

The Yom Kippur War was a watershed moment in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the modern Middle East more broadly. It marked the beginning of a US-led peace process between Israel and her Arab neighbours; it introduced oil diplomacy as a new means of leverage in international politics;...

In this at times startlingly candid memoir, Chaim Herzog reviews an extraordinary life. Born in Belfast in 1918 to a Latvian mother and a Polish father who was chief rabbi of Ireland, Chaim Herzog moved with his family to Palestine in 1935 and at 16 joined the Haganah, the underground resistance led...

For the Muslim faithful, the familiar sound of the Qur anic recitation is the predominant and most immediate means of contact with the Word of God. Heard day and night, on the street, in taxis, in shops, in mosques, and in homes, the sound of recitation is far more than the pervasive background music...

Far from California, in a rural neighborhood on the outskirts of Istanbul, a young woman faced a life where marriages are still arranged and women must keep their bodies covered. It's a culture where women are subservient to men and a career is out of the question. When the outside world began to...

Because of recent changes in the explicitly declared goals of Arabs in the Palestinian conflict, this book is of singular importance, and no scholar or expert on Middle East affairs can afford to ignore it. This work, by a scholar described as "the doyen of Israeli Arabists," is the...

Poet and essayist Fawaz Turki begins his search for answers in the hallways of the 1983 Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. He then recalls his family's flight into Lebanon when he was eight, childhood in a refugee camp and the streets of Beirut, and years spent in Australia, France, and...

This mirror for princes sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers,...

Replete with a cast of giants in Islamic thought and philosophy, Ahmad S. Dallal's pathbreaking intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Muslim world challenges stale views of this period as one of decline, stagnation, and the engendering of a widespread fundamentalism. Far from being moribund,...

October Earthquake presents a chronological account of the days surrounding the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) War, along with the significant military and political events of each day of the conflict. Zeev Schiff's comments on Israel's exaggerated self-confidence, the hopelessness of Israeli leadership,...

Patronage, power, and competition in the Sultan’s court The Sword of Ambition opens a new window onto interreligious rivalry among elites in medieval Egypt. Written by the unemployed bureaucrat 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi, it contains a wealth of little-known historical anecdotes, unusual...

This book examines the motivation behind the regime’s political and economic strategy by considering three areas: terrorism including in Europe and the United States, incitement of regional conflicts, and the ballistic missile threat. Failing to quell growing popular protests against their...

Covering Mesopotamia from around 3000 BCE to the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE, Mesopotamia and the Rise of Civilization: History, Documents, and Key Questions combines narrative history material and reference entries that enable students to learn about the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia and its...

Hegel's philosophy has been of fundamental importance for the development of contemporary thought and for the very representation of Western modernity. This book investigates Hegel’s influence in the Arab world, generally considered "other" and far from the West, focusing specifically...