PART ONE
That the best books on the Middle East are about the past says much about the state of the region. For a window into an Ottoman world, Philip Mansel’s two charming works Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924 and Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean remain unsurpassed in portraying the empire’s haute culture, and help explain why a century on such a benighted region continues to inspire such love and nostalgia. Salim Tamari’s Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman Past and Michelle Campos’s Ottoman Brothers both offer turn-of-the-twentieth-century descriptions of how Palestine was so very different from the collection of xenophobic, gated communities it is today. Louis de Bernières’s Birds Without Wings, a historical novel set in a southwestern Anatolian village, vividly depicts how Ottoman pluralism unraveled and its people lost their innocence.
PART TWO
Two Israelis, one an urban planner and the other an architect, have written remarkable accounts of how Israel relandscaped Palestine. Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 examines the changes Israel has made to the rural environment. Sharon Rotbard’s White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa similarly exposes what lies beneath Israel’s metropolis. Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers provides a sympathetic but very insightful account of the role Jewish terrorists played in achieving statehood. The Dove Flyer, a semi-autobiographical novel by Eli Amir and a powerful Israeli film, portrays the painful transition from an Iraqi homeland to an Israeli one.
PART THREE
A splurge of recent publications depict the rise of Islamic State. Under the Black Flag: At the Frontier of the New Jihad, by Sami Moubayed, a Beirut-based journalist, has a wealth of background despite sloppy editing. The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, by Charles Lister, maps the plethora of Sunni groups that have converged and competed to produce the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East, Gerard Russell, a former British diplomat, moves amongst the ancient sects that had survived the ravages of time until the rise of the Islamic State. He produced it just in time.
PART FOUR
Fanar Haddad’s Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity is a colorful account of Iraq’s descent into sectarian strife, brought to life by contemporary poetry. My A New Muslim Order: The Shia and the Middle East Sectarian Crisis is a record of the multiple new theologies that arose after America’s 2003 invasion and continue to vie for dominance over Iraq’s long-suppressed Shia. Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism, by Toby Dodge, shows how Saddam-like Iraq’s post-invasion crop of Shia rulers became.
PARTS FIVE AND SIX
Charles Allen’s God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad is a highly readable, finely researched historical account of the roots Saudi Arabia shares with al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The Islamic Utopia: The Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia, by Andrew Hammond, a former Reuters correspondent in Riyadh, offers a more contemporary account of how Salafis rule in Saudi Arabia, and might rule much in Syria and Iraq should IS survive. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh have edited a highly compelling collection of essays charting the demise of the region’s political order called Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East. It is full of larger theories but also choice tidbits, including the revelation that France’s negotiator François Georges-Picot signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement in ink, while the Briton Sir Mark Sykes used a pencil, reflecting each side’s attitude towards the pact. For those who despair that diversity, humor, and art might survive the turmoil, this book is a delightful antidote.