Must Reads on the Middle East

For those of you wanting an insight into the many potions cooking the broth in the Middle East there are hundreds of books flooding shelves in bookshops around the world. To ward off confusion and to save time I have selected four must reads for readers to be somewhat knowledgeable about the region. I have selected them preponderantly for their analysis and readability. It’s not to suggest that they are anywhere near enough but the subject itself is imbued with many tones of history and it would be good to start off with authors who are able to condense history and weave it with contemporary events.

A good way to start off would be with Bernard Lewis’s What Went
Wrong: Western Impact and Middle East Response as a kind of primer into the region. Lewis writes with great literary lure about the clash between Christian Europe and the Turkish Caliphate which eventually lead to the gradual decline of the great Islamic empire, specially after the events that lead to the signing of the Treaty of Carlowitz in January, 1699.He provides great insight into the cultural turmoil in the region as new, western ideas seeped into the cultural realm.

Next would be Jihad vs McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin R. Barber—the kind of book that some of us would wish we had the depth to write. While, for Barber, McWorld is "a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce", Jihad is then "a rabid response to colonialism and imperialism and their economic children, capitalism and modernity". Barber calls for a globalization of civic and democratic institutions as a way out and argues, lucidly, that the modern response to terror cannot be exclusively military or tactical, but "must entail a commitment to democracy and justice even when they are in tension with the commitment to culture expansionism and global markets".

For an understanding of Al-Qaeda there is nothing in the market that beats journalist Jason Burke’s Al-Qaeda, Casting a Shadow of Terror.
Burke’s account obviously benefits from a lot of frontline research and he gives us insights about the shadowy organization that are original---specially his view of them being more a commissioning house on terror, a sort of Venture Capitalist fund stewarding many bombing projects with the help of ’talent’ that comes calling with novel ideas of mayhem.

To get a pulse on the economic mismanagement in the region there’s nothing better than Mullahs, Merchants and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World by Stephen Glain. In a reasoned account, Glain talks of how most of the Arab states have wittingly or unwittingly opted out of the global economy creating chilling statistics. Between 1990 and 1999, for instance, real per-capita income in the world’s 22 Arab countries averaged less than 1 per cent growth, about a quarter the rate of its population growth during the same period! He examines contemporary economics of six Arab countries, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine (a colony), Iraq and Egypt and tells us how the economics are working in favour of the Jihadis.