Biography Middle East

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the larger-than-life Egyptian president who ruled for eighteen years from the coup d'etat he led in 1952, is best known for wresting the Suez Canal from the British and French empires and befriending such iconic revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Yet there is a darker side to Nasser's regime. He was a brutal authoritarian, whose legacy lies at the heart of the violent and repressive order that still prevails throughout the Arab world today. In We Are Your Soldiers, Alex Rowell focuses on seven countries to reassess Nasser's impact in the Arab sphere.

And the Rest Is History takes listeners on a traveling circus from Paris to Beirut, Baghdad, and beyond, introducing them to spies and terrorists, arms dealers and crooks, and along the way reveals a few surprises about the secret underbelly of recent history you won’t find in WikiLeaks. This book pinpoints precisely when the era of “fake news” actually began in America, and will change the way you think about journalism and journalists.

From 2018 to 2021, writer and researcher Theodore Ell accompanied his wife on her diplomatic posting to Lebanon and unexpectedly found himself a witness to a country on the brink of collapse. In 2019, facing economic meltdown, the people of Lebanon rose up, united in a revolution of hope. With the country on the precipice of war, COVID-19 then swept in and the eerie quiet of lockdowns descended—a silence tragically shattered in August 2020, when Ell narrowly survived the largest ever non-nuclear peacetime explosion, which destroyed half of Beirut.

In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became a key figure in their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one of the warlords, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home.

Nasser Abu Srour grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. As a child, he played in its shadow and explored the little world within the camp. As he grew older, he began questioning the boundaries that limited his existence. Later, sentenced to life in prison, with no hope of parole, he found himself surrounded by a physical wall. This is the story of how, over thirty years in captivity, he crafted a new definition of freedom. Turning to writings by philosophers as varied as Derrida, Kirkegaard and Freud, he begins to let go of freedom...

This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a courageous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the first modern genocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness and rescue victims, sometimes sacrificing their lives. Diplomats, humanitarians, missionaries, lawyers and other visitors to the Empire stood up, including Tolstoy's daughter, Alexandra; Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who first established genocide as an international crime; and the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen.

Dubai wunderkind Michelle Rasul was only a toddler when she first got behind the turntables. By the time she entered the 2021 DMC Global DJing Championship, she was on her way to becoming an international celebrity. Her inspiring autobiography is a testament to passion, talent, family, love, and perseverance—and above all, a celebration of Girl Power with some scratching and a beat.

Atatürk'ü en doğru ve en yalın biçimde herkese anlatabilecek tek kitap: Dersimiz: Atatürk. Tarih, savaşlarda düşmana galip gelen büyük komutanlarla dolu. Tarihte milletlerini daha ileriye götürmek için çalışan birçok önemli önder var. Ama hiçbiri Atatürk gibi anılmıyor, özlenmiyor. Tarih sayfalarında uyuyorlar. Çünkü aralarında Atatürk gibi hem vatanını düşmanlardan temizleyip yeni bir devlet kuran, hem milletini sömürüden, hurafelerden, ortaçağlılıktan kurtarıp çağdaş uygarlığa kavuşturan biri yok.

The events of the Arab Spring have come to be overshadowed by the civil war in the Arabic-speaking nation of Syria, which has been ruled throughout the 21st century by Bashar al-Assad. Though he had not planned on ruling Syria, several events conspired to make Bashar the successor of his father, Hafez. Though the West frequently looked for signs that Bashar might be a reformer, due in part to his formerly popular Western wife, Assad remained part of a critical alliance with Iran and the sub-state groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

A journalist returns to her family home in Iran, witnessing enormous political, social, and personal change.

The Spymaster of Baghdad is the gripping story of the top-secret Iraqi intelligence unit that infiltrated the Islamic State. More so than that of any foreign power, the information they gathered turned the tide against the insurgency, paving the way to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.

Growing up as a girl in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai had to fight every step of the way to get an education. After she was attacked for doing so, Malala took her fight to the world stage, pushing for the right to an education for every girl, everywhere. Her activism earned her a Nobel Peace Prize and inspired girls and women everywhere to stand up for their own rights too.

From 1951 to 1967 Egypt pursued a secret program to build military rockets that could have conceivably posed a threat to neighboring Israel. Because such an ambitious project required Western expertise, the Egyptian leader President Nasser hired West German scientists, many of them veterans of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde and elsewhere. These covert plans soon came to the attention of Israel’s legendary secret service, Mossad, and caused deep alarm in Tel Aviv.

Was macht man, wenn man auf einer Recherchereise im iranischen Gebirge nicht tanken kann, weil das Benzin aufgrund westlicher Sanktionen knapp ist? Oder wenn man eine vermeintlich zu kurze Hose trägt und die Strafe darauf lautet, in ein Fass mit schwarzer Farbe steigen zu müssen? Und warum reiste Amiri trotz aller Warnungen immer wieder in den Iran?

Gamal Abdel Nasser has been called many things. The father of modern-day Egypt. The founder of Arab nationalism. The leader of the Egyptian Revolution. The second president of the Egyptian Republic. The creator of his own brand of political and social governance - Nasserism. Anthony Eden, the former British prime minister, called him the "Mussolini of the Nile".

August 21, 2013: A chemical weapons attack on the suburbs of Damascus reminds the world of the existence of the Syrian war. Hundreds of journalists from every corner of the world rush to the frontier only to leave disappointed when Obama decides not to bomb. They leave behind 200,000 estimated victims, and more than half of a population of 22 million people dispersed or refugeed in nearby countries: the worst humanitarian crisis since WWII according to the UN.

Lucky in Cyprus is a coming-of-age story set in the Middle East during the height of the Cold War. An American teenager - son of a CIA operative - is inspired by grand events and a Greek Cypriot teacher to learn about survival and his art. He witnesses earthquakes and riots and terrorist attacks, but in the end it is his teacher's gentle lessons that keep him whole.

Here's a remarkable, true story of love and war, of journalist Micah Garenheld hostage in Iraq, and the determined young woman, Marie-Helene Carleton, who fought and won his release.

Ron Leshem ist Autor, Journalist und ehemaliger israelischer Geheimdienstoffizier, Verwandte von ihm wurden ermordet oder entführt. Hier schildert er ein zutiefst gespaltenes Land, den Tag des Terrors und seine unabsehbaren Folgen. Am 7. Oktober 2023 überzog die Hamas Israel mit Terror, seither hält die Welt den Atem an – und überschlagen sich die Ereignisse. Ron Leshem zeichnet in seinem bewegenden Text jenen Tag und die Entwicklungen seither nach – und führt ein zutiefst gespaltenes Land vor Augen. Gerade der liberale, auf Verständigung bedachte Teil der Gesellschaft wurde getroffen.

Shahan Mufti’s family history, which he can trace back 1,400 years to the inner circle of the prophet Muhammad, offers an enlightened perspective on the mystifying history of Pakistan. Mufti uses the stories of his ancestors, many of whom served as judges and jurists in Muslim sharia courts of South Asia for many centuries, to reveal the deepest roots - real and imagined - of Islamic civilization in Pakistan.