Memoir Middle East

The Jihadi Next Door provides unprecedented information that can be used to actually combat terrorism. By laying bare the tactics used by ISIS to deceive and exploit new recruits and exposing the veneer these extremists operate under, Dr. Mehlman-Orozco hopes to empower listeners with the knowledge needed to prevent future recruitment and thereby preventing acts of terrorism.

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.

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.

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...

Tiny Dancer is the amazing true story of Zubaida Hasan, a nine-year-old girl from the remote deserts of Afghanistan who, in the summer of 2001, accidentally fell into a kerosene fire while heating water for a bath. Though she was horribly mutilated, her father refused to give up and exhaustively sought help to save his child.

Suleiman was the most famous sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. His reign meant an increase of interest in art, expanded regions under Muslim law, and hundreds of thousands of men employed in the army, ready to fight wars against surrounding nations. Political and law reforms took place, and in the matter of a short time span, much of the culture and society in the region had been changed.

In Lives Between the Lines, Michael Vatikiotis traces the journey of his Greek and Italian forebears from Tuscany, Crete, Hydra and Rhodes, as they made their way to Egypt and the coast of Palestine in search of opportunity. In the process, he reveals a period where the Middle East was a place of ethnic and cultural harmony—where Arabs and Jews rubbed shoulders in bazaars and teashops, intermarried and shared family history.

In November 1922, a new door to the ancient past was opened. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun would be the most astonishing of the young century. Howard Carter was the lead archaeologist, but the years of excavations were funded and engineered by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, George Herbert, whose country house Highclere Castle is today known as the set of Downton Abbey. In dramatic detail, calling on Highclere Castle’s archives to throw new light on the lustrous settings and striking characters, this book reveals the true story behind the thrilling discoveries made in Egypt.

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

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.

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.

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.

Dodging secret police on the daily, and haggling prices for dried fruit and vintage leathers in heroin-laced bazaars, My Kazakhy is filled with all the gems you wouldn't expect to find from a queer Latino boy serving in the Peace Corps in a third world, Muslim country.

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".

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.

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.

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.

The symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer draining the swamps and making the deserts bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So what ever happened to the pioneers’ dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine? Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws listeners into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era. Acclaimed author David Leach revisits his raucous memories of life as a kibbutz volunteer and returns to meet a new generation of Jewish and Arab citizens struggling to forge a better future together.

It doesn’t seem like Enver Pasha was a good man. His war crimes caused the deaths of millions of innocent citizens. Sure, during a war and a collapsing empire, you try to do what you can to stop losing, but I doubt anyone in their right mind can justify his actions, which included the slaughter of minorities in the Ottoman Empire during World War One, and even the Armenian Genocide. And to this day, the Turkish government is still somewhat reluctant to acknowledge the severity of that historical atrocity.