Reddit reviews The Arabs: A History
We found 10 Reddit comments about The Arabs: A History. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Reddit reviews The Arabs: A HistoryWe found 10 Reddit comments about The Arabs: A History. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
No, these regions would not be described as peaceful decades ago. Places that have large amounts of terrorism/ fighting may have not had those elements a few decades ago, but they were ticking time bombs. Regions just don't erupt into war and destruction over night, there are deeply rooted historical reasons for the current state of affairs in the Middle East and most are rooted in the European colonialism of the region during the 1800s and 1900s.
i would recommend this book if you want to learn more about the history of the arab people and the middle east in general.
Unfortunately, the most efficient way to become knowledgable about the Middle East is to read. A lot. The Middle East is a far more complex place than most people imagine and understanding the region requires a great deal of knowledge. I have been studying the Middle East for nearly a decade and I still feel like there is so much that I do not know. I would start by reading reputable news sources every day. Places like The Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, Financial Times, are the Los Angeles Times are good English language news sources that you should look at. Additionally, I have written up a suggested reading list for learning about the Middle East, though it is a bit more security-related since that's my area of expertise. I hope it helps. And feel free to ask any questions if you have them.
Books - General History of the Middle East
Books - Middle East Military History
Books - Middle East Terrorism and Substate Violence
Books - U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East
Think Tanks
Below is a list of several different think tanks, which frequently publish everything from extension research and analysis to quick and succinct blog posts about the issues in the Middle East. Some of these think tanks specifically focus on the Middle East, while for others it is only one area of their research.
Journals, Blogs, Podcasts, and other Publications
Rather than giving you foreign policy/political-science books; the two books I highly recommend for interested people, to getting a proper understanding of today's Middle East, would be these two books:
"The Arabs: A History" Eugene Rogan
A History of the Modern Middle East William L Cleveland, Martin Bunton
If you want to understand the situation today, its important to take a historical approach to it, rather than a political-science one, written by pundits and politicians, who carry a lot of the interests of their respective backers.
They are standard University texts, very well written, and updated as well. To understand the "present", one must first understand the "past". And so if you want a truly unbiased understanding of the Middle East in 2015, its important to understand how events got to there.
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The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan targets this time period and should be on your reading list. I'm just getting started on it, and it's already quite detailed and insightful.
I would highly recommend:
or
Hourani's is a bit more thorough and is available in audiobook format, whereas Rogan's is an easier read and gives more attention to the modern day Middle East. Both offer insight into the cultural, colonial, and political histories of the peoples living within the Middle East, which is really the only way to understand how and why the states operate the way they do today.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Arabs-History-Eugene-Rogan/dp/0465025048
We read that guy in my intro to the middle East course. Great book, bad class. Starts in the 1600s and covers major events until it was published around the time of the Arab spring. It's focused on the Arabs as a people, rather than just the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Great Britian, 1922.
When the Ottoman Empire fell after the First World War, the French, British, and the Russians (to a lesser extent) divided up the territory that was formerly owned by the ottomans into administrative districts between them. When doing so all considerations of ethnic, linguistic, and historical division were ignored, except to intentionally separate common people to weaken their resistance. The Sykes-Picot Agreement is the foundation of all subsequent conflict in the region, from ISIS, al-Qaeda, Israeli-Palistein conflict, you name it. Another take on Sykes-Picot
There is an problem reoccurring throughout history that if you take over a people, kill there leaders and trash their cultural institutions and way of life, it's no simple matter to undo that. Anyways, countries began to get their independence back but then were forced to either aline with the US or the USSR to survive the Cold War.
The modern Iran is the fault of the US and Britian. Iran was one of the most modern and liberal places in the world during the 50's, had a brilliant film industry, was really a modern wonder. But when Iran decided to nationalize their oil industry so the profits could go to bettering the country rather than into the pockets of the Brits that owned the contracts the CIA and MI6 staged a coup of the Iranian government. They installed a puppet, he was wildly unpopular and the resulting unrest and instability gave rise to the modem Islamic nationalism currently in charge of Iran. It's really a shame, Iran could have been absolutely on par with France or Germany right now, had this not happened to them.
If there is one thing I know about politics, it's that the more unstable a place is the more extreme politics will come out of it. This is probably just intuitively obvious, but when a place starts to lose its stability people will abandon the 'standard' set of political solutions and start reaching for more and more politically extreme ones. The particular character of the ideology developed just takes the flavour of whatever already exists there and really takes it off the chart. See the rise of the Nazis following a crippling war and economic downturn, the communists came to power in Russia after years of political turmoil and the massive causalities of the war as well. Look at Greece in the last few years, huge economic strife and now their parliaments has both Neo-Nazis and Communists.
So take a region like the Middle East, and subject it to 100 years of political turmoil, consistently have western powers come in and knock governments down ever once in a while, finally demolish a long standing strong man in the region and something like ISIS springs up to fill the power vacuum. The imminent cause of ISIS was removing Saddam followed by failing to create a political situation that respected the actually ethnic topography of the country, but the root is early 20thC interference by the British and French. ISIS themselves recognize this as the root cause, and some section of ISIS see their mission as undoing that original agreement.
Also:
[Afganistans woes date back all the way to 1813, where Great Britain and Russia completely screwed the place when both were trying to build empires.] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game)
If you really want to get into understanding this Id recommend The Arabs: A History by Eugene Scott. It starts in around 1500 and goes right up to W. Bush, and really gets into the deep roots of why the Middle East looks like it does today.
Interesting tidbit of history: a lot of the violent religious fundamentalism has to do with the Wahhabi movement out of Saudi Arabia late in the 18th century. At the time, the Ottomans ruled over the entire Arab world, but the founder of the Wahhabi movement was a religious scholar, and believed that the Sufi religious practices of the Turks at the time were weak and an affront to god. He advocated an open rebellion against the Sufi practices of the Ottoman empire, and the thousand year old practice and reverence of the Islamic equivalents to Christian saints, calling it polytheism and justifying a jihad against the Turks and all moderate muslims.
The movement's founder was not very popular in his own village, but soon found a political ally in Muhammad ibn Saud, ancestor of the Saudi Arabian rulers. Ibn Saud used the al-Wahhab's radical reinterpretations to justify war and subjugation of other arab tribes in the peninsula and against their Ottoman rulers.
Fast forward to the modern day, and you have several groups including al-Qaeda, the Tailban, ISIS and many others who follow this movement and use it as religious justification for destroying other muslims and westerners. The Wahhabis look to the King of Saudi Arabia as a religious leader, and much of the oil wealth of the Saudis goes straight into funding these radical religious groups. Their intention is to change the Islamic world back to the way it was in the first few generations after Islam's founding, because they fully believe that other groups do not practice true faith and profane their god.
TL;DR: A highly conservative religious movement around the time of the American Revolutionary war declared all other sects as polytheists and thus deserving of extermination according to Islamic law.
Note: I am an American and much of my understanding on the topic comes from this wonderful book. I'm just passionately fascinated by the history of the region.
To really understand why the Israeli-Arab conflict is so intractable, you have to understand the history of the whole middle east going back several hundred years.
For the last 300-400 years, Arab philosophers have debated on why the power and influence of arab empires(ottomon mostly) peaked in the 1600s and what to do to reverse the trend. Most islamic scholars eventually came to the conclusion that secularism was to blame for the decline in power.
As a result, there has been a background pan-arab movement over the last 200 years in most middle east islamic states to be more unified, focused and centered on islam. In fact in the 1960s...there was a movement to unite several middle east islamic states including egypt and iran into one big state.
So then in 1948, the state of Israel is created in the middle of the islamic middle east, encompassing the land of several of islam's most holy shrines. Frustratingly, Israel is also enormously powerful for its size, and it frequently politically and militarily humiliated islamic middle east states in war.
A similar analogy would be if after the civil war, when the union and the southern states were trying to pull back together as one country, britain carved out a piece of land from pennsylvania(containing philadelphia), virginia and north carolina,) and gave it to Iran. Iran then massacred whole towns in these states to force all americans to evacuate from their new land(Israel did this to force palestinians out of Israel after 1948). In the years since the civil war, we've tried to take back our land, especially philadelphia where the declaration of independence was created and signed. However, Iran has repeatedly beaten us and actually expanded their borders during each battle.
This is an excellent book on the 500 year history of the middle east. [The Arabs: A History] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Arabs-History-Eugene-Rogan/dp/0465025048/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406865889&sr=8-1&keywords=the+arabs+a+history)