This #1 New York Times best seller remains the most informative and objective account of the Taliban availableThis modern classic brings the shadowy world of the Taliban and its impact on Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Central Asia into sharp focus...

Since the 1970s, the Egyptian state has embarked on a far-reaching and destabilizing project of economic liberalization, reneging on its commitments to social welfare. Despite widespread socioeconomic grievances stemming from these policies, class...

Each year, in a solemn Sunni Muslim feast, the Ait Mizane of southern Morocco reenact the story of Abraham as a ritual sacrifice, a symbolic observance of their submission to the divine. After this sober ceremony comes a bacchanalian masquerade which...

The recent revolution in Egypt has shaken the Arab world to its roots. The most populous Arab country and the historical center of Arab intellectual life, Egypt is a lynchpin of the US's Middle East strategy, receiving more aid than any nation except...

A robust defense of a poetic geniusAbū Tammām (d. 231 or 232/845 or 846) is one of the most celebrated poets in the Arabic language. Born in Syria to Greek Christian parents, he converted to Islam and quickly made his name as one of the premier Arabic...

Accounts of remarkable women at the world's most powerful courtConsorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid...

Explores how writers, filmmakers and artists have attempted to reckon with the legacy of a devastating warThe Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war of the 20th century. The memory of it may have faded in the wake of more recent wars in the...

For more than thirty years Hafez al-Asad has ruled Syria with an iron fist. Six U.S. presidents and eight Israeli prime ministers have come and gone, but Asad remains, one of the last of the old generation of Arab leaders. But in the post-Cold War Middle...

Uncovering the professional secrets of con artists and swindlers in the medieval Middle EastThe Book of Charlatans is a comprehensive guide to trickery and scams as practiced in the thirteenth century in the cities of the Middle East, especially in Syria...

In this engaging first memoir, George A. Kiraz tells the story of a young Palestinian boy growing up in Bethlehem, fascinated with understanding his Syriac roots even as he drew steadily nearer to the day when he would inevitably be transplanted to the...

A sequel to Howard Sachar's classic History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, which Commentary called "monumental...a triumph of comprehensive scholarship which is also a delight to read," this book offers an equally compelling and...

Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests examines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical...

An incisive account of Erdoğan’s Turkey—showing how its troubling transformation may be short-livedSince coming to power in 2002 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has overseen a radical transformation of Turkey. Once a pillar of the Western alliance, the country has...

Insights into power, spectacle, and performance in the courts of Middle Eastern rulersIn recent decades, scholars have produced much new research on courtly life in medieval Europe, but studies on imperial and royal courts across the Middle East have...

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Written by recipients of the John Freely Fellowship awarded annually through the American Research Institute in Turkey from a major gift from the Joukowsky Family Foundation of New York to honor a celebrated author of travel and history books, this...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceWhy the conventional wisdom about the Arab Spring is wrongThe Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either...

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. This book unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political...

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the storyIn the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and...