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...

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...

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 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...

A collection of personal stories, history, poetry, and artA Land With a People is a book of stories, photographs and poetry which elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. Eloquently framed with a foreword by the dynamic...

"In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein's study stands alone."—Noam Chomsky"No one who ventures an opinion on Gaza . . . is entitled to do so without taking into account the evidence in this book."—The...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A hugely ambitious, “delightfully readable, genuinely informative” portrait (The New York Times) of the two-centuries-long entwined histories of Iran and America—two powers who were once allies and now...

From the author of The Penguin State of the World Atlas, an essential tool for understanding the modern Middle EastThe Middle East is in a constant state of change, and understanding it has never been more important. In this essential guide to the region...

When Terence O'Donnell, an American who lived in Iran for fifteen years in the 1960s and 1970s, was asked what he was doing there, he replied, "The conviction of all Iranians, of most of my compatriots, and indeed of the Russians, was that I was engaged...

In 2005, teacher Theresa Kubasak and retired publisher Gabe Huck moved to Syria with the hope of making a positive contribution for the many Iraqis who sought refuge there after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2007, they established the Iraqi Student...

An “arresting” (New York Times Book Review) revisionist history demonstrating how Islam and the Ottoman Empire made our modern world. The history of the Ottoman Empire―once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any...

A major new history of the century-long debate over what a Jewish state should beMany Zionists who advocated the creation of a Jewish state envisioned a nation like any other. Yet for Israel's founders, the state that emerged against all odds in 1948 was...

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be...

The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger)Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel.'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the...

From its earliest days, the dominant history of the Turkish Republic has been one of national self-determination and secular democratic modernization. The story insisted on total rupture between the Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish state and on the...

An architect’s gripping account of living and working in war-torn Syria, and the role architecture plays in whether a community crumbles or comes togetherDrawing on the author’s personal experience of living and working as an architect in Syria, this...