Middle East Near You

The author of The Last Great War of Antiquity makes the point that its writing was "no easy task… but given the importance of the war, it is worth...

In post-World War One Iraq, Britain was the occupying power. At a celebration of Prophet Muhammad's birthday in 1920 (peace be upon him) in Baghdad's Haydar-Khana Mosque, blind poet...

Tancred Bradshaw concludes in his new book – The End of Empire in the Gulf: From Trucial States to the United Arab Emirates – that, "The British imperial project...

Zana Gulmohamad's new book, The Making of Foreign Policy in Iraq: Political Factions and the Ruling Elite, takes on the mammoth task of exploring and explaining how Iraq has...

Kelly A. Hammond's book China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II is published at a time when Islam in China is under intense scrutiny with...

Laleh Khalili's book Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula is a surprisingly seductive read. A cross between history, geopolitics and economics, with a...

Our interview with Mauritanian-American activist Nasser Weddady discussing corruption in Mauritania

The United Arab Emirates is waging a war for influence over the Horn of Africa

Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions by Oludamini Ogunnaike is a sweeping and ambitious book that operates on multiple levels with...

Our interview with Dr Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, historian of nationalism and race at King's College London, about Islamophobia in France in light of President Emmanuel Macron's recent comments about Islam being 'in crisis'.

It is almost a year since Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani (11 March 1957 – 3 January 2020) was killed in a US drone attack near Baghdad International...

Social anthropologist Madawi Al-Rasheed's new book The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia looks at the conflicts taking place in the desert Kingdom both historically and under...

Ulrike Freitag's A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is a seductively charming urban history of the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah,...

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi's Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran takes us on an intellectual tour of post-Islamism and Islamic left thought in Iran. The early 1990s...

On 29 October 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk declared the birth of the Republic of Turkey and became its first president

Arzoo Osanloo's Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law and Victims' Rights in Iran takes us through a little discussed feature of the Iranian legal system, which has implications beyond the country...

"Under these circumstances, talking to a Western reporter could be a death sentence. And yet here in Douma, as soon as people saw that I was a journalist, they...

MEMO's Usman Butt takes a closer look at Egypt's MeToo moment in the context of the social and political structures in the country as well as the way in which the state handles ongoing cases

Sarah Hunaidi, a Syrian feminist and human rights activist, spoke exclusively to MEMO about the Syrian uprising, revolution and civil war, as well as the politics of the Druze community.

Li Guo's Arabic Shadow Theatre 1300-1900: A Handbook is a sweeping survey and interesting introduction to all things shadowy and theatrical. It is rare to say that an academic...

Ulf Laessing's book Understanding Libya Since Gaddafi is published at a time when it has never been so important to know what is happening in Libya, but few outside...

Following the death of his father Hafez Al-Assad, Bashar Al-Assad official became president at only 34 years old

The nature of authoritarian rule in Syria remains little understood outside the country. As a notoriously closed society with limited access to the outside world before the 2000s, with...

Ahmed El Shamsy's Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed An Intellectual Tradition takes us into the story of how seminal works of Islamic philosophy, theology,...

The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought by Andrew F March comes to us at an interesting time. The 2011 Arab Spring led many across the...

Events in the Arab world and beyond over the past decade have ignited an intense debate about Islam, Muslims and political engagement. A common theme of western historical research...

Professor Ilan Pappé cautions against overly optimistic readings of the Netanyahu affair

Over the summer of 2019, observers of events in Syria were left bemused by the news that Rami Makhlouf had been placed under house arrest. It simply didn't make...

For the past few weeks, Lebanon has been rocked by anti-government protests calling for a change in the ruling system and an end to corruption, economic decay and political...

What is the difference between a democratic society and a dictatorship? In a nutshell, a death in a democracy is a personal tragedy, but in a dictatorship it is...

The Sacking of Fallujah: A People's History by Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn makes for chilling reading as it takes us inside the three sieges that the...

It is not usual to begin a book review with a quote from elsewhere, but, "Bad men need nothing more to compress their ends, than that good men should...