Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Usman Butt
-
Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic
In 2020, with the full extent of the coronavirus outbreak still unknown, Chris Buckley of the New York Times received a phone call from a woman at the Wuhan Foreign Affairs Office in the People’s Republic of China. It was a few days into the lockdown. “We know you...
-
Discover the Great Mosque of Xi’an, China
Located in the central Chinese province of Shaanxi and in the same city as the terra-cotta army, the Great Mosque of Xi’an is believed to have been built in 742 during the Tang dynasty...
-
Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society
Locals and foreigners alike often ask why people in the Middle East are “so lazy”. While such a view held by people from outside the region has its roots in racist stereotypes, many within the region hold a similar opinion, regardless of whether or not there is any merit...
-
Discover Tabriz, Iran
Today Tabriz is the capital of the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan and boasts a population of 1.7 million....
-
Markets of Civilisation: A Review
Muriam Haleh Davis’s new book Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria explores the colonial roots of Algeria’s transition into a modern capitalist economy. But it is more than that; it is a critical examination of how race and racialisation by French authorities formed the development of...
-
‘We’ve got the largest climate conference to which nobody was able to get to by sustainable methods’
Dan Hodd travelled from Europe to COP27 in Egypt without stepping foot on a plane to highlight the case for environmental travel, MEMO caught up with him along the way...
-
The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution
This new book edited by Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed seeks to make sense of the October 2019 uprising that shook Lebanon. The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution pulls together experts from political science, sociology, economics, the arts and other fields with the objective of...
-
The North Caucasus Borderland: Between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, 1555-1605
Regions such Dagestan, Chechnya and the Caucasus tend to make us think of territories that are firmly under Moscow’s control as part of the Russian Federation. However, Russian control only stretches back a few hundred years. Large parts of the region came under the Ottoman Empire and in the...
-
Putin’s War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America’s Absence
“It turned out that Syria is our sacred land,” wrote a Russian blogger sarcastically in 2016 following attempts by some public figures to recast Syria as part of Russia following Moscow’s military intervention in the country’s civil war in 2015. Before then, the idea of Syria being part of...
-
Fixing Stories
Arjomand takes us into the critical and largely invisible work of the media fixer. Defining what fixers do is difficult as their role can be quite fluid but, essentially, the general idea is when a journalist visits a country or an area they are not local to or familiar...
-
In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine’s Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s
A popular Russian-speaking Jewish satirist from Kharkiv, Leonid Osmolovskyi, had become a shadow of his former self by the 1980s. Once famed for his witty essays and part of a generation of radical thinkers, artists, journalists, poets, writers and historians who came up in the eastern Ukrainian city in...
-
MENA, China and the great human rights trade off
'Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world'. ...
-
Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt
In his new book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture In Modern Egypt, Andrew Simon recounts how, on 12 June, 1974, US President Richard Nixon landed in Cairo for a “tour of peace” in the Middle East. Embroiled in the Watergate scandal at home, many American media outlets branded...
-
Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and the Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire
“From a deep history perspective, Ottoman rule in Iraq — the land of ancient Babylonia — was a political oddity,” writes Faisal Husain in Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates In the Ottoman Empire. “In its millennia-long history, Iraq was never ruled from Istanbul before the sixteenth...
-
The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier
How does history look at non-urban, rural populations who lived through the last century of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish republic? Chris Gratien’s The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier takes us through the experiences of the inhabitants of a central...
-
The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan
In January 2022, Kazakhstan made international headlines when it was hit by waves of popular protests which were suppressed by the authorities in the Central Asian state. What began as protests against the lifting of the energy price cap and subsequent rise in gas prices, ended with hundreds of...
-
Genetic Crossroads
Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity by Elise Burton, is a sweeping history of ‘genetic nationalism’ in the 20th century covering Iran, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and other Arab countries. Throughout much of the previous century, western researchers were fascinated by the Middle East,...
-
Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa
Jocelyn Hendrickson takes us on a historical and legal tour exploring Islamic responses to Christian conquests in Spain and North West Africa in her book Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa. How do a series of legal opinions born in the context of the...
-
The Nature of Tyranny and the Devastating Results of Oppression
“Tyranny is the origin of every perversity,” claims the author of The Nature of Tyranny and the Devastating Results of Oppression. “Tyranny corrupts the mind by restrictions, and degrades religion by manipulations, and destroys knowledge by intimidations.” Reading these passages, it looks as if Syrian Abdul Rahman Al-Kawakibi is describing...
-
‘We had a choice - war or diplomacy’ - MEMO speaks to Emad Kiyaei
MEMO sat down with Emad Kiyaei of the Middle East Treaty Organisation to discuss the significance of the nuclear talks...
-
The Socotra Archipelago: A Battle for an Ancient Land
96 km off the Horn of Africa coast lies a unique archipelago of Yemeni islands...
-
Moral Crisis in the Ottoman Empire: Society, Politics and Gender during WW1
This new book by Cigdem Oguz, who teaches history at Bologna University, reveals the growing concern in Ottoman society during the First World War about the decline in public morality. From the late 19th century onwards, she writes in Moral Crisis in the Ottoman Empire: Society, Politics, and Gender...
-
The Last Great War of Antiquity
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 making the effort.” The Persian-Roman War (602-630 CE) was one of the most significant to be fought in the ancient...
-
The Dangers of Poetry: Culture, Politics and Revolution in Iraq
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 Muhammad Mahdi Al-Basir recited his poetry from the pulpit: “Let them bend their necks before you in submission… Until they...