Feature Review
A Daring Enterprise tells the story of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund (EAEF) from the perspective of its founder, Harmon, who established it in 2011. Harmon is a longtime New York investment banker and former chairman of the…
Feature Review
In Beyond Dialogue, Rice University sociologist Considine offers the solution of interfaith dialogue to 14 centuries of Christian-Muslim conflict. He dubs this DEUCE, an acronym for Dialogue, Education, Understanding, Commitment, and…
Feature Review
El Guabli, a professor of Arabic studies and comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University and, without a doubt, one of the brightest scholars, has written a masterpiece with Desert Imaginations. His previous book,…
Feature Review
Kaye, an academic who participated in low-level negotiations between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran during her time at the RAND Corporation and the Wilson Center, examines U.S. policy toward Iran under the Islamic…
Feature Review
Hansen aims to capture in Karagümrük, an Istanbul neighborhood, and on one particular avenue within it, how ordinary people experience authoritarianism in the twenty-first century. Having lived in Istanbul for 16 years after 2007, Hansen…
Feature Review
Altman, a U.S. district court judge for the Southern District of Florida, has made several trips to Israel with fellow American judges. Together, they traveled throughout the country, including the West Bank. Through a judge’s discerning…
Feature Review
The prominent Muslim reformer and modernist Mustafa Akyol presents a collection of essays asserting that Muslims can—and must—update how their faith is practiced. Akyol and his reformist contributors find Qur’anic sanction for their effort…
Feature Review
The only country in the world named after its current ruling family, Saudi Arabia, traces its origins back nearly three centuries to an alliance between a central Arabian clan (the Saud) and a revivalist Islamic ideology (Wahhabism).…
Feature Review
Magid has produced a well-written account of the life of Jordan’s King Abdullah II, from his upbringing in Britain and the United States, followed by his years of service in the British and Jordanian armies, to his quarter century on the…
Feature Review
Segal, Israel's most popular and influential political commentator, offers an insider's account of Israeli politics in A Call at 4 AM. Drawing on exceptional access and journalistic precision, he reconstructs how key political and security…
Feature Review
Peacock, professor of history at the University of Alabama, examines radio broadcasts to the Middle East from the late 1940s through the Six-Day War of 1967. She focuses primarily on broadcasts from Britain, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and…
Feature Review
All those people who cling to conspiracy theories about October 7, 2023—from the ignorant to the evil, from gullible college students to veteran faculty, from “truthers” to celebrities—should read Sharabi's Hostage. I consider it the most…
Feature Review
Burmawi, born a Muslim in Jordan and later a convert to Christianity, has done the post-Christian West a great favor by highlighting the threat that Muslim immigration presents to civil society in Europe and North America. He also…
Feature Review
Israel Under Netanyahu can charitably be described as silly, less so as hopelessly ill-informed and blatantly contrived—an echo chamber for the jaundiced prattle of Benjamin Netanyahu's political adversaries. If Oren displays unbridled…
Feature Review
Ben-Bassat and Büssow open their riveting analysis of Late Ottoman Gaza by striking a note that irresistibly tempts further scholarly inquiry: “Around 1900, Gaza was one of the largest and most important cities in Ottoman Palestine.” That…
Feature Review
World War I saw the emergence of the soldier's camera; the American side of the Vietnam conflict marked the first televised war; the Kuwait War inaugurated the first live-television war; and the civil conflict in Syria, 2011–24 can lay…
Feature Review
Although the title suggests a cohesive volume, Syria: Civil War to Holy War? contains a collection of the author's articles—chronologically arranged—about his reporting trips to Syria over the course of the country's civil war, plus his…
Feature Review
More than a century after the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I, historians continue to blame European powers for this catastrophe as part of a broader indictment of the Western colonial legacy. At the same time, these historians…
Feature Review
Oukacha presents a concise critique of Islam's foundational text. Originally written in French and translated into English, his book adopts a systematic, polemical approach, cataloging logical inconsistencies, doctrinal contradictions, and…
Feature Review
Chronic Israel-basher Thrall won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. The book recounts a genuinely tragic school bus accident in which Abed Salama's young son, Milad, was among six children killed. Inevitably,…
Feature Review
Antisemitism describes the turbulent and nearly universal malady afflicting Jews for millennia—dhimmitude, ghettoization, expulsions, autos-da-fé, and genocide; anti-Zionism the opposition of the region's Arabic-speaking inhabitants and…
Feature Review
Many histories of modern Iran are Tehran-centric, focusing either on Iran's shahs or, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, on its ayatollahs. Consciously or not, they also focus on the country's Persian political elites or, in earlier…
Feature Review
Hovsepian's Edward Said offers an intimate intellectual biography of the influential Palestinian-American scholar (1935–2003), drawing heavily on the author's friendship with Said, as well as his diaries and correspondence. The author, an…
Feature Review
One thoughtful review of King of Kings—by Arash Azizi in The Atlantic (August 5, 2025)—is entitled “The Islamic Republic Was Never Inevitable.” That title is a good summary of Anderson's main thesis. He is quite correct, though the thesis…
Feature Review
Aldoughli's Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria offers a compelling, original, and timely analysis of national identity and authoritarian ideology, examining how idealized notions of manhood have defined both state and society. The…
Feature Review
This translation of an anonymous early twelfth-century Arabic chronicle narrating the Islamic conquest of much of Spain—from the 711 A.D. invasion to the Almoravid invasion in the late eleventh century—is very readable and valuable. The…
Feature Review
Veteran Israeli defense correspondents Katz and Bohbot seek to identify and explain the process that led to Israel's failure to anticipate the Hamas attack from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and then the government's inability to prevent the…
Feature Review
Padnos, an American journalist, tells about his abduction and near two-year incarceration at the hands of the Syrian Sunni jihadi organization Jabhat al-Nusra (Victory Front, JN) from October 2012 until August 2014. His kidnapping took…
Feature Review
Albayrak, a humanist Muslim theologian, has written a remarkable book. In A Contemporary Turkish Prison Diary, he reviews the prison experiences chronicled by the Kurdish religious leader Said Nursi (1877-1960), imprisoned by both Russian…
Feature Review
Euben's Driven to Their Knees offers a timely and fresh perspective on humiliation, not merely as an emotion but as a political tool driving conflict across ideologies and cultures. Using evidence from contemporary historical conflicts and…
Feature Review
Ragan's Forgotten Saint-Simonian Travelers in Egypt should interest readers intrigued by the gallery of mirrors that scholars (and foreign correspondents) encounter on finding themselves in alien cultures. In trying to make sense of what…
Feature Review
To say that Nasr's criticism of Tehran is usually muted would be quite the understatement. He has written many articles arguing that US-Iran tensions result from misunderstandings by Americans; for example, in his recent essay, “Iran's…
Feature Review
Edwin Black, a prize-winning journalist, seeks to “alert the world about Iran's determination to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons,” and plenty of evidence in statements by leaders of Iran's genocidal regime confirm his message. Indeed,…
Feature Review
New Directions in Israeli Media, an edited volume, offers a comprehensive exploration of the evolving landscape of Israeli media in the post-cinematic age, building upon the editors' previous work, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion…
Feature Review
Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and Divine, professor emerita of Jewish Studies and Government at Smith College, have assembled leading scholars to consider the debate over October 7. They…
Feature Review
Three days after Iran's morality police detained 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini on September 13, 2022, for failure to cover her hair properly, her family retrieved her corpse from Tehran's Kasra hospital. Protests erupted at her funeral in…
Brief Review
Armageddon 2029 may seem at first to be a contrived futuristic novel, but it is historical, clever, and full of surprises. It asks one big question: will Israel survive a deadly Iranian attack in 2029, or will it self-destruct, taking the…
Brief Review
Coates, deputy national security advisor in the Trump administration, brings extensive practical experience to The Battle for the Jewish State. Among other accomplishments, she played a key role in moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and…
Brief Review
Academia generally denies the very existence of Islamism. Exceptions tend to acknowledge only its most violent expressions, restricting scholarship to jihadist groups and the most extreme cases of violence. A book that focuses on lawful…
Brief Review
Ignore the overblown title and the publisher’s rush to get this book out quickly following Syria’s December 2024 revolution; its charm and power lie in evoking nearly 55 years of life under the Assads, father and son, 1970-2024. Although a…
Brief Review
Zelin and Margolin, both fellows at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (TWI), present a series of essays by contributors who participated in a January 2024 TWI workshop focused on jihadist governance. By “jihadist,” the editors…
Feature Review
In a notable coincidence, two Palestinian authors have recently published memoirs in English: Salman Abu Sitta in Mapping My Return and Mohammed Almoghayer in Pleasures of Living in Gaza. In parallel, Almoghayer offers a nostalgic and…
Feature Review
In a notable coincidence, two Palestinian authors have recently published memoirs in English: Salman Abu Sitta in Mapping My Return and Mohammed Almoghayer in Pleasures of Living in Gaza. In parallel, Almoghayer offers a nostalgic and…
Brief Review
Sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa brings together essays from multiple authors, covering a wide array of topics. They range from reproductive health and sexual diversity to the clash between individual sexuality and state…
Brief Review
The American scholar, also known as Abdul Hakim Jackson, hopes to rescue contemporary Islam from intellectual stagnation in The Islamic Secular by challenging the idea that Shariah (Islamic law) covers all aspects of life. Western and…
Brief Review
Karlinksy’s edited volume, intended for an academic audience and consisting of a lengthy introduction followed by 14 chapters, holds that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs living abroad each represent a version of the diaspora experience.…
Brief Review
If liberal academics spent as much time investigating and lamenting the negative consequences of Islamist ideologies on the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims, it would be easier to take more seriously their warnings about the dangers of…
Feature Review
Türkiye shares many similarities with advanced industrial Western countries, and Yavaş writes as if there are few, if any, significant differences between Türkiye and, say, Australia, Belgium, or Canada. His account of Türkiye’s “white…
Feature Review
Beinart gives full expression to the fantasy that Jewish self-reform can lead to peace in the Middle East, a delusion exposed twenty years ago by Kenneth Levin in The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege (Smith & Kraus).…
Brief Review
Kurmanji, the largest dialect of the Kurdish language, is spoken by approximately 20 million people across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, as well as in smaller communities in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. In most of these countries,…
Brief Review
The Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements, published in Brill’s Handbooks of Contemporary Religions series, offers a rich collection of 33 essays on movements in contemporary Islam. Upal, a cognitive scientist of religion at the…
Feature Review
Given the importance of U.S.-Iran relations, surprisingly little academic literature tackles the topic. Historian Barry Rubin published his take in Paved With Good Intentions in 1980, even as the Iranian hostage crisis was underway.…
Brief Review
Darke, a former BBC broadcaster now living in Damascus, contributes to the cottage industry of books by Westerners that explain how Muslims deserve credit for the West’s achievements. In this case, Romanesque architecture is presented as…
Feature Review
Hammer’s Israel and Civilization paints a stark picture of a world at a crossroads. He argues that Israel is not just another nation defending itself from external threats but the last stronghold of the Judeo-Christian values that underpin…
Feature Review
Jerusalem on Earth presents a portrait of Jerusalem during the period between the Six-Day War of 1967 and the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987. The author, a veteran journalist and long-time resident of Jerusalem, worked at the…
Brief Review
On learning the title of this book, I reacted with, “I’ve studied leaving Islam and ex-Muslims for years—but what is zemiology?” Briefly, zemiology is the study of harm, presented in this book primarily through a sociological…
Feature Review
Davis and Garb examine the informal Palestinian e-waste economy in the West Line region of Judea and Samaria (West Bank), which falls under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. They show how discarded Israeli electronics are…
Brief Review
Ariel Toaff, a professor of medieval and renaissance history at Bar-Ilan University, is the son of Rabbi Elio Toaff, one of the most eminent figures of post-war Italian Judaism. In 2007, he published a book in Italian titled Pasque di…
Feature Review
Writing contemporary history presents a significant challenge: the writer may face plot twists that must fundamentally change his account. This is the fate that faced Coughlin and his 2023 book titled Assad: The Triumph of…
Brief Review
Strangely, as the decades pass since the Nazi regime fell in 1945, historians assess its impact on the Middle East as greater and greater; Küntzel’s excellent study adds significantly to that process. Coming from a a far-left background,…