Midden-Oosten

In de zomer van 2011 reist Monique Samuel ruim twee maanden lang door de landen in het Midden-Oosten waar grote omwentelingen hebben plaatsgevonden. Haar uitvalsbasis is het appartementje van haar oma in Cairo. Samuel wil weten wat er leeft onder de mensen en spreekt met hen over de oorzaken van de revoluties, de invloed daarvan op de maatschappij en hun toekomstperspectief. Ze wil zich niet laten leiden door de waan van de dag of door gefilterde berichtgeving, maar zich baseren op eigen ervaringen. De neerslag van deze ontmoetingen combineert de schrijfster-journaliste met beschouwingen over de sociale en politieke consequenties.

In The Iranians, eminent Middle East expert Sandra Mackey brings us invaluable understanding of a complex, contradictory, and sometimes volatile people. Beginning with the ancient Persian empires that ruled from India to Greece and later humbled mighty Rome, and tracking the waves of invasions that culminated in the triumph of the Arabs under the banner of Islam, Mackey delineates the opposing poles of identity and power that have vied for the Iranian state and the Iranian soul. On the one hand, there is the Persian concept of kingship, in which the nation is guided toward its destiny by a single strong ruler. On the other, there is the Islamic concept of a community of believers in which the faith of Muhammad reigns supreme over every facet of life. This dramatic conflict has played itself out over centuries, intensifying in the twentieth century when Iranians also confronted the issue of modernization in the mode of the West. In the last decades, the Iranians' intertwined destinies of Persia and Islam resulted in the violent shift of leadership and policy from the imperious "King of Kings," Muhammad Reza Shah, to the zealous Ayatollah Khomeini. Without a current icon of culture and authority, the Iranians now struggle with their present and search for their future in the decaying Iranian Revolution. The author's personal knowledge of Iran gives her book a superbly human dimension. Sandra Mackey has more unrestricted movement within the Iranian Islamic Republic than any other American journalist. Her eyewitness account gives the reader a uniquely authentic present-day picture of Iran and the Iranians from the cities to the countryside and from humble mosques to the chaotic political arena governed by the clerics of Shia Islam, as pressures build for a new definition of revolutionary Iran that may well shake the region and the world.

For many centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement--the foremost military and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization. Christian Europe, a remote land beyond its northwestern frontier, was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear. And then everything changed, as the previously despised West won victory after victory, first in the battlefield and the marketplace, then in almost every aspect of public and even private life.In this intriguing volume, Bernard Lewis examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to understand why things had changed--how they had been overtaken, overshadowed, and to an increasing extent dominated by the West. Lewis provides a fascinating portrait of a culture in turmoil. He shows how the Middle East turned its attention to understanding European weaponry and military tactics, commerce and industry, government and diplomacy, education and culture. Lewis highlights the striking differences between the Western and Middle Eastern cultures from the 18th to the 20th centuries through thought-provoking comparisons of such things as Christianity and Islam, music and the arts, the position of women, secularism and the civil society, the clock and the calendar.Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies," Bernard Lewis is one of the West's foremost authorities on Islamic history and culture. In this striking volume, he offers an incisive look at the historical relationship between the Middle East and Europe.

Robin Wright, the acclaimed Mideast expert and foreign correspondent, returns to Iran, which she has visited more frequently than has any other American since the fall of the shah, to give us a portrait of the revolution -- a generation after Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to end 2,500 years of monarchy. She shows us how the Iranian revolution has taken on even greater importance since Khomeini's death, and how it transformed Iranian society as well as Islam. She describes the revolutions within the revolution that have resulted in a movement as radical in the world of Islam as Luther's Reformation was in the Christian world -- empowering women, modernizing social traditions, creating a fiesty, independent cinema and arts industry and giving birth to a new generation that is redefining Iran's political agenda.
Wright makes abundantly clear why she believes the Iranian revolution will stand along with the French and the Russian as one of the three innovative revolutions -- and the last great revolution -- of the Modern Era.

Journalistieke analyse van het moderne Israël.

In this extraordinary study, D. A. Spellberg examines the life of 'A'isha bint Abi Bakr, Muhammad's most beloved and controversial wife, and a central figure in Islamic cultural history. Instead of employing the traditional chronological technique of the biographer, however, Spellberg uses 'A'isha as a lens through which to examine the place of women in Islamic societies.

Geschiedenis oud Egypte.