Customer Reviews

The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide

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Newly revised and updated, this volume is a handy reference to the people, policies and issues dominating headlines today, but is lamentably short on cultural entries. Hiro, a prolific author and frequent commentor on Middle Eastern and Islamic affairs, focuses in this work on personalities who reached adulthood around the turn of the 20th century, so readers seeking greater historical depth should look elsewhere. Ar-ranged alphabetically, the more than 1050 entries include succinct, straightforward treatments of topics ranging from religious and political ideologies through languages, the oil and gas industry, international agreements and historical places, to profiles of notable people and of every country in the region, defined here as Iran, the countries of the Fertile Crescent, the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt.
-KYLE PAKKA

If one has a genuine desire to understand the history and events of the Middle East, this desire will only be met by painstaking research, and this research will entail that one seek alternative sources of information. A true and accurate understanding of the Middle East cannot be obtained by consulting the Western press, for the latter has proved itself biased beyond all rational bounds. It cannot be trusted. Indeed, it has become a uncritical sycophant of a yellow, brutal regime, and through its writer's pens has with great zeal assisted in the unleashing of horrible carnage upon a people whose history has been re-written, falsified, and vilified.

It becomes imperative therefore that a methodology be developed that will allow an objective study of the history of the Middle East. It is the opinion of this reviewer that such a study should begin with a perusal of the works of those individuals that are "on the ground": those individuals that live in the regions of interest and who are experiencing the events as they happen.

This book therefore is a good start in this regard, for it has been written by someone who has lived in the Middle East, and has compressed his experiences in the written word with concentrated skill. The author of course has his biases, but since they are not hidden from the reader under the cover of tact and prudence, they can be readily be dealt with by a patient reader. Non-experts in the history of the Middle East, such as this reviewer, will gain a lot from the study of this book. There are many surprises of fact for those readers, such as this reviewer, who have been acclimated to the distortions of the Western press.

Some of these surprises include: 1. The United Nations partition for Palestine in 1947 gave the Jewish people, who owned 6% of the land at the time, 53.5% of Palestine. 2. Menachem Begin, former prime minister of Isreal from 1977-1983, was the main planner of the attack on Deir Yassin, an Arab village, in 1948, which resulted in the massacre of 254 people. In the author's opinion, this massacre motivated a massive exodus of Arabs from Palestine, but he does not offer (causal) evidence for this. 3. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, began using chemical weapons, in the form of mustard gas and nerve gas, in October 1983, in its war against Iran (called interestingly, `Gulf War I' by the author). 4. "Hamas" means "zeal" in Arabic. 5. The Hanbali code, which is the school of the Sharia founded in the eighth century, is opposed to the legal pronouncements of the Quran and the `sunna', thus shedding light on the tensions between the Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East. 6. "Hizbollah" means "party of Allah" in Arabic. 7. Kuwait actually assisted Iraq, both materially and logistically, in its war against Iran. 8. Reza Shah Pahlavi changed the name of Persia to Iran in 1933. 9. Premier Muhammad Mussadiq nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, perturbing the West, and resulting in the CIA launching a counter-coup in 1953. 10. Bahais, a religious minority in Iran, are considered heretics and are banned in Iran. 11. The Quran forbids usury, and money is to be used only as a means of exchange. However, the need for lending instigated a pronouncement in Islamic doctrine that "Necessity makes prohibited things permissible." The author describes other methods of circumventing the doctrine against usury. 12. The Islamic revolution began in 1977 as a demand by Iranian intellectuals to abolish censorship. Nonreligious opposition to the Pahlavi regime was substantial but was not given any power after Khomeini took power. 13. Khomeini was a writer, and was arrested in 1963 but Shah Pahlavi. This caused an uprising argues, the author, which was crushed by Pahlavi, with thousands being killed in the process. After taking power, Khomeini repressed all non-Islamic contributors to the revolution. 14. Nuclear weapons research began in Israel in 1957. According to the author, Israel has the capacity to produce a neutron bomb, and has in its possession 400 thermonuclear and nuclear weapons. 15. Oil was found in Iran in 1908 by a British prospector, whose firm eventually became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. 16, At current production rates, Iran will run out of oil in 2070, but their natural gas reserves, at current production rates, will last another 450 years. 17. At current production rates, Iraq will be out of oil in 2116. Gas production can continue at current rates until 2096. 18. Saudi Arabia, if current production rates continue, will run out of oil in 2087.

There are many other interesting facts in the book, which will need checking if the reader is to be confident in their truth. This will take an enormous amount of resources and time, and will require knowledge of Arabic. However, a more accurate picture of the Middle East is preferable to the loose association of facts delivered by the Western press. It is only by a thorough understanding of the Middle East can one differentiate foes from friends. An honest examination of the evidence will reveal, at least so far, that there are more friends in the Middle East than foes. Whether this will remain true remains to be seen.

This may be a very good book, but it did not meet my needs. The author has written dozens of books on the Middle East and Asia. There is little doubt that he is an expert on the subject.