Customer Reviews

Politics in the Middle East (5th Edition)

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This is a well-written book explaining the history of the Middle East. It provides the historic basis for understanding the current situation and tension in this region. James Bill is an excellent writer, and a well-known expert on the Middle East. A great book!

This book was a primary text for my Middle Eastern Politics class as an undergraduate in the early 1980s. It was in the second edition at that time, and has gone through a few subsequent editions as politics of the region develops. My particular copy remains useful for history and background purposes; there are chapters on the theoretical ideas of Islam and politics in general, the implications of the post-imperial and post-colonial institutions, and the various conflicts prevalent in the region. So many tend to see the Middle East in an Israel-Arab conflict context, but this text has but one of ten chapters devoted to that particular situation.

According to the authors, `The Middle East might once have been studied as an exercise in statics, but in the last years of the twentieth century, it is a dynamic and explosive area. To be dynamic is not necessarily to change or to change in any particular direction.' In fact, Bill and Leiden see many directions, some convergent and some divergent, in which the Middle East's future is pulled. These include economic, social philosophy, modernization, globalization, and religious revolution directions. It only adds to the complexity that the policies of the United States, Russia, China, and Europe toward the region and individual states within the region fluctuate on a regular basis. Written before the current conflicts of Afghanistan and Iraq began, it speculates on an uneasy future with conflicts of different sorts - a safe prophecy with regard to the Middle East.

I continued to find useful information from the text, and recommend it to anyone seeking a greater historical appreciation of the different contexts and conflicts of the Middle East, in terms here stretching from Morocco and Algeria in the West to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the East.