The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel [Hardcover]

Michael J. Totten (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 2011

The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after fifteen years of quiet. Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie.

He sets up camp in a tent city built in downtown Beirut by anti-Syrian dissidents, is bullied and menaced by Hezbollah's supposedly friendly "media relations" department, crouches under fire on the Lebanese-Israeli border during the six-week war in 2006, witnesses an Israeli ground invasion from behind a line of Merkava tanks, sneaks into Hezbollah's post-war rubblescape without authorization, and is attacked in Beirut by militiamen who enforce obedience to the "resistance" at the point of a gun.

From the "Cedar Revolution" that ousted the occupying Syrian military regime in 2005, to the devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, and to Hezbollah's slow-motion but violent assault on Lebanon's elected government and capital, Totten's account is both personal and comprehensive. He simplifies the bewildering complexity of the Middle East, has access to major regional players as well as to the man on the street, and personally witnesses most of the events he describes. The Road to Fatima Gate should be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, Iran's expansionist foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, asymmetric warfare, and terrorism in the aftermath of September 11.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael J. Totten is a foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, City Journal, LA Weekly, The Jerusalem Post, Beirut's Daily Star, Reason Magazine, Azure Magazine, and the Australian edition of Newsweek. He writes regularly for Commentary. He lives with his wife and two cats in Portland, Oregon, and is a former resident of Beirut. Visit his Web site at www.MichaelTotten.com.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (April 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594035210
• ISBN-13: 978-1594035210
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #378,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #25 in Books > History > Middle East > Lebanon

More About the Author

Michael J. Totten is an award-winning journalist and prize-winning author whose very first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, won the Washington Institute Book Prize.

His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic among numerous other publications, and he's a contributing editor at World Affairs and City Journal. He has reported widely from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. He lived once in Beirut and today lives in Oregon with his wife and two cats.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars relevant, urgent, smart April 4, 2011

By SLC Snowdrops

Format:Hardcover

Full Disclosure: I have known Michael Totten & counted him a friend for many years. We have rolled our eyes through lame (read: back-patting) writing workshops, eviscerated each other's creative writing, and argued about the tiny 1% sliver where our politics diverge. That 1% sliver has always been small but significant. Over the years, though, that 1% sliver has shrunk considerably--at times because Totten's writing changed my mind. When someone's right, he's right.

So take this review with a grain of salt if you must, but know this: I would not be afraid to deliver a bad review to Michael if it were warranted. He has too much integrity to freak out and fire his friends over something like that. Those 5 stars are legit.

To me, what makes "The Road to Fatima Gate" different from every other book about the Middle East is this: Totten is genuinely curious about every culture, every person, every religion, every sect, every building, every propaganda poster, every town, every conflict--everything--he encounters. Even though "Fatima Gate" is a first-person account, Totten gets out of the way and lets the people and the place tell the story because he genuinely wants to understand. Most journalists and writers fail miserably at that. They have a story to tell and find a way to impose it on the places and people they encounter. Not Totten.

He listens to everyone--cab drivers, soldiers, Hezbollah security officers, journalists, Lebanese activists, bartenders, Israeli soldiers. He wants to know. He wants to understand. He wants the story he tells to be genuine and real and true. Every person has something to teach him. Every perspective is interesting on its own terms, just for existing.

And that is why his book is a game-changer. It is nothing like the reports you see on cable news about Lebanon or the Middle East in general. The mainstream media tries to take something complex and make it simple and digestible--something "black and white." Totten takes something complex and makes the complexity easier to understand. He wrestles with the region on its own terms.

Of course, Totten does not disappear from the narrative. He is always there--always questioning, wondering, and analyzing. During a scene at the Lebanese-Israeli border, he wonders what it would be like for Americans to live just a few feet away from the Taliban, with nothing but a fence between them. It brings the reality of the border situation into sharp focus. But he wants to know what it's like to look at that border through the eyes of someone from Lebanon, someone who lived through the upheavals and conflicts and remembers when the border was open. So he asks. The answer--the entire scene, really--gave me chills.

At times, he is even hilarious, as in the scene where he and a colleague attend a Hezbollah iftar (a fast-breaking meal after sunset during Ramadan), and it occurs to Totten that the Islamic Republic of Iran paid for his meal. "It was about time they did something for citizens of the Great Satan," he thinks. By that point, he had tolerated bullying and harassment from various Hezbollah security officers. He had enough.

That sense of humor gets him in trouble, though. When he jokingly posts on his website that Hezbollah had "blindfolded" him and taken him to a "'safe house'" in the mountains, Hezbollah is not pleased. Hussein Naboulsi in the Hezbollah media relations office calls him and accuses him of spreading propaganda. Never mind that Totten made it crystal clear the post was a joke (a reckless one, Totten realizes in hindsight). Naboulsi threatens, "We know who you are, we read everything you write, and we know where you live."

Totten is terrified, but he refuses to be bullied. He has the guts to call Naboulsi back two days later and tell him to "shut up" and "never call or threaten" him again.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't call a workplace bully to say that--let alone Hezbollah.

Totten's intellectual curiosity and bravery make his book different and game-changing, but the depth of his historical knowledge makes it smart. He has done his homework, and he has much to teach about the history of Lebanon and the Middle East. But he doesn't just spout off facts. No, he tells a gripping narrative and connects it to the events he witnesses. In "The Road to Fatima Gate," history is alive. History is relevant. History is now.

If you want to finally, finally, finally understand Middle East politics, read this book now. With all the recent uprisings in the region, Totten's work has never been more relevant or urgent, especially as Americans wrestle with foreign policy questions that could help set the course for the future of the region.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Oral History of the Modern Middle East: judicious, nuanced, a page-turner April 6, 2011

By CMC

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

It is hard to put down The Road to Fatima Gate. Totten turns arcane subject matter into flowing prose, and lets his subjects speak for themselves.

Michael Totten is not an academic, and he's not a political activist. He's a concerned American citizen who happens to be an excellent writer. This makes him a journalist, but that title doesn't fully suite him either, because it often implies reporting on deadline. His interest is not in parachuting into a foreign capital, interviewing the most important political actors and academics, writing about it, and leaving.

Totten truly wants to understand the Middle East. As is apparent in The Road to Fatima Gate, Totten arrived in the region for the first time already well versed in the academic and political theories on Lebanon, Israel, and the Middle East at large. However, those works did not describe the place Totten saw. Lebanon and Israel and the people living there were nothing like what he read in books and saw in the news. The first thing he needed to do was to reorient himself.

Totten writes that he was apprehensive on arrival in Beirut, but suddenly recognized that the images didn't match the place. A young man in a bar says to him, "You must be crazy to be here." Totten responds, ""You really think so?" I said. I didn't feel crazy to be there. That feeling passed after twenty-four hours" (7). But, of course, how could he know for sure? He didn't do what many journalists would have done: run to the politicians and the political risk consultants and the academics. He talked to the people. He went to their houses, dined with them, and drank tea. It seems his stringers were nice people he met along the way who offered to help him understand this complex place.

Totten recognizes that he could not fully understand the biases of his sources, so he talks to as many people as possible. Despite his initial bias against certain factions, like Hezbollah, Totten talks to them. What makes him different than journalists is that he is not looking to portray an overarching concept in a headline and 2,000 words, ie "Hezbollah Attacks Beirut, Settles Scores," "Does the US Need Dialogue with Hezbollah?," "Regional Instability Increases Sectarian Tension in Lebanon." He will describe those same situations and convey his positions on those matters, but only after letting the people speak for themselves.

Often times, Totten's sources hang themselves with their words and actions, like when Hezbollah's press relations manager threatens Totten and his photographer, and when Syrian Social Nationalist thugs beat Christopher Hitchens in the middle of a main thoroughfare as Totten tries to rescue him. At other moments, Totten provides a voice to political parties, like the Christian Aounists, little understood in the West (and even within Lebanon). His interviewees appear endearing, and it is left to the reader to recognize their naivete, which Totten often does not need to point out, as he does not selectively quote them and lets them speak for themselves over the course of many pages.

In this regard, he is more of an oral historian of the Middle East in the tradition of Studs Terkel than he is a journalist. Totten isn't just telling a story. He is trying to depict lives. An entire chapter is based on a long conversation at a cafe with the previously mentioned Aounists prior to a rally they held alongside Hezbollah to overthrow the government. It is a compelling read, and provides a fair assessment of these Christian men and their motivations for supporting what most Americans believe is a radical Muslim terrorist organization.

Like Terkel, Totten has his biases, which are apparent in the text, even if he is sometimes not even aware of them. Like any concerned citizen (and even oral historian) writing about a contemporary issue, Totten makes moral judgements, which will upset people who differ with his opinion. However, Totten reveals his thinking and the process through which he made his opinion. Often, the reader is left in agreement: "The spokesman hung himself with his own words," "That action was unjust," "They seem to be good people, but misguided."

My only major qualm with the work is due to something out of Totten's control: that he cannot be in two places at one time. Totten covers the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah from the Israeli side of the border. At that moment, the road he takes to Fatima Gate is from the south, and he does an excellent job conveying the physical destruction in northern Israeli and giving voice to bombarded Israelis. Not only do those chapters manifest the implications of Lebanon's unstable and violent politics on other countries, but they provide the reader insight into the minds and motivations of Israelis and how much their domestic interests are determined by foreign actors. Totten is so good at conveying the emotions and details of lives that it would have been nice to see effect of that violence on the northern side of the border.

Totten makes up for it with what I think is his best chapter - the one that reads like an action novel - on the 2008 Hezbollah invasion of Beirut.

Not only will The Road to Fatima Gate provide readers with fingerspitzengefuhl knowledge of Lebanon, but it will be a fun read, as well.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Road to Fatima Gate April 4, 2011

By Gareth

Format:Hardcover

The middle-east is fascinating and important but too often it is frustrating. It is unusually complex. Every chunk of its past seems to clash with every moment of its present, revealing an intellectual abyss into which many writers and readers who attempt to tackle the dynamism and contradictions of the mid-east are flushed.

Michael Totten is different, and reading him is too. His understanding of the middle-east comes not just from personal experience, but from a perception that allows him to grasp conflicts and ideas not as news but as forces created by, and effecting, lives. He has a sub-conscious hatred for sectarianism and an outward sensibility that guards his writing, keeping it comprehensively logical and fair and therefore easy to understand without minimizing a subject's complexity. He demonstrates these qualities unfailingly in what Id call his finest work to date: The Road to Fatima Gate: the beirut spring, the rise of hezbollah, and the iranian war against isreal.

It begins where it should: "I'm going to die here" a colleague of Michael's said to himself on the plane.

When he arrived, Totten stayed in west Beirut at a ghost hotel, feeling the thick tension and fear in the air. The Lebanese prime minister's motorcade was just blown up and as locals knew very well, things could get worse. "You are crazy to be here right now," the man said next to him at a bar. "Crazy."

Michael travels to both sides of the temperamental border-region between Hezbollah controlled Lebanon and Israel, finding the sneaky hand of Iran and all the people caught between its fingers.

Michael mixes memoir and history, proving that the latter is defining the present and demonstrating within the former that he doesn't have it in him to be a bore. The dialogue is lively, or rather, alive.

Michael requesting an interview with Hezbollah is one of my favorite parts:

'"I an American journalist," I said, "and I`d like to set up an appointment for an interview."
"I cannot talk to you," he said. "I don't have permission to talk to the press."
"I'm sorry," I said. "someone gave me this number and told me you were the person I needed to talk to."
I waited for him to say something, but he didn't. So after another uncomfortable pause, I continued.
"Can you direct me to the right person?" I said.
"Who are you!" he said, as if he suspected I was a CIA or Mossad agent. "What do you want!"'

Later, Totten gets into some trouble with Hezbollah. He is currently banned from any of their future functions, a damn shame.

The Road to Fatima Gate is a non-fiction novel, really. One has to constantly remind oneself that this has happened, or that is happening. It is like reading a middle eastern For Whom The Bell Tolls.

And Its importance grows everyday. The mid-east is convulsing out of its old state and into a new one, flying miles above, propelled by revolutions and revolts, and no one can know where it will land. Lebanon has been in this process for quite some time now and may be the first. Whatever happens in Lebanon, it will be significant -not only to Israel- and when it does, you'll be glad to have read this book.