Selected Product:
| Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East
Paperback
Edition: 1
Author: Akram Fouad Khater
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing
Release Date: 2003-04-09
ISBN-10: 0395980674
ISBN-13: 9780395980675
List Price: $70.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
This unique primary source reader provides first-hand accounts of the events described in Middle Eastern history survey texts. The text is organized into ten chapters featuring chapter introductions and headnotes. The primary source documents cover the late 18th through the 20th centuries, exploring political, social, economic, and cultural history and infusing the volume with the voices of real people.
The Long and the Short of It? Consider the Sources!
| Customer Rating: | Anyone attempting to makes sense of events in the contemporary world is largely at the mercy of the media. What we see is what we're shown, and what we're shown is often laughably one-sided. Accounts of the war in Iraq, for instance, are so severely limited that we no longer have a compass by which to guide our understanding. In any democratic country, that can only be a recipe for disaster: we place ourselves at the mercy of demagogues and propagandists who use our ignorance to foster our hatreds. [In the current administration's parlance this kind of misinformation is cynically dubbed "public diplomacy."]
The study of History can save us from some of the worst excesses of this kind of media-spawned ignorance. But here too, for every story we are told or choose to read, our mantra must be: Consider the Sources! If we don't, we will simply fall prey to more sophisticated forms of manipulation. Since, in human affairs, no one person or institution has a corner on the Truth, we must be willing to read widely and ponder critically if we wish to dispel the Ignorance.
With all this in mind, I strongly urge interested readers to do more than simply read short introductions to the history of the Middle East or "the" Islamic World. Secondary works, no matter how scholarly or erudite, well-intentioned or informed, will only tell us what their authors think, and still leave us at several removes from the human face of historical change. This is so regardless of whether we choose Bernard Lewis' The Middle East, or Arthur Goldschmidt Jr.'s A Concise History of the Middle East as our guide. Reading these (or similar) surveys is a necessary first step, but it is only a first step. From them we can glean the outlines of "the" story, but to see the human actors (and to assess the judgments of historians) we need more works like Akram Fouad Khater's excellent collection of primary documents, Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East. Though intended for university and college students, it really deserves a much wider audience.
In Part One, Khater deals with the Political, Economic, Social and Cultural changes set in motion by the French and British "incursions" into the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s. The readings make it clear that there was a wide-ranging internal debate about the direction, desirability and nature of these reforms, and that they sprang as much from domestic concerns as from European "incursions." What will be abundantly clear to any Western reader today is the arrogant and condescending tone of nearly all "outside" commentators on the "situation" of Islam in the Nineteenth Century. Clearly, they were no less prone to sound-bites and self-congratulatory propaganda than we are today!
Part Two deals with the eruption of regional nationalisms in the Middle East and North Africa in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Khater's sources here provide an excellent base from which, for instance, to compare Arabic nationalism chafing under Ottoman control with later versions chafing under "Allied" control. Part Three deals with the "Post-Independence States" that have emerged since 1950. The foundations, both secular and religious, of these states are evident in the documents and provide a rich source for informative debate and discussion, especially given the "Cold War" meta-narrative that often clouds and/or distorts American perspectives on this period. Part Four on "The Middle East Today" deals with concerns with which most of us will be familiar (9/11, Israel/Palestine, etc). But the section on "Subaltern Groups" is superbly original and on its own will more than repay the reader's investment in this book. Not only is it highly unusual in itself, but it also provides an excellent source of information that will enable any reader to inestimably broaden the scope of inquiry and debate on a world that is routinely misrepresented in the "West." On its own, Akram Fouad Khater's reader offers a much-needed way out of our often self-imposed ignorance about Islam and the Middle East. In conjunction with a judiciously chosen survey text, it cannot fail to free us from our self-indulgent prejudices and our self-fulfilling prophecies of doom and despair. |
A One-Stop Collection of Primary Sources
| Customer Rating: | AF Khater's collection "Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East" is a collection of many of the most influential documents in Middle Eastern history. As he writes in his introduction, there is no other collection like it, and as such it is essential for anyone making a serious study of the history of the region. Even were there to be other collections, this would remain the yardstick for quite some time.
All the usual suspects are represented here, dating from the Tanzimat era of the Ottoman Empire through to recent political developments and the rise of Islamist terrorism. Khater's terms of reference are sufficiently broad to warrant inclusion of some very illuminating documents from Algeria dealing with both the decolonisation period and the manifestation of a Berber national identity, the latter of which is an area of study which would benefit from much more scholarly attention.
As a result, the reader will be able to read the Hatt-i-Serif of Gulhane - arguably the most important proclamation in Ottoman History, as well as the Husayn-McMahon correspondence and the Balfour Declaration, often said to be the sources of the Israel-Palestine question in the modern history of the region. Writings of many leading Zionist intellectuals are included as well, demonstrating several of the nuances of the creation of Israel. For more modern interest, the full text of Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad on the West is included, to say nothing of texts from his ideological ancestors such as al-Banna and Qutb.
Sources from the West are also included, particularly an astonishing series of diplomatic cables on the situation in pre-revolution Iran which manifestly get the situation wrong. While some readers might be surprised to see names such as Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini included here, this is actually a great strength of the collection, as these individuals have been particularly important historically - regardless of anyone's feelings about their actions.
Khater introduces each section and each document with a brief overview of its significance, but the main focus here is to let the articles, proclamations and speeches speak for themselves. While some of the longer documents are present only in edited form, this does not sufficiently detract from an understanding of the work.
As a result, this is not a book for the casual reader. The five stars awarded here are on the supposition that readers with a specialised interest in and knowledge of the history will derive great use from this book. While Khater mentions the significance of the documents and their authors briefly, anyone with only a passing knowledge of the region will be left confused as to what part some of these intellectuals and political luminaries played. For a casual reader, a general history of the region is much more advisable. |
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