Middle East Strategy at Harvard

With the holidays fast approaching, MESH has asked its members to recommend books you might give as a gift or read by the fire. (For more information on a book, or to place an order with Amazon through the MESH bookstore, click on the book title or cover.)

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Jon Alterman :: For those who despair reading still more about the Middle East but who find it frivolous to read something that has nothing to do with Semites at all, Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament is the answer. Auslander’s book is a hilarious romp through his adolescence in an Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, New York. Shoplifting, sexual aids, and premarital sex all make unlikely appearances in this book. The battle running through the book is the way in which the author’s deep religiosity plays off against his rather lax observance. Auslander believes fervently in a God who is endlessly tormenting him and punishing him for his excesses, and he just as fervently feels he should tell God to stick it. Auslander’s eye for hypocrisy, his impatience with religious pieties, and his underlying outrageousness make this book laugh-out-loud funny, page after page. One can only hope the names in this book were changed to protect the innocent.

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Daniel Byman :: God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Levering Lewis, is a quirky and wide-ranging book, covering the period of Islam’s rise and spread. Unlike most histories of this period, Lewis is superb not only at detailing the struggles within the Arab world and Muslim community, but also at placing Islam’s rise in context: we learn about imperial politics and dynamics that weakened Byzantium and the Sassanid empires and allowed the new religion to flourish and about Islam’s competition with parts of Christian Europe (in particular the Franks). Much of the book focuses on Spain, where Islam flourished as Muslims and Christians traded with, taught, and warred against each other.

Lewis’ writing is colorful yet clear, and he is an excellent storyteller. Scholars may note that there are large parts of the story that he doesn’t cover or mentions only briefly (Byzantium, in my view, gets short shrift, particularly in the centuries after Islam’s birth), but such gaps are inevitable for a book that covers such a vast period and region.

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Mark T. Clark :: Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda is a good book for the holidays. Naylor, a war correspondent for the Army Times, narrates the U.S. military operation in March 2002 against the Taliban and remnants of Al Qaeda in the Shahikot Valley in Afghanistan. It was the largest military operation in Afghanistan after the action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda at Tora Bora.

The well-written book is riveting for many reasons. First, it helps the reader understand the kinds of challenges the United States faces in fighting in Afghanistan; second, it shows some of the problems the United States has encountered while trying to avoid the mistakes of the Soviet Union; third, it reveals some early problems with Rumsfeld’s transformation plans; fourth, Naylor’s account demonstrates the difficulties of coordinating such a large operation with conventional and special operations forces in conjunction with CIA operatives and indigenous fighters. And fifth, it promises to help the reader anticipate some of the concerns we may have when the Obama administration shifts U.S. focus away from Iraq and towards the renewed conflict in Afghanistan.

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Steven A. Cook :: I recommend Amin Maalouf’s wonderful book about his family, Origins. The first 75-125 pages are a bit of a slog, but once over that hump, Maalouf’s work hums along as he traces the arc of his family’s history from Lebanon to the United States to Cuba to France and back to Cuba. Largely because Maalouf is a writer of historical fiction, the book captures all the complexities of identity without the post-modernist jargon that often clouds the issue.

One of the most poignant moments early on in the book is Maalouf’s discovery of a trunk filled with, among other items, his grandfather’s correspondence. Maalouf’s meticulous, yet also vaguely frantic efforts to organize the contents of the trunk represent the ambivalence of the assimilated émigré. He is content in the Parisian world of letters, but there is an inextricable pull to the ancestral village in the mountains that hang over Beirut. The scene launches Maalouf on a journey to understand not only his grandfather’s life, but also to comprehend the powerful nature of that force that connects him and his relatives to this place. The device for this meditation on identity and one’s place in the globalizing world is the tension between the lives of Boutros, Maalouf’s grandfather, and his brother Gebrayel who ventured from Lebanon in the late 19th century bound for New York City and ultimately Havana.

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Mark N. Katz :: I love travel narratives, and since this is a recommendation for holiday reading, I’d like to call attention to one of my favorite Middle East travel narratives: Eric Hansen’s Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea. Yemen is frequently in the news, and the news from there never seems to be good. Yet as visitors to Yemen (including myself) have discovered, there is much that is friendly and attractive about this country that is little known not only to Westerners, but also to other Arabs.

In this book, Hansen conveys a strong sense of the country’s rugged beauty and individualism. Though many outside Yemen fear the rise of radical Islam there, Hansen’s descriptions of two widespread Yemeni customs—chewing qat (a mildly narcotic leaf) and carrying arms—suggest that this is not a country that Al Qaeda or other puritanical Islamist movements will find easy to dominate. Hansen, though, also discusses Yemen’s many problems—which have largely grown worse since his book was published. More than anything else, Motoring with Mohammed provides a clear, understandable introduction to a country whose politics so often appear to be neither clear nor understandable.

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Martin Kramer :: The Institut du monde arabe in Paris is hosting a splendid show on Bonaparte in Egypt through March 19. I saw it, and couldn’t resist the sumptuously illustrated catalogue, Bonaparte et l’Égypte: feu et lumières. It’s the next best thing to being there, and a perfect souvenir or gift if you do get there over the holidays. Not only are all the exhibits shown and explained, but there are background essays by leading experts, including Henry Laurens on Egypt and the French Enlightenment, André Raymond on Mamluk Egypt, Abdul-Karim Rafeq on Bonaparte’s Syrian expedition, and more. Despite its title, the exhibition covers Franco-Egyptian relations right up to the digging of the Suez Canal. There’s lots to captivate, from a panoramic painting of the Battle of the Pyramids to a special bookcase designed to hold the Description de l’Égypte, on loan from the National Assembly. Safe to predict that two hundred years hence, our descendants won’t be celebrating the cultural legacy of the invasion of Iraq. That’s what makes the French great—even (and all too often) in defeat.

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Walter Laqueur :: Read The Yacoubian Building, a fascinating, astonishingly outspoken bestseller about the life of the dwellers of a well known building in Central Cairo dealing with the radicalization of Egyptian youth, the fate of the old elite, homosexuality, corruption and a great many other topics. The novel, written by a Chicago-trained Egyptian dentist, inspired a movie by the same name, as well as a television series (I liked the movie even better than the book).

Also to be looked at (even if your Hebrew is a little rusty) is David Kroyanker’s new book about the (Jerusalem) German Colony. The author, architect and historian of architecture and Jerusalem, has dealt earlier on with half a dozen other sections of Jerusalem. This book, heavily illustrated and well researched, covers the history of this part of Jerusalem since the first Templars arrived from southwest Germany in mid-19th century. About every other house gets a write-up or illustration. Both a coffee table book and a serious study of wide interest.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: The Foreigner’s Gift by Fouad Ajami, the most insightful book on the American encounter with Iraq, has three cardinal virtues. First, it takes the measure of the people of Iraq as no other book has done, because unlike almost all other Iraq books, this one is written by a native speaker of Arabic with a deep familiarity with the history and culture of the Middle East, who visited the country frequently and traveled widely in it after 2003. Second, as the book’s subtitle—The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq—indicates, the book deals in depth with the third party to the post-2003 events, describing how the rest of the Arab world worked to thwart the plans and crush the hopes of the other two. Third, the book is elegantly, often lyrically written. Anyone interested in the Middle East will find The Foreigner’s Gift a pleasure to read even as he or she will come to understand better both the frustrations and tragedies since 2003 and the more recent hopes for better days in Iraq.

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Michael Reynolds :: The best books for the holidays are ones that are accessible to a general reader yet manage to inform and open new vistas. My recommendation, the Chechen doctor Khassan Baiev’s memoir of life and war in Chechnya, The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire is more than just accessible, informative, and stimulating. It is one of the most powerful stories I have read, and was written by one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met.

The book’s title refers to Baiev’s determination during the wars of Chechnya to fulfill his Hippocratic obligation to treat all wounded and sick, Chechen fighters and Russian servicemen alike. Baiev’s loyalty to his profession’s code led both sides eventually to identify him as a traitor and seek retribution, forcing Baiev to flee Chechnya in 2000. Fortunately, he was able to find asylum in the United States, where he put his story to paper.

Baiev’s description of the laceration of Chechen society by war, radical Islamism, and crime in the years between 1994 and 2000 is exceptional in its intimacy, but the book offers more than a recounting of conflict in Chechnya. Through the story of his childhood and life in the former Soviet Union, Baiev allows the reader to see the Chechens, who more commonly are either celebrated cartoonishly as die hard opponents of Russian imperialism or pilloried wholesale as terrorists and gangsters, as people. Baiev’s witness of human savagery unsettles at the core, yet his own example of courage inspires and offers hope.

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Tamara Cofman Wittes :: Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India, by Kristian Davies, is beautifully produced, with many full-color plates and wonderful details of some great Orientalist paintings. But more importantly, Davies helps us understand how and why Western artists became fascinated with these “exotic” parts of the world, through a narrative that is mercifully free of academic aridity and political jaundice. His fresh approach resonates with his pure aesthetic enjoyment of the subject, and his delight at peeking into the worlds (the real world, and the ones in the artists’ minds) that the paintings portray.