The End of Modern History in the Middle East

by Lewis, Bernard

• ISBN13: 9780817912949
• ISBN10: 0817912940
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-01
• Publisher: INGRAM

Summary

With the ending of global strategic confrontation between superpowers, those in the Middle East must adjust to a new reality: to accept final responsibility for their own affairs, to make and recognize their mistakes, and to accept the consequences. In The End of Modern History in the Middle East,Bernard Lewis discusses the future of the region in this new, postimperialist era. For each and every country and for the region as a whole, he explains, there is a range of alternative futures: at one end, cooperation and progress; at the other, a vicious circle of poverty and ignorance. The author examines in detail the issues most critical to the region#x19;s future. He describes oil as the current, most important export to the outside world from the Middle East but warns that technology will eventually make it obsolete, leaving those who depend solely on oil revenues with a bleak future. The three factors that could most help transform the Middle East, according to Lewis, are Turkey, Israel, and women. He also argues that there is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other to provide the basis for an advance toward freedom in the true sense of that word and to achieve the social, cultural, and scientific changes necessary to bring the Middle East into line with the developed countries of both West and East.

Author Biography

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. A widely read expert on the Middle East, he is regarded as one of the West's leading scholars on the region. He has published numerous books, the most recent of which he coauthored with Buntzie Ellis Churchill, Islam: The Religion and the People.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction: The Historian's Vision: The Craft of Bernard Lewis	p. xvii
The End of Modern History in the Middle East	p. 1
Propaganda in the Middle East	p. 69
Iran: Haman or Cyrus?	p. 133
The New Anti-Semitism First Religion, Then Race, Then What?	p. 155
About the Author	p. 177
About the Hoover Institution's Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order	p. 178
Index	p. 179
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