Showing titles in Middle East

Ahed Tamimi is a world-renowned Palestinian activist, born and raised in the small West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, which became a center of the resistance to Israeli occupation when an illegal, Jewish-only settlement blocked off its community spring. Tamimi came of age participating in nonviolent demonstrations against this action and the occupation at large. Her global renown reached an apex in December 2017, when, at sixteen years old, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested.

Land Between the Rivers is the result of ten years of research, writing, and thinking about the subject. It is an enormous topic: five thousand years, beginning with Gilgamesh at the edge of historical time. It is a big topic in another way. More than anywhere else, the famous Land Between the Rivers, where civilization was born, where East and West have mixed and clashed since long before Alexander, has led an existence that could be called, from a certain perspective, a history of the world.

As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps in 1948, Elias began a long struggle with how to respond. In Blood Brothers, he blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, touching on questions such as: What behind-the-scenes politics touched off the turmoil in the Middle East?

A timely and unprecedented examination of how the modern Middle East unravelled and why it started with the pivotal year of 1979. 'What happened to us?' For decades, the question has haunted the Arab and Muslim world, heard across Iran and Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and in the author's home country of Lebanon. Was it always so? When did the extremism, intolerance and bloodletting of today displace the region's cultural promise and diversity?

This riveting narrative explores the lives of six remarkable female pharaohs, from Hatshepsut to Cleopatra - women who ruled with real power - and shines a piercing light on our own perceptions of women in power today. Female rulers are a rare phenomenon - but thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, women reigned supreme. But throughout human history, women in positions of power were more often used as political pawns in a male-dominated society. What was so special about ancient Egypt that provided women this kind of access to the highest political office?

Thirty-five-year-old Mohammed bin Salman's sudden rise stunned the world. Political and business leaders flew out to meet with the crown prince and came away convinced that his desire to reform the kingdom was sincere. He spoke passionately about bringing women into the workforce and toning down Saudi Arabia's restrictive Islamic law. He lifted the ban on women driving and explored investments in Silicon Valley. But 'MBS' began to betray an erratic interior beneath the polish laid on by scores of consultants and public relations experts like McKinsey & Company.

Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion dollar question: How is it that Israel - a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources - produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the UK?

1948, Jerusalem. Zakia is forced to flee the only home she’s ever known as war rips through the leafy streets and the bustling spice-filled souqs. Taking just one suitcase, Zakia thinks she’ll be able to return soon. But within weeks, she realizes she won’t be allowed back to her beloved homeland.

Cleopatra: lover, seductress, and Egypt's greatest queen. A woman more myth than history, immortalized in poetry, drama, music, art, and film. She captivated Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, the two greatest Romans of the day, and died in a blaze of glory, with an asp clasped to her breast - or so the legend tells us. But the real-life story of the historical Cleopatra VII is even more compelling. She was the last of seven Cleopatras who ruled Egypt before it was subsumed into the Roman Empire. These extraordinary women keep a close grip on power in the wealthiest country of the ancient world.

With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several articles he wrote while researching that book as well as many that he's written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread.

In just over a hundred years - from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 - the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time.

For more than two centuries, Egypt was ruled by the most powerful, successful and richest dynasty of kings in its long end epic history. They included the female king Hatshepsut, the warrior kings Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, the religious radical Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti, and most famously of all for the wealth of his tomb the short-lived boy king Tutankhamun. The power and riches of the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty came at enormous cost to Egypt's enemies and most of its people.

A hundred years ago, a team of archaeologists in the Valley of the Kings made a remarkable discovery: a near-complete royal burial, an ancient mummy and golden riches beyond imagination. The lost tomb of Tutankhamun ignited a media frenzy, propelled into overdrive by rumours of a deadly ancient curse. But amid the hysteria, many stories—including that of Tutankhamun himself—were distorted or forgotten. Tutankhamun: Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma takes a familiar tale and turns on its head.

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to two percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. This is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.

تفرد الدكتور والمفكر علي الوردي في طرح بعض الإشكاليات والمواضيع الاجتماعية الهامة والتي كان الناس يأخذونها مأخذ اليقين، في هذا الكتاب يُناقش بعض القيم التي تهدد البنية الاجتماعية وتتسبب في تآكل دور المدينة في مواجهة زحف الريف.

Do you know that the ancient Egyptians believed that people were made out of clay by their river god? For eons, the wisdom cultivated by the Egyptian people has been extolled time and time again. These timeless myths are fountains of insight and, many would argue, beacons of light that can shatter the darkness of ignorance. For those of you that are ready and willing to receive these ancient messages, your time has come. All you need to do is start listening. Then the wisdom of Thoth will begin to stir inside you.

Using the writings of Cosmas and a wealth of other historical and archaeological evidence from the period, eminent historian G. W. Bowersock carefully reconstructs this fascinating but overlooked chapter in pre-Islamic Arabian history. The flashpoint of the war, Bowersock tells us, occurred when Yusuf, the Jewish king of Himyar, massacred hundreds of Christians living in Najran. The Christian ruler of Ethiopia, Kaleb, urged on by the Byzantine emperor Justin, led a force of 120,000 men across the Red Sea to defeat Yusuf.

Dr Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist, specialising in forensic techniques to research the paths of Vikings who came to rest in British soil. By examining teeth that are now more than 1,000 years old, she can determine childhood diet and thereby where a person was likely born. With radiocarbon dating, she can ascertain a death date down to the range of a few years. And her research offers new visions of the likely roles of women and children in Viking culture.

In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising - an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis. Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria's tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged....

In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly 20 years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in.