Uranium Wars
According to legend, the great Iranian city of Isfahan was, until recently, the site of a public bath built by a medieval sage known as Sheikh Baha'i. The bath was designed in a way that its water supply remained constantly hot with a single magical ... more |
Asharq Al-Awsat Book Review: Cockroach
What is the most loathsome creature you could think of? To Franz Kafka, the Czech novelist, the answer was: a cockroach.
Now, imagine the whole world as a desolate back alley with row after row of dustbins brimming with putrefying rubbish inhabited ... more |
Grass: Untold Stories
The latest political crisis in Iran has highlighted the difficulties of covering a country that is both anxious to open itself to the outside world and afraid of doing so. These days the authorities are expelling the foreign media because they do not ... more |
The Lady from Tel Aviv
If you leave aside its modern setting, Rabai al-Madhoun's new novel would read as a tale out of the 1001 Nights. There is a narrator, not always reliable and often mischievously determined to put us on the wrong track, relating a story of love and ... more |
The Search for Al Qaeda
A visit to most bookshops during the past few years may well have convinced you that we now have all the books that anyone might want to read on Al Qaeda. Well, apparently not.
Many of the books on the subject turn out to be little more than a ... more |
Khomeini's Ghost
As the Obama administration prepares to engage Iran diplomatically, one question is paramount: Who are the men with whom the White House hopes to reach accommodation with?
Con Coughlin's new book "Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and ... more |
Iran's Longest Night in History
For thirty years, the regime in Iran has been a puzzle to most Iranians and a mystery wrapped in an enigma to the outside world. It has rejected almost every single tenet of Iranian culture, denied the best part of the Iranian history, and tried ... more |
Behind the Dam
Since the fall of the Baathist regime in Baghdad in 2003, hundreds of books have appeared on Iraq and the tragedies it has suffered over the past six decades. One frequent assumption in those books is that Iraq under monarchy was something of a terrestrial ... more |
Comedy of Divine Love
According to an old proverb, there are three cities in the life of every man or woman: the city of birth, the city of residence, and the city of which one dreams. This trinity of real and imagined existence means that we are all exiles, driven from one ... more |
The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad
Over the past decade or so, as the conflicts in the Middle East and the growing challenge of radical Islam have moved up the agenda of American foreign policy concerns, a new breed of analysts, born and raised in the region, has appeared o the scene. ... more |
The Persian Night
London, Asharq Al-Awsat- An anatomy of one of the most secretive regimes in the contemporary world, this essay traces the historic, religious, cultural, and ideological roots of the Khomeinist revolution.
It dissects a regime that has mobilized ... more |
A Path Out of the Desert
In recent days, many commentators of both left and right have noticed Senator Barack Obama's efforts to adopt as many of President George W Bush's policies as he can in the hope of winning the presidential election in November. Some commentators ... more |
Book Review: The Secular Conscience
You are contemplating doing something but decide not because you think it is wrong. How do you know it is wrong? If you were religious, you would probably say: because God forbade it. If you were merely a law-abiding citizen you might point out that ... more |
DECEPTION
This book by two prominent British journalists sets out as an indictment of the major Western powers, especially the United States, for supposedly deceiving the world about Pakistan's secret nuclear programme. The word ' conspiracy' in the book's subtitle ... more |
WORLD WAR IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
As the political microcosm in Washington holds its breath for General David Petraeus' report on the "surge" policy in Iraq, the regular folk would do well to read this broader report on the much larger struggle of which the battle for Baghdad is ... more |
The Great Troublemaker: Reflections on the Iranian Question
In his first major foreign policy speech, France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy singled out Iran as the centre of what could become the biggest crisis on the international scene.
What Sarkozy did not do, however, was to try to find out why this ... more |
THE ISLAMIST
During the past six months, more than 300 Muslims have been arrested in five European countries, and charged with involvement with terrorism. Most are young, often aged between 16 and 30. Almost all were born in Europe and hold the nationality of the ... more |
The Populist Illusion
"The enemy is destroyed," the voice on the radio shouted. "Our heroes are on their way to Tel Aviv. This was June 1967, and the voice, heard on The Voice of Arabs (Sawt al-Arab), from Cairo was that of Ahmad Saeed, Egyptian President Jamal Abdul-Nasser's ... more |
American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion
One of the nightmares of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the mullah who ruled Iran with an iron fist for a decade, was ha he called "the Americanization of Islam."
Khomeini feared that the infiltration of such an American ideas as the rule of law, democracy, ... more |
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