The contrast between Kuwait and the UAE today illustrates the vastly different possible futures facing the smaller states of the Gulf. Dubai's rulers dream of creating a truly global business center, a megalopolis of many millions attracting immigrants in great waves from near and far. Kuwait, meanwhile, has the most spirited and influential parliament in any of the oil-rich Gulf monarchies.In The Wages of Oil, Michael Herb provides a robust framework for ...

Osama bin Laden's former sister-in-law provides a penetrating, unusually intimate look into Saudi society and the bin Laden family's role within it, as well as the treatment of Saudi women.On September 11th, 2001, Carmen bin Ladin heard the news that the Twin Towers had been struck. She instinctively knew that her ex-brother-in-law was involved in these horrifying acts of terrorism, and her heart went out to America. She also knew that her life and the lives of her ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A gripping, triumphant adventure” (Los Angeles Times) from the bestselling author of The Circle—the incredible true story of a young Yemeni American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana’a by civil war.Mokhtar Alkhanshali is twenty-four and working as a doorman when he discovers the astonishing history of coffee and Yemen’s c...

“Saudi Arabia is more and more an irrational state—a place that spawns global terrorism even as it succumbs to an ancient and deeply seated isolationism, a kingdom led by a royal family that can’t get out of the way of its own greed. Is this the fulcrum we want the global economy to balance on?”In his explosive New York Times bestseller, See No Evil, former CIA operative Robert Baer exposed how Washington politics drastically compromised the CIA’s efforts to fight ...

From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering m...

A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia, the subject of the PBS documentary Letters from Baghdad, voiced by Tilda Swinton, and the major motion picture Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, and Robert Pattinson and directed by Werner HerzogGertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before Sheryl Sandberg. One of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century, she turned her back on Victoria...

Constantinople, the Turkish capital, the mysterious, ancient, ever-flourishing city, sacred alike to Christian and Mahometan, stands in its wondrous beauty upon European shores; yet Turkey is an Asiatic State. Her story belongs to Asia, the world of dreamy fancy and lurid legend, not of sober fact and accurately dated history. Hence one can speak of Turkey only after the fashion of her own clime, repeating the poetic fantasies with which her writers have adorned her early days, enjoying th...

"I loved this book when I read it in Arabic. The Penguin's Song is a classic novel of the Lebanese civil war."--Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman"Sixteen years after appearing in Daoud's native Lebanon, this elegiac novel has finally arrived in English . . . Daoud's novel seems to have inherted its sensibilities--its recursive and dense sentences, its damaged narrator, its poignant obsession with lost time--from Remembrance of Things Past o...

The history of Arabia naturally divides itself into three periods, the Ancient, the Military, and the Modern. The first carries us down to the age of Mohammed, and is called by the Arabs the Times of Ignorance. The second includes the wars of the Saracens, and the empire of the caliphs. The third embraces the events from the fall of the caliphate to the present day. The native writers who treat of the first period all flourished, as has been observed, posterior to the era of the Prophet. I...

Literally the concept of Al-Rasm means an attempt of picturing things and generally it means all the customs habits manners superstition and laws that limits the way of communication between the caliph (the successor) and the common people including his favorite. In the field of specialized study a book was written in the fifth century of Hijra by HilalIbnMuhsin Al-sababi called (Rusum Dar Al-khilapha) in addition to what was written by Al-Jahidh in his book "Al-taj in kings' morality" con...

The Hadhramis of Yemen have migrated for centuries in large numbers, establishing a diaspora that extends around the Indian Ocean, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States. This migration has deeply affected the host countries as well as Hadhramaut itself. Yet the region has not been able to use its population size, capabilities or resources to wield significant political influence in successive Yemeni regimes. This book examines the people of the Hadhrami diaspora, who travelled as religiou...

‘”From the very first moment they realize that the Hajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca—is among the duties of each and every Muslim, the faithful long to go.”This book presents Ilija Trojanow’s journey from Mumbai to Mecca in the tradition of the rihla, one of the oldest genres of classical Arabic literature, describing the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy sites of Islam. Every Muslim, regardless of geographical location, is implored by tradition to undertake the Hajj at least on...