Selected by Fred Rhodes

THE WAR FOR PALESTINE

Rewriting the History of 1948

Edited by Eugene L Rogan and Avi Shlaim

Published by Cambridge University Press

ISBN 0 521 79139 1 price ?37.50

The 1948 Palestine War was one of the most momentous events in the history of the contemporary Middle East. It was the last and most dramatic phase in the struggle for Palestine and it ended in triumph and tragedy: triumph for the Israelis and tragedy for the Arabs. The subsequent history of the Middle East was punctuated by six other Arab-Israeli wars, although none of them had such far-reaching consequences and none generated so much controversy.

Israelis call the 1948 War the ?War of Independence’, while the Arabs call it Al Nakba or ?the disaster.’ The conventional Israeli version portrays 1948 as an unequal struggle between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath, as a desperate, heroic and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. In this version, all the surrounding Arab states sent their armies into Palestine to strangle the Jewish state at birth, and the Palestinians left the country on orders from their own leaders and in the expectation of a triumphal return.

Since the late 1980s, however, a group of Israeli ?new historians’ or revisionist historians have challenged many of the claims surrounding the birth of the state of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war.

This volume was conceived as a contribution to the ongoing debate about 1948. It re-examines the role of all the participants in the Palestine War on the basis of archival sources where they exist, contemporary reports, memoirs, and other primary sources. The collection brings together leading Israeli new historians with prominent Arab and western scholars of the Middle East who revisit 1948 from the perspective of the countries involved in the war. The result is a book which is rich in new material and new insights and which enhances considerably our understanding of the historical roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

PHARAOHS OF THE SUN

Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen

Edited by Rita E Freed, Yvonne J Markowitz, Sue H D’Auria

Published by Thames and Hudson
ISBN 0 500 05099 6 price ?36.00 hardback

Visionary, zealot, dreamer, iconoclast: the pharaoh Akhenaten has been called all of these. Some credit him with the introduction of monotheism. Others have labelled him a criminal and a heretic. All agree that he revolutionised Egyptian art and religious practice. In a reign lasting only 17 years (1353-1336 BC), he rejected Egypt’s age-old traditions and institutions, building a new capital city in a remote region of the Nile valley to serve his personal ideology. At the centre of his beliefs was Aten, the sole god, the light emanating from the sun. Akhenaten’s queen, Nefertiti, enjoyed unprecedented power and may have reigned both with and after him. Her compelling image appears throughout the city and is lasting testimony to her influence. With the eventual accession of Tutankhamen, ? perhaps Akhenaten’s son ? to the throne, the old gods and practices were reinstated and Akhenaten’s experiment was abandoned.

Few figures in history evoke the curiosity or command the attention that Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamen do. Although they lived 3,500 years ago, their impact on religion, history, art, and literature reverberates to this day.

The international intrigue, politics, romance, and mystery that marked their lives seem familiar to us. Because a wealth of new information has emerged about these luminaries, the people who served them, the monuments they erected, and the world they influenced, it is fitting and timely that their period be explored and celebrated in Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen.

 

Order books through The Middle East Books Dept., IC Publications, 7 Coldbath Square, London EC1R 4LQ, UK. Telephone: +44 (0)207 713 7711 Fax: +44 (0)207 713 7898. Orders should include the nine-digit ISBN, book title, price and postage for each book — UK ?3, Europe (airmail) ?5, Rest of World (airmail) ?10. Payment must accompany each order, by sterling cheque drawn on a UK bank and made payable to IC Publications Ltd or by credit card giving number and expiry date, together with the cardholder’s name, address and telephone or facsimile number.

THE ORIGINS OF THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE

The US, Britain and Nasser’s Egypt, 1953-57

By Ray Takeyh published by Macmillan Press

ISBN 0 333 80055 9 price ?42.50

This book explores the relationship between the United States and Egypt from 1953 to 1957. In the 1950s, the Middle East saw a unique interplay among policies, commitments, and conflicts, including American Cold War strategies, local pressures for self-determination, Soviet plans for expansion, the remnants of British colonialism and the apparently intractable Arab-Israeli conflict. All of these elements played a role in the United States’ policy as it sought to secure the support of nationalist forces in the region in its struggle against the Soviet Union.

The American policy toward the Middle East must be viewed in the context of Cold War rivalry, in which the Eisenhower administration sought to incorporate the Arab world in its global alliance network. In pursuit of this aim, the American policy-makers recognised the potency of regional nationalism and the importance of Egypt in determining the direction of Arab politics. Accordingly, the Eisenhower administration sought to guide the Egyptian regime along lines conducive to its Cold War objectives.

However, the focal point of Egypt’s policy was domination of the Middle East through lessening the impact of outside powers. To achieve its aspirations, Cairo sought to exploit the Arab nationalist sentiments that pervaded the region. By the 1950s, Egypt’s historical leadership of the Arab world allowed Gamal Abdul Nasser to effectively claim Arab nationalism and utilise it as an instrument of Egypt’s area hegemony. Thus, while the American policy-makers hoped to employ Egypt’s influence as a barrier to Soviet subversion, Cairo sought to eliminate external influences and mobilise Arab resources behind its drive for regional leadership. The inherent conflict between a superpower focused on curbing Soviet moves and a local regime preoccupied with regional challenges eventually caused a breakdown In US-Egyptian relations.

The other facet of this study is an assessment of Anglo-American relations and the role that Britain played in the Eisenhower administration’s conception of Middle East security.

STATIONS OF DESIRE

One of the great mystics of all time, Muhyiddin Ibn Al’Arabi was a prolific author who wrote on every aspect of medieval Islamic thought. Among the most widely read of his works, and certainly his most famous collection of poems, was his volume of odes, The Translator of Desires (Tuquman Al Ashwaq), which is regarded as a masterpiece of Arabic and Sufi love poetry

Michael Sells’s Stations of Desire contains the first translations of Ibn ’Arabi’s Tuquman into modern poetic English. Sells, the translator of the highly praised volume of pre-Islamic qasidas, Desert Tracings, carries into his translations the supple, resonant quality of the original Arabic, so that the poems come to robust life in English. In addition to a substantial selection of the odes themselves, Sells provides an insightful introduction that makes this work accessible to contemporary readers, as it locates the poems within the history of Arabic poetics and the tradition of Sufi mysticism. The book also includes a section of Sells’s original poems, which are modelled on the Tuquman and serve as further commentary to the medieval odes and their extension into the present climate of poetry.

BLOOD-DARK TRACK: A Family History

By Joseph O’Neill published by Granta Books

ISBN 1 86207 288 4 price ?16.99 hardback

The thrilling history of Joseph O’Neill’s grandfathers is a narrative of murder, paranoia, espionage and fear, with one of the most notorious political killings in pre-war Ireland playing a key role in its characters’ lives.

Joseph O’Neill’s grandfathers ? one Irish, one Turkish ? were both imprisoned during the Second World War. His Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA, and was interned with hundreds of his comrades by de Valera’s government. O’Neill’s other grandfather, a debonair hotelier from the tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine ? where he was travelling to buy lemons ? on suspicion of being an Axis spy.

When Joseph O’Neill set out to investigate the imprisonment of his two grandfathers, which had always been veiled by family silences, he found himself assessing his grandfathers in new ways, learning about their characters from their diaries and letters of the time, and from friends and colleagues who had known them in their youth. He also found himself having to come to terms with violence, with a legacy of fierce commitment and political blindness, with the enchanting power of nationalism and the fear and complicity of the bystander.

Joseph O’Neill was changed by what he found, and he has written a remarkable book about the ties and limits of kinship. With great tact, he sets the stories of individuals against the reality of the last century’s most inhuman events; Blood-Dark Track brings the darker moments of history to vivid life.

TWO ANDALUSIAN PHILOSOPHERS: The Story Of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan

Anatomy of a Failed Policy

By Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl and

The Definitive Statement

By Abu’I Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd, translated from the Arabic by Jim Colville

Published by Kegan Paul International

ISBN: 0 7103 06431 price ?65.00 hardback

The Story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan is described by its author, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, as an introduction to the philosophy or ?wisdom’ intimated by one of the most renowned philosophers of Islam, the sheikh and master, Abu ’Ah ibn Sina.

The book establishes its frame of reference with a short and selective critique of Islamic philosophy before introducing the narrative framework of a boy of obscure origins reared by a gazelle on a desert island, without human contact. As the boy gradually becomes aware of his surroundings, he begins to understand that he is somehow different from the other animals, superior by virtue of the technical advantages he can realise with his hands.

At the age of seven, the shock of the gazelle’s death sets the boy upon the quest which is the book’s central theme: the search for the spirit of life. Through sustained observation and reflection, his natural intelligence, ingenuity and increasingly more refined reasoning, he acquires mastery of the environment and expertise in the natural sciences.

In parallel with this scientific knowledge, the eponymous Hayy ibn Yaqzan ? i.e., ?a living son of consciousness’ ? reasons from the diversity of the world to its wholeness and from the particular objects of sensory perception to an abstract epistemology of universal forms. He infers the existence of God as both the necessary, primary and non-corporeal cause of the universe and its prime mover. Along the way, he deals with many of the major issues of metaphysics. In short, he becomes a philosopher.

The Definitive Statement, argues persuasively for the independence of philosophy from religion; in so doing, it provides a succinct critique of traditional Islamic thought and an indictment of established theology. In this respect, The Definitive Statement covers much of the same ground as the latter part of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, although in a more closely argued way.

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