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A searing exploration of authoritarianism in the Middle East through the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s years in power in Cold War–era Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the larger-than-life Egyptian president who ruled for eighteen years between the coup d’état he led in 1952 and his death in 1970, is best known for wresting the Suez Canal from the British and French empires and befriending such iconic revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Yet there is a darker side to Nasser’s regime. He was a brutal authoritarian, whose legacy, Alex Rowell argues, lies at the heart of the violent and repressive order that still prevails throughout the Arab world today. We Are Your Soldiers examines seven countries—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya—weaving the epic tale of Nasser’s dramatic encounters with each to reassess his impact in the Arab sphere. These engagements were often drenched in blood and destruction, leaving deep scars that endure to the present. Rowell shows how the Nasser years were crucial to the formation of regimes as varied as Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt. Crushing democracy at home while launching wars and slaying opponents abroad, Nasser ushered in the long political winter from which the region is still yet to emerge. Drawing on a deep reading of Arabic sources, extensive interviews, and material never before published in English, Rowell offers a necessary reexamination of Nasser’s rule and a new understanding of the politics of the Middle East.
Nasser is a definitive and engaging portrait of a man who stood at the center of this continuing clash in the Middle East. Since the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 there has been no ideology to capture the imagination of the Arab world except Islamic fundamentalism. Any sense of completely secular Arab states ended with him and what we see today happening in the Middle East is a direct result of Western opposition to Nasser's strategies and ideals. Nasser is a fascinating figure fraught with dilemmas. With the CIA continually trying to undermine him, Nasser threw his lot in with the Soviet Union, even though he was fervently anti-Communist. Nasser wanted to build up a military on par with Israel's, but didn't want either the '56 or '67 wars. This was a man who was a dictator, but also a popular leader with an ideology which appealed to most of the Arab people and bound them together. While he was alive, there was a brief chance of actual Arab unity producing common, honest, and incorruptible governments throughout the region. More than ever, the Arab world is anti-Western and teetering on disaster, and this examination of Nasser's life is tantamount to understanding whether the interests of the West and the Arab world are reconcilable.
Abu Nuwas, the pre-eminent bacchic bard of the classical Arabic canon, was loved and reviled in equal measure for his lyrical celebration of Abbasid Baghdad's dissolute nightlife, his cutting satires of religion and the clergy, and the extraordinary range and virtuosity of his literary talent. Vintage Humour contains approximately 120 translations, each replicating the monorhyme scheme of the originals, with commentary where appropriate, a brief history of the poet's life and times, and a glossary of the key themes, motifs, and running jokes of the poems themselves. Based on extensive research with both Arabic and English source materials, Vintage Humour is an illuminating collection, of interest to both general and informed readers with an interest in Islamic studies, Arabic literature, and the history of Iraq and the Middle East.
Based on a decade of research, including in-depth interviews with many leading figures in the story, this edition is essential for anyone who wants to understand the roots of the turmoil engulfing the Middle East, from civil wars to the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
A historical study of the 1925 revolt against French rule in Syria, and how it established a new popular nationalism that helped shape the Middle East. The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 was the first mass movement against colonial rule in the Middle East. Mobilizing peasants, workers, and army veterans, it was also the region’s largest and longest-lasting anti-colonial insurgency during the inter-war period. Though the revolt failed to liberate Syria from French occupation, it provided a model of popular nationalism and resistance that remains potent in the Middle East today. Each subsequent Arab uprising against foreign rule has repeated the language and tactics of the Great Syrian Revolt. In this work, Michael Provence uses newly released secret colonial intelligence sources, neglected memoirs, and popular memory to tell the story of the revolt from the perspective of its participants. He shows how Ottoman-subsidized military education created a generation of leaders who rebelled against both the French Mandate rulers of Syria and the Syrian elite who helped the colonial regime. This new popular nationalism was unprecedented in the Arab world. Provence shows compellingly that the Great Syrian Revolt was a formative event in shaping the modern Middle East.
Kristian Gustafson's Hostile Intent reexamines one of the most controversial chapters in U.S. intelligence history, the Central Intelligence Agency's covert operations in Chile from 1964 to 1974. At the request of successive U.S. presidents, the CIA in conjunction with the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency first acted to prevent Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from becoming the democratically elected president of his country and then tried to undermine his government once he was in office. Allende's government eventually fell in a bloody military coup on September 11, 1973. President Richard Nixon's administration and corporate interests were not sorry to see him go, but did U.S. covert operations actually play a decisive role in Allende's downfall? The declassification of thousands of U.S. government documents over the last several years demands that historians take a new look. Since 1973, most observers have maintained that U.S. machinations were responsible for the success of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's coup that forced Allende's fall and suicide. This assessment has been based on a thin documentary record of U.S. activity, the myth of an all-powerful CIA, and the CIA's checkered history of covert action in Latin America. However, Gustafson convincingly shows the conventional wisdom about the impact of U.S. actions is badly flawed. His meticulous research is based upon an intensive examination of previously unavailable U.S. records as well as interviews with key figures. Hostile Intent is the most comprehensive account to date of U.S. involvement in Chile, and its provocative reinterpretation of this involvement will shape all future debates.
A unique and revealing portrait of Saddam Hussein's Iraq which was every bit as authoritarian and brutal as Stalin's Russia or Mao's China.
Nasser's Gamble draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as "my Vietnam." Jesse Ferris argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967. Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi-Egyptian struggle over Yemen, Ferris demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the "Arab Cold War" set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam. Bold and provocative, Nasser's Gamble brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.
Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (1919–1990) is the most popular and prolific writer of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century. The Politics of Melodrama is the first book to take on this giant of Arabic fiction and consider both his outsized cultural influence and consequential position in Egyptian politics. Jonathan Smolin frames the work of Abdel Kouddous not only as romantic melodrama, but as an entirely new model of Arabic fiction as dissent—contesting the fate of the 1952 revolution, condemning Nasser's betrayal of democracy, and grappling with depths of guilt at what Egypt had become. Smolin reveals the surprisingly close relationship between the famed writer and Nasser. He offers a new reading of fiction during the Nasser era that inserts the importance of non-elite culture in the history of the period and reevaluates the production of Nasserism. Unearthing Nasser's repeated interventions both to shape the work of Abdel Kouddous and to discipline him personally, this book demonstrates how the media and popular fiction became spaces of negotiation between the intellectual and the state, contesting Nasser and his politics during a period that has been widely assumed to be devoid of dissent.