Five of the best books to understand Middle Eastern Muslims

Donna Lee Bowen, Professor Emerita of Political Science and Near Eastern Studies at Brigham Young University, is co-editor of Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East.

At Shepherd she taggd five of the best books to understand Middle Easterners and their lives in the Muslim Middle East. One title on the list:

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East by Kim Ghattas

Over the past forty-plus years, the Middle East has seen more than its due of wars and chaos. Kim Ghattas, a Lebanese journalist who currently writes for The Atlantic, writes in Black Wave of the impact throughout the Middle East of three heavy-duty events—the fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, the attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca by a Saudi Arabian fundamentalist, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and gives a sense of the why and the how behind the events she documents.

Ghattas tracks the impact of these events throughout Iran and Afghanistan but also in Pakistan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. She handles the sheer volume of material by focusing on the repression of regimes and the ideologies they represent as seen through the voices of novelists, journalists, intellectuals, and religious figures. Her account emphasizes issues often seen as marginal to the politics of the region, such as dialectical differences and actresses choosing to veil, but which, under examination, prove to be meaningful as dictators use social issues to keep their political pots boiling.

One of my favorite sections was the Pakistani woman news announcer who began her career as a top-notch star, then gradually lost freedom to dress as she chose, and then even to appear on air. I was also fascinated by an unconventional story of love and free speech. A well-known Egyptian literature professor’s life was upended by conservative Muslim scholars critical of his publications. In court, they won cases that declared that in looking at the origins of Islam through a critical eye, he was an apostate under Islamic law. They undermined his private life by ruling that—no longer considered a Muslim—he could no longer be married to his wife, a Muslim woman.

All of these stories help readers understand the everyday impact the increasing political Islamization had on Egyptians, Pakistanis, and other Middle Easterners.

Read about the other books on Bowen's list.

--Marshal Zeringue