Middle East

The Middle East (also called the Mid East) is a transcontinental region centered on Western Asia.

The term "Middle East" usually includes the Levant countries (Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Palestinian territories), the Arabian Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen), Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Some definitions may include the Maghreb (Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia), Afghanistan, Pakistan, and/or Cyprus.

The corresponding adjective is Middle-Eastern and the derived noun is Middle-Easterner. Formerly, the Eurocentric synonym Near East (as oppo ...more

Middle East Books

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1)

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and The Creation of the Modern Middle East

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

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Lists

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

International development

227 books — 234 voters

When the Future Comes Too Soon by Selina Siak Chin Yoke

The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds by Selina Siak Chin Yoke

International Women: Female Leads From All Over the World

732 books — 171 voters

جاسوس من أجل لا أحد . ستة عشر عاماً في المخابرات السورية by صنيب، باسل محمد روحي. ‏باسل...

La Biographie Du Prophète Mouhammad, Le Nectar Cacheté by Ar-Rahik

Best Books for Understanding Middle Eastern Culture

144 books — 44 voters

Under a Crescent Moon by Julia Juwairiah Simpson-Urr...

Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan Al-Shaykh

At the Drop of a Veil by Marianne Alireza

Fiction/memoirs set in Saudi Arabia

28 books — 29 voters

History through Novels: Pre-1900s Middle East

100 books — 61 voters

The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress by Mark Twain

Books Set in Israel

267 books — 75 voters

Featured News & Interviews

Readers' Most Anticipated Books for March

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Quotes Tagged “Middle East”

“ America could leave the Middle East, thought Gabriel, but the Middle East would follow it home. ”
― Daniel Silva

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“ So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Nava So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase. ...more ”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

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