So with all the stuff going on recently in Gaza and Iran, and with all the islamophobic comments I’ve been seeing recently on youtube, I realized I really didn’t know as much about middle eastern history as I’d like to. I did learn some in history class, which was decent enough and fortunately lacked chuddish overtones, but I’d like to know much more since there was so much they could fit into the course. Does anyone have good suggestions? Doesn’t have to be explicitly communist, but I would prefer if the author wasn’t a raging midwest armybro pro-iraq war chud.
Thanks in advance!
Adnan Husain knows about that stuff. Hes got a good reading list there.
I was reading Eurocentrism. It’s not specifically about the Middle East. But the author writes a lot about a materialist history of West Asia. It was in Hakim’s recommended reading list, btw.
Samir Amin can be exceptionally critical of Islam. But he’s half-Egyptian, and I’m fully white, and so probably he has a voice to be critical. I was just taken aback by some of the things he wrote.
I would recommend “The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule: 1516-1800” by Jane Hathaway, the book itself is very good but particularly it has stellar bibliography which you can consult for any particular topic that might catch your interest in the overview.
Here’s a Soviet book about the history of the Arab countries from the beginning of Ottoman rule in the 1500s to 1918.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I’ll definitely take a look at some of these.
