Arab Military

Since the Second World War, Arab armed forces have consistently punched below their weight. They have lost many wars that by all rights they should have won, and in their best performances only ever achieved quite modest accomplishments. Over time, soldiers, scholars, and military experts have offered various explanations for this pattern.

In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

In just over a hundred years - from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 - the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time.

SHEIKH ROMANCE LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN. ANNABELLE WINTERS STYLE. THIS BOX SET CONTAINS: SURROGATE FOR THE SHEIKH: The Teacher from Tulsa (267 pages) STARS FOR THE SHEIKH: The Astrologer from Albuquerque (356 pages) SHELTER FOR THE SHEIKH: The Widow from Wyoming (277 pages) SHARED FOR THE SHEIKH: The Professor from Pittsburgh (245 pages) ASSASSIN FOR THE SHEIKH: The Agent from Alabama (227 pages) PRIVILEGE FOR THE SHEIKH: The Librarian from Louisiana (241 pages) SURROGATE FOR THE SHEIKH Oklahoma schoolteacher Gracie Garner will be surrogate to a mysterious Sheikh's first-born child. There's ...

“A remarkable new history” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Magazine) of a decade aflame—and what we can learn from its embers From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies...

In the seventh and eighth centuries AD, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest Asia, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. These Arab conquests followed immediately after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 632. By this time, against all the odds, he had managed to unite the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. The Muslim conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Arab armies had carved out an Islamic empire which, in size and population, rivalled that of Rome at its zenith.

An American officer presents an invaluable handbook for dealing with cultural issues in the Middle East during military operations....

When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs' fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the Prophet. In October 1918, Faisal, Lawrence, and the Arabs victoriously entered Damascus, where they declared a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. At the Paris Peace Conference, Faisal won the support of President Woodrow Wilson.

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition; it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty, to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced.

Barely a year after the self-immolation of a young fruit seller in Tunisia, a vast wave of popular protest has convulsed the Middle East, overthrowing long-ruling dictators and transforming the region’s politics almost beyond recognition. But the biggest transformations of what has been labeled as the “Arab Spring” are yet to come. An insider to both American policy and the world of the Arab public, Marc Lynch shows that the fall of particular leaders is but the least of the changes that will emerge from months of unrest.

Going far beyond a military account, Segev re-creates the crisis in Israel before 1967, showing how economic recession, a full grasp of the Holocaust's horrors, and the dire threats made by neighbor states combined to produce a climate of apocalypse. He depicts the country's bravado after its victory and the mood revealed in a popular joke in which one soldier says to his friend, "Let's take over Cairo". The friend replies, "Then what shall we do in the afternoon?"

‘Essential reading for anyone interested in Turkey and its future.’ Literary Review ‘Essential reading full stop.’ Peter Frankopan ‘It is a must.’ The Times Who is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and how did he lead a democracy on the fringe of Europe into dictatorship? How has chaos in the...

A "glorious, humane novel" (The Observer) about the Egyptian revolution, taking us inside the battle raging between those in power and those prepared to lay down their lives in the defense of freedom—this globally-acclaimed narrative from one of the foremost writers in the Arab world is still...

The study of past military figures provides a useful aid to meeting the leadership challenges today in the most demanding profession; the profession of arms. We may distil from the past lessons to apply now and into the future. Australians were engaged in military leadership in earnest at the time of Federation in the Second Boer War. This book is a collection of profiles of military leaders in challenging situations from the late 1890s to the present day, 120 years. Influenced by the writings of Homer, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, leadership is often explained in terms of qualities and...

The judging panel of the Hebrew Writers Association and Tamuz Publishing House unanimously chose The Arab Within as the best prose book for the year 2000. “Against a background of this decade’s political events, there unfolds a creative and fascinating tale, which slowly penetrates the membrane of Israel’s sanity, to extract truths that pluck at the chords of our soul.” (The judging panel) From the book: Nadia’s words rose and floated in his head. As long as he doesn’t meet the victim face to face, he’ll never know who it was and now that he has details of the man’s private ...

A searing debut novel from the award-winning author of You Know When the Men are Gone, about jealousy, the unpredictable path of friendship, and the secrets kept in marriage, all set within the U.S. expat community of the Middle East during the rise of the Arab Spring. Both Cassie Hugo and...

Follow Hagar Khalifa as she navigates growing up between two worlds. Caught between an American Christian mother and an Egyptian Muslim father, Hagar searches for her identity as she navigates the public Egyptian school system and subsequently the private American one. As she explores the two worlds, she discovers her ambition to immigrate to the United States and join the U.S. Army. As she navigates extreme challenges of growing up between these two worlds, join Hagar in the second novel of the Nadiri series to discover her journey as she becomes a U.S. Army officer, joins a university in ...