The Middle East today

Treating the area from Turkey to Iran and Egypt, the author devotes the initial chapters to a general treatment of Islam, the Ottomans, the relations between the Middle East and the West before and after World War I, and Arab nationalism. Each country is then treated separately. This new edition is up to date Iran through the establishment of the Islamic Republic and Lebanon through the 1982 Israeli invasion. The author places the region's contemporary politics in historical perspective. This, of course, is necessary to the understanding of politics anywhere, but is especially so in the Middle East. Not widespread in the United States, knowledge of the region's past is all the more important because the political culture of the Middle East is vastly different from that of the Western democracies. We are prone to believe that democratic patterns are standard, if not for the politics of the present, then of the future. But judgments and expectations shaped thus by the success of the American experiment are highly deceptive. True, the heterogeneity of the United States is greater even than that of the Middle East, but the consensus achieved through the remarkable phenomenon of American nationhood is in the Middle East an impossibility. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Sep. 21, 2016).