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Rating: 
Summary: A whirlwind account
Review: A wonderful survey of Middle Eastern history from the 1800s to late 1950s. A very interesting combination of scholarship and sweeping popular history. The countries covered include Syria, Israel, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon. The rest of the middle east, although mentioned intermittedly is ignored. Many usually forgotten episodes are illuminated here. For instance special coverage is given to Kings Faisal and Hussein. Coverage is also given to the oft ignored genocide committed against the Christian Assyrians by the Iraqis and special reference compares it to the similar genocide against the Armenians following World War Two. The author gives coverage to Mr. Antonious's assertion of an `Arab Awakening' and the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ba'athist movements is given attention. Of special interest is the coverage given to the drawing and re-drawing of the middle East's maps thus creating problems that persist to this day. This is the thesis of the volume, namely that western interference in the mapping of the middle east and politics of the middle east has created many of the problems that exist to this day. This is not entirely proved since organizations like the Ba'athists and the Pan-Arabism of Nasser were home grown ideologies that borrowed from European Social ideals. In the end probably the greatest left-overs of the foreign involvement in the middle east is the Kingdom of Jordan, which was a figment of British imagination that has taken hold. Seth J. Frantzman
Rating:
Summary: A whirlwind account
Review: A wonderful survey of Middle Eastern history from the 1800s to late 1950s. A very interesting combination of scholarship and sweeping popular history. The countries covered include Syria, Israel, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon. The rest of the middle east, although mentioned intermittedly is ignored. Many usually forgotten episodes are illuminated here. For instance special coverage is given to Kings Faisal and Hussein. Coverage is also given to the oft ignored genocide committed against the Christian Assyrians by the Iraqis and special reference compares it to the similar genocide against the Armenians following World War Two. The author gives coverage to Mr. Antonious's assertion of an 'Arab Awakening' and the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ba'athist movements is given attention. Of special interest is the coverage given to the drawing and re-drawing of the middle East's maps thus creating problems that persist to this day. This is the thesis of the volume, namely that western interference in the mapping of the middle east and politics of the middle east has created many of the problems that exist to this day. This is not entirely proved since organizations like the Ba'athists and the Pan-Arabism of Nasser were home grown ideologies that borrowed from European Social ideals. In the end probably the greatest left-overs of the foreign involvement in the middle east is the Kingdom of Jordan, which was a figment of British imagination that has taken hold. Seth J. Frantzman
Rating:
Summary: A lucid and compelling history
Review: It is an excellent history of the Middle East (Egypt to Iran) from 1900 to 2001.
As with so many of Keay's works it is immensely readable. A must for anyone seeking a clearer understanding of this complex subject.
Rating:
Summary: "Into this melee now boldly blundered"
Review: It is the British in Eygpt in 1950 that boldly blundered. This is after a British official, obsessing over a social slight, came to the stark realization that "we are loathed here." The sad and vexing parallels between the history covered in Sowing the Wind and today's Middle-East are striking and make Mr. Keay's work a critical read. To pluck but one: "Baghdad was the first city of any consequence to be captured by the British in the Second World War." In the First, the conquest cost 100,000 lives and consumed three years. In the Second, it "cost the British 34 lives and took thirty days." But the conquest, like so much in the Middle East, was deceptive: "Probably, the greatest loss of life came after the ceasefire." The environment eventually changed, and in 1943 Iraq would declare war on the Axis powers. Even then, though, the stage was being set. A ten-year old boy was taken into the home, and placed under the mentorship of one Khairallah, an Iraqi officer who had been imprisoned and, upon his release, returned to his village in Tikrit. The boy-student was Saddam Hussein. The year 1947. This gracefully written book is not focused exclusively on the U.K. in the Middle-East, but history invariably buys them the plurality of pages. Nor is the book without its lighter moments. The story of the twins from Minnesota who seem jointly and quite happily to have married the same Prince, the makeshift taxi service founded by a pair of enterprising New Zealanders, and any number of intriguing some plots -- Gertude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and others -- help to bring to the surface the multi-layered "character" of the region. (I think a book remains to be written about the prominence of British and American women -- as journalists, advisors and power brokers -- in the modern history of the Middle East, and Keays is a good place to start.) Somewhere John Dos Passos wrote that a "sense of continuity with the past" can be a source of comfort in troubled, uncertain times. The continuity that one finds in Mr. Keay's work is more unsettling than not, but it deserves, for that very reason, a serious readership, particularly in the U.S. The detailed narrative stops in the early 1960s, but Keays pulls threads together in a concluding chapter that takes us to September 11th. The history of this region continues to evolve in unexpected ways, and I share with President Bush the desire to focus on the positive changes that have taken place in Iraq in recent months and, like countless others, sincerely pray that peace and stability find a home in the region. Until then, the Middle East Keays surveyed in this exceptional book will continue to contain its unsettling continuities.
Rating:
Summary: The most balanced book on the issue in years!
Review: John Keay is one of Britain's best and most authoritative writers on Asian issues and this new book of his can only add to his already growing reputation. If you want a book that is beautifully well written, scrupulously well researched, and has a properly balanced, careful, moderate position on one of the most vexed, hate-filled subjects on earth, you cannot do better than buying this superb book. You will understand the different sides in ways that you had not done before. Strongly recommended! Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003)...
Rating: 
Summary: An average account
Review: This average account of middle east history, although interesting in light of the sudden obsession with the middle east, uncovers nothing new. This book is a survey with lots of information but no revelation, nothing explosive or even interesting, simply an account of more then a hundred years of fascinating Arab history.
Rating:
Summary: Fine account of imperialist abuse of the Middle East
Review: This book charts the malign effects of British, French and later US imperial interference in the Middle East, from 1900 to 1960. But in common with many recent historians, the author takes far too rosy a view of the Empire, an approach not unrelated to his consistent anti-Soviet bias. Keay vividly depicts how the British, French and US states interfered in Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Iran and Lebanon for oil, military bases and power, always claiming the purest and most democratic of motives. But their autocratic and imperial rule betrayed those countries' aspirations for democracy and sovereignty. For example, successive British governments tried to rule Iraq after World War One through a series of constitutional fictions uncannily similar to the US state's efforts today. In 1919, Arnold Wilson, Britain's Acting Civil Commissioner, set up municipal councils and (purely advisory) divisional councils. The British state preferred a Sunni oligarchy to a Shia democracy, so Wilson prevented any elections, claiming that the 'premature' election of an Iraqi government with real power would be 'the antithesis of democratic Government'. The Iraqis objected to these anti-democratic and anti-national shenanigans and in 1920 rose in revolt: British forces killed 10,000 of them. In 1921, Britain's new High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, appointed a Council of Ministers and told them to ask ex-king Faysal of Syria to become Iraq's king. Cox then arranged a plebiscite asking the 'better sort' of Iraqis to endorse his choice, and removed the other candidates. Under British supervision, Faysal won 96% of the votes. The British state brought not democracy, but death and destruction to Iraq. Why was it really there? The answer, in a word, was oil. Yet the Minister for War and the Colonies, Winston Churchill, told the House of Commons in December 1920, "The idea that HMG would have gone through all the difficulties they have gone through, faced all the expenses and burdened themselves with all the military risks and exactions in order to secure some advantage in regard to some oilfields ... is ... too absurd for acceptance." It is perhaps less absurd than the notion that they would have gone to all that trouble if Iraq had no oil. In 1924, the Admiralty informed Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, "from a strategical point of view, the essential point is that Great Britain should control the territories on which the oilfields are situated." Five weeks later, Curzon lied to The Times, "Oil had not the remotest connexion with my attitude, or with that of His Majesty's Government, over Mosul." The British state's abuse of Iraq was typical of the way the British, French and US states mistreated the peoples of the Middle East. These states continually sought to justify their interference by blaming the peoples for the region's troubles. However, as Albert Einstein told an Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine, "It was the British presence that perpetuated the troubles, not, as received opinion had it, the troubles that perpetuated the need for a British presence." This book helps us to understand why capitalist ruling classes continually resort to empire, and why some people in the Middle East resort to terrorism, but to understand both is to condone neither. Last century's imperialist interventions in the Middle East created lasting bitterness. Reruns of aggression and occupation today only worsen life for all the Middle East's peoples, adding to the bitterness and increasing the dangers of terrorism.
Rating:
Summary: A freewheeling look at Middle East history from 1900 to 1960
Review: This book has plenty to recommend it. It describes Middle East history for the first half of the twentieth century. And it has an open, irreverent style that many people seem to like. Hey, that's my style too. But now that I got a big taste of my own medicine, I found I didn't always enjoy it.
Let me try to explain the problem. There is too much "realpolitik." And sometimes, it obscures the big picture.
Suppose I were trying to describe the emancipation of the Blacks in the American South after the Civil War. If I were into realpolitik and irreverence, I might explain how political pressure enabled the Blacks to achieve emancipation. And, of course, I would imply that emancipation was not really wrong, given that Blacks had the power to achieve it! But I might also explain that it was totally unfair to the Whites to allow the Blacks to be liberated from slavery!
Well, if I did that, it would be racist of me. And it would also be dishonest. You see, enslaving the Blacks was always an arbitrary idea. It was bad for pretty much everyone. A good test is that "color-blind" folks would never have thought of such an immoral idea.
I think Keay makes a similar mistake when he discusses the Zionists. He has no problem allowing them their State. But only by might, not by right. And in doing so, he totally overlooks the fact that in a color-blind world, the Jews would have simply bought far more land than they wound up with in real life. Meanwhile, Keay offers some misplaced sympathy to the Arabs who had to witness the Jews become emancipated, and who wound up selling land to those Jews at quite high prices, and wound up watching the Jews improve the economy and living standards for everyone in the region.
This book offers quite a bit of history and some valuable insights, and it is fun to read. But it occasionally lacks some needed perspective.
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