'Aqoul Reviews - Books & Media

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:27:05 -0500

Our readers are doubtless already familiar with the allegation that the Bush Administration made an epic mess of Iraq. But what exactly did they do wrong? Rajiv Chandrasekaran explores this in his account of the year and a bit immediately after the invasion, when the country was officially occupied.

Infidel

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:46:55 -0500

Well, here it is. After much haranguing by Matthew and Lounsbury, everyone finally gets to hear what I think about Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir, Infidel. When I started the book this past summer, I forced myself to read it with an open mind (as opposed to the snarky cynicism I've applied in the past). However, this mindset was soon abandoned once it became clear that it was simply an elaborate attempt to win sympathy and establish a personal brand. For non-critical readers, such as the dimwit at NYT who called her book "brave, inspiring and beautifully written," Hirsi Ali emerges as an embattled, courageous soul who escaped the benighted world of Islam and found sanctuary in the enlightened West.

The truth is of course more mundane.

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:47:42 -0500

The bottom line, up front: Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs is a necessary resource for anyone seriously interested in the subject of negative stereotyping of Arabs in American cinema. The best supplement to this book, by the way, besides its recently released DVD companion piece, is the same author's The TV Arab. That work provides a sustained analysis and background regarding Arab stereotyping on the small screen. On the downside, however, both are a bit dated (I am using the original 2001 edition of Reel Bad Arabs) and perhaps dangerously so at times. More about that in a bit.

Birds Without Wings

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:57:58 -0500

This book was sold everywhere in Istanbul, but paying €30 for a paperback seemed ridiculous, so I bought it here. The plot isn't terribly intricate and the characters are only briefly sketched, but the story is decent. It also serves as a basic introduction to the Ottoman collapse and subsequent birth of modern Turkey (for those who find actual history icky).

Birds Without Wings juxtaposes the life of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk with that of a tiny Lycian coast village and its inhabitants. The villagers are Christian and Muslim peasants who live side by side in relative peace, intermarry and even partake in each other's religious rituals. Eventually, global events detailed in the Atatürk chapters begin to have an impact on this idyllic village. Armenians are killed, Muslim boys go off to war (and are subsequently traumatized), Christians are deported and bandits overrun the countryside. The main love story, involving a Muslim boy and a Christian girl who have been besotted with each other since birth, obviously ends in tragedy.

Banker to the Poor

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:43:33 -0500

This book is a good layperson introduction to the concept of microcredit and its Nobel Prize-winning champion, Muhammad Yunus. Unfortunately for me, it didn't get into the nuts and bolts of the Grameen microcredit model and why it produces inconsistent results when applied to different regions. However, that level of detail is probably not interesting to most readers, which is why Banker to the Poor is a little bit saccharine at times. Most of the chapters are anecdotes about saintly bank workers, poor but plucky Bangladeshi peasants and above all, Yunus's tireless networking and wasta-mongering with senior government officials.

Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:59:38 -0500

Interesting examination of Khomeini's very populist and usually pragmatic style of politics. Khomeini in this analysis comes off as a surprisngly flexible thinker, more than willing to alter his theology in practice (if not always openly in theory) to work the crowds. Well worth reading as a counter to the common popular view of Khomeini as an entirely inflexible dogmatist (or a fundamentalist, a descriptor Arahamian disputes on semantic grounds).

Islam, Politics and Pluralism: Theory and Practice in Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia and Algeria

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:57:16 -0500

Very well done almost pamphlet-sized volume that very concisely describes the rise of Islamism in MENA in general, the trajectory of Islamist movements in the countries listed, and their interplay with notions of electoral politics and movement towards representative democracy in the same. Ultimately she makes a compelling (if not airtight) argument that perhaps the best way to moderate Islamist movements (and the only way to move forwards towards true democracy in the region) is to include them within the democratic framework, as Turkey has successively done.

Faith At War

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 22:56:12 -0500

Well over a year after the book's first release, one paragraph alone validates the continuing worth of Yaroslav Trofimov's Faith At War. Although buried in chapter 12, among seemingly more telling fare, had a few planners in high positions in several countries took it seriously last year, a lot of embarrassing reckless victory promises and glibly proclaimed regional "pangs" would not have issued forth:

True to is reputation, Hezbollah proved the most efficient organization I have come across in the Middle East...[Each] interview would happen exactly as planned. In my dealings with the U.S. military, I never saw such precision.

The Mystery of Capital

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:45:37 -0500

Hernando de Soto's brilliant (and surprisingly elegant) theories on extralegal property systems, dead capital and rentier/vampire states can easily be applied to any number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, Aqoul once elaborated on his Egypt case study by examining Cairo's collapsing building problem in the context of weak property laws, poor accountability and nonexistent enforcement.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:41:26 -0500

Imperial Life in the Emerald City is a detailed account of life in the Green Zone after the Iraq invasion. As one might expect from title alone, much of the book is spent describing poor decisionmaking by hilariously incompetent political appointees. However, author Rajiv Chandrasekaran acknowledges that the CPA wasn't entirely staffed by green 20-something Republicans. Experienced post-conflict veterans, while highly competent, were often stymied by bureaucracy, inter-agency squabbling, lack of resources and overly optimistic commitments made by Bremer and the White House.

The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 16:29:17 -0500

Although Eqbal Ahmad's work spans a huge array of questions and countries, the theme of North-South, decolonization and its brutal legacies, runs throughout this long collection of his essays. Ahmad's close relationship with a host of revolutionary/national liberation movements allowed him to reframe the major problems of the post-WWII era in terms decolonization, national liberation struggles, and counterinsurgency, rather than the bipolar-world, superpower-based framework that characterized much Cold War thinking.

Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 21:57:59 -0500

The term "Ottoman" does not often evoke a positive response. Few empires have been as villified as this one. Detractors include its own Muslim subjects - a majority of the intelligentsia I would venture - who accuse the empire of being responsible for their current backwardness. The heirs of its former Christian subjects perceive it as a long era of oppression. The heirs of its former Christian rivals see it as the embodiement of Islamic expansionism, an alien Asiatic, Oriental, Turkic state which threatened Europe. Few identify the Ottoman Empire as a direct part of their own heritage.

ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 21:50:08 -0500

The late Andre Gunder Frank was apparently regarded as bit of an iconoclast as a historian and economist and this volume certainly seems to fit the bill. In brief he takes the studies like Janet Abu-Lughod's and K.N. Chaudhuri's a step further and posits that up until ~1800 Europe was an economic backwater of relatively minor importance in an Asia dominated economic system.

Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 16:38:40 -0500

Right after 9/11 and the subsequent Afghanistan War of late 2001, bookstores became awash with accounts and analyses of the Taliban and like-minded Islamist groups in Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. Most of those were written by journalists or people within the policy sphere, and not by scholars, owing mainly to the fact that (a) there are, particularly compared to the Middle East, few scholars who work on Islamist and Jihadist groups in those two regions and (b) even fewer of those jumped on the bandwagon.

Oil Monarchies

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:56:06 -0500

Gregory Gause is one of the best scholars of the Gulf, and this book is a good example of why.