This evening, Stephen Colbert will talk with Timothy Garton Ash, author of Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Nameon Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, has written extensively on modern political history, notably covering Communism and the 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, and his syndicated writing continues to appear in The Guardianand the New York Review of Books. His book, just out in paperback, explores the “oughts”, “the thousands”—whatever colloquial phrase we’ve decided upon—applying his political acumen to the international issues and affairs of the last decade. From 9/11 to the Orange Revolution and various global statuses of Islam to the election of Barack Obama, there was a lot that just passed by us without a common name, even in an age of rising digital interconnectivity. Check it out tonight on Comedy Central.
At the start of this year, a number of uprisings in the Middle East moved the region center stage in the arena of international politics. In a short amount of time, the Arab world from Morocco to Oman was consumed by protests—and in the politically extreme cases, two revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have resulted in overthrowing the heads of state of those nations. Some have even speculated that the Arab Spring has begun to turn into the European Summer, with protests in Spain occurring at the end of May. Quite noteworthy to many commentators has been the impact of social media in these uprisings: interactive news feeds, video, and live updates were, and still are, crucial to spreading the word.
YUP has a notable list of political area studies and histories of countries. For example, earlier this year, we released Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak, by journalist Tarek Osman, who was in Cairo throughout the uprisings and managing to interview with news outlets despite the turmoil. Together with Victoria Clark’s Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakesand Martin Evans’ and John Phillips’ Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, we compiled a free chapter sampler, “Crisis in the Arab World”, available for download in Kindle, ePub, and PDF formats. Given the weekend events in Yemen, with President Saleh fleeing to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, now is a good time to think about these roads to revolution and what the implications are for the Arab world and the global network of participants and onlookers.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, few people in America had heard of the Taliban. And in 2000, when Ahmed Rashid wrote the bestselling Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,based on his experiences as a journalist covering the civil war in Afghanistan for twenty years, traveling and living with the Taliban, and interviewing most of the Taliban leaders since their emergence to power in 1994, the book offered, and still does, the only authoritative account of the Taliban available to English-language readers. Last year, we published a second edition with a new introduction and an all-new final chapter.
Now that the story continues with the recent death of al-Qaeida leader, Osama bin Laden, Rashid has been interviewing and writing op-eds about bin Laden’s role within the organization and what his death means for the future. Yesterday, he appeared alongside John McLaughlin, Yochi Dreazen, and Paul Pillar on WAMU’s Diane Rehm Show, with guest host Susan Page. He also had an op-ed that ran in the Financial Times, and his book was even referenced in the New York Times obituary for bin Laden. Today, you can listen to Rashid as he interviews on WHYY’s Fresh Airwith Terry Gross.
The discussion heats up for Why Marx Was Right at Bensonian.org: Andrew Walker, contributor to Mere Orthodoxy, gets into the claim that "Marxism believes in an all-powerful state."
Andrew Walker
Terry Eagleton insists that Marx’s understanding of the state has been misunderstood. Objecting to the claim that the state leads to irrepressible tyranny and the loss of liberty, Eagleton claims that Marx was in fact an opponent of the state and that his philosophy had no intent to wrest power into the hands of the State. Objecting to Eagleton’s claim, Walker discusses the anthropological deficiencies surrounding Marx’s view of man and how this inadequacy detrimentally impacts political authority. He contends that Marx failed to properly delineate the function of the state from being minimally administrative to maximally coercive. While the historical record reveals no long-term success for Marxism, Walker shows that failing to limit the reach of the state has led to disastrous and deadly consequences in the history of statecraft and secondly, that Marxist models have debunked Marx’s own claims. Read more on Bensonian...
In the midst of recent events in the Middle East, YUP is offering a special look at the books that cover religion, politics, and culture of the region, and our authors who are active in contributing to these discussions.
Last month, Marwan Muasher gave a talk at Yale as part of the Jackson Senior Fellows Lecture Series, titled “The Arab World in Crisis: Redefining Arab Moderation.” As a top-ranked diplomat, Muasher has held many high-level positions within the government of Jordan, including Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Ambassador to the United States, and first Jordanian Ambassador to Israel. He is the author of The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation, written prior his appointment as a fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His recent talk readdresses the issues he presents in his book—the promise and perils of taking the “middle road” toward peace in the Middle East and what must be done to encourage the development of moderate, pragmatic Arab voices—and on YouTube, there is a full lecture from a similar talk he gave that was sponsored by the International Development Research Centre.
For Women’s History Month, we have a forthcoming study of the political and cultural history of the veil over the past half century: A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, written by Leila Ahmed, the first professor of Women's Studies in Religion at Harvard University and currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity at Harvard’s Divinity School. Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, she asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West? When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil's return indicated a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. What she discovered, however, in the stories of British colonial officials, young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations, reaching surprising conclusions about contemporary Islam's place in the West today.
And in looking back on Egypt, where so much action at the start of this year has sparked movement across social media and traditional news outlets—oh, and something of a revolution, too?—we have Egyptian journalist, Tarek Osman, with his newly published book: Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak. His prescient analysis foretold the roles that young Egyptians assumed in determining the future of their nation. The chapter “Young Egyptians” is part of YUP’s “Crisis in the Arab World” free book sampler, also featuring chapters from Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, by Martin Evans and John Phillips, and Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, by Victoria Clark, both areas where similar uprisings have begun to stir. The sampler is now available for free download with your choice of PDF, Kindle, and ePub files.
For good measure, watchTarek Osman talk Egyptian politics on Al Jazeera English, the Arabic news network that has provided so many important real time updates throughout these tumultuous times.
The events of January and February 2011 have shaken not only the Middle East and North Africa but the whole world.
Starting in Tunisia in December 2010, unrest has spiraled through the Arab world, with extraordinary results: following mass uprisings, the Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben-Ali has fled the country, while his counterpart Hosni Mubarak of Egypt decided to stand down with immediate effect. Meanwhile, Algeria – also ruled by a military dictatorship – has seen major riots, with several protestors killed, while similar demonstrations in Yemen have led President Saleh to announce that he will not seek another term in office.
Click the 3D book display to download Crisis in the Arab World, a free sampler of Yale books that discuss these three febrile regions.
In Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak(2011), Tarek Osman looks at the situation of his fellow young Egyptians – tech-savvy and full of passion, but deeply frustrated by the corrupt, economically stagnant Egyptian state.
In Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (2008, updated 2011), Martin Evans and John Phillips ask how long Algerians will put up with their repressive military regime, whose only opposition consists of intermittent al-Qaeda attacks.
In Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (2010), Victoria Clark analyses the prospects for a country with 40% unemployment, near-exhausted water supplies, and a long-running rebellion in the southern provinces.
As we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., many will first recall his most famous lines: “I Have a Dream…” Delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, King’s speech was a milestone in the fight for racial equality in the United States. Even now in daily life, the lines used as a mantra of the Civil Rights Movement, a call for freedom from unfair treatment, even in jest to hyperbolically compare our own smaller dreams to the scope of what he envisioned for our nation’s future.
Eric J. Sundquist has expanded on the speech’s place in American culture for our Icons of America series, in King’s Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" Speech. He weaves together ideas of narrative, rhetoric, racial justice, and freedom, underlining how the speech fits into a definitively American story of equality from the nation’s founding. There is little doubt that it is the most powerful American address of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, another Icon in our series is published today: James Ledbetter’s Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex, timed to the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell speech. His warning about our reliance on our own embrace of wartime economy echoed throughout the Cold War years. Ledbetter outlines the ways in which we have perpetuated the complex since, looking back to its origins in the 1930s and its lasting influence today, to mixed positive and negative effects on American politics and culture.
You can tune today into NPR/WBUR’s On Point (11am EST) and America Public Media’s Marketplace to listen to Ledbetter speak about this timely farewell address.
In light of the recent bombing in Alexandria, Egyptian banker and writer, Tarek Osman, has been interviewed by the London Times and CNN for his take on the current political situation. Today we have published Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak, in which Osman describes the huge changes that have taken place in his home country since the 1950s.
Writing for the Financial Times, Joyce Tyldesley opines that Osman's and two others, Egypt: A Short History (Princeton U Press) and The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (Bloomsbury) together give a picture of Egypt's history from ancient times to the present, brought into "sharp focus." For Osman's book in particular, addressing the last sixty years, she says: "Osman writes with a focused and uncluttered style, and there are enough political twists and high-action events – including a president assassinated live on television – to retain the interest of even the most general reader."
To learn more about the political forces at play in Egypt (regime, political Islam, and the liberal movement, as defined by Osman), check out the interview with CNN.
