The Shaping of the Modern Middle East
Bernard Lewis
Oxford University Press
The best short book on the Middle East....A work of the highest level, combining, elegance of style with an easy mastery of the subject. This is probably one of the best books on any historical-political subject in recent years.”
New York Review of Books
“The author’s great learning, his keen understanding of the processes at work in the region, his incisiveness and wit, make reading this volume an undiluted pleasure.”
The Nation
With this major revision of his classic The Middle East and the West (1964), a leading Middle East historian of our time offers a definitive and now more-timely-than-ever history of Western-Middle Eastern relations from the late seventeenth century to the present day. Fully revised to cover the volatile developments of the last three decades, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East sheds light on the climax and sudden end of the cold war, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Arab-Israeli wars, the formation and activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Persian Gulf War, and the Iranian revolution. Illuminating the region’s geography, culture, history, language, and religion, Lewis explores the complex and often confusing issues of Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and responses and reactions in the Middle East to centuries of Western influence, revealing the subtlety and sophistication of this dynamic civilization as no other scholar can.
About the Author
Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus, at Princeton University. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages, and he has lectured in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and America, and in many Muslim countries. | 
