A history of the Middle East: from Antiquity to the present day (*)

Author: Georges Corm

Book review by: Ziad Hafez (**)

Published by: Garnet, Reading/ England

Year of publication: 2010

Number of pages: 224

ISBN: -13: 978-1-85964-220-7

In an earlier issue of Contemporary Arab Affairs (2 (2), 2009), I reviewed a book by Georges Corm entitled L’Europe et le Mythe de l’Occident in which I suggested that it was indeed unfortunate that the Anglo-Saxon publishing world had apparently deliberately ignored a major Arab author whose books have been translated into seventeen languages, except English! An initial redress of this shortcoming seems to have been undertaken by Garnet Publishing, an affiliate of Ithaca Press, which has opted to translate and publish one of his latest books.

This is a short book written for those who have little or no knowledge of the Middle East and its long history, and given that the period covered spans from antiquity to the present, there is no way a 224-page book could be considered as a reference to Middle Eastern history. Despite this, the book genuinely constitutes a new way of reading the history of the region.

Read full text here  A history of the Middle East from Antiquity to the present day

#centre_for_arab_unity_studies #CAUS #history #Middle_East #Antiquity