Let’s have a look at your books, which will give us some good background on all this. First up is What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, written by the former Middle East Editor at The Guardian, Brian Whitaker.

What Brian Whitaker did with this book is very interesting. It’s considered a controversial book. Critics see it as a Westerner criticising Arab culture and the Arab world. The sort of criticisms we have seen from Western scholars and journalists tend to be tinged with racism and not properly contextualised. But Brian Whitaker is someone who is known as being sympathetic to Arabs. So for him to write this book, giving this critical take on a region that he had been working in for years, was quite original. He argues that the real problem is not terrorism, but rather the lack of personal freedom in the Arab world. He writes about this culture of paternalism, of people feeling that they can police other people’s behaviour.

I reviewed the book about two years ago when it came out and I myself was critical of parts of the book. But I like the book because it asks hard questions, and does it through Arab eyes by profiling a number of activists who speak about their experience, raising issues such as gay rights, sexual harassment of women and the family as oppressors.

But do you think he is right that people in the Middle East need to take responsibility for their situation and try to move forward?

I agree that these are important issues to raise. But in the Arab world there are many conservatives and we have to work out how to argue for these rights, which are taken for granted in Europe, within the context of the dominant conservative culture of the region. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens regarding those issues as these countries come out of the Arab Spring. And the book is a very good starting point to think about these things.

Your next choice, Eugene Rogan’s The Arabs, looks at the political history of the Arab lands since 1517. How do you think he helps us understand what is going on in the Arab world today?

I chose this book because I think the weight of history and the historical context is really important. There have been a number of general histories of the Arab world. What Eugene Rogan does in this book is to provide a very well written, comprehensive and general history of the Arab world in modern times. What he does well is to highlight how much interaction there has been in the Arab world with outside forces, especially the West, and how so much of the modern region has come out of that experience – imperialism, colonisation and so on.

The United States and its foreign policy in the region stems from this time. For me, knowing a little bit about the history of the region is a basic requirement to understanding what is going on now. You just can’t start from the point of there being a revolution in the Arab world without looking to the past to see how it came about.

That makes sense, and your next book, Edward Said’s Covering Islam, carries this theme on. A misunderstanding of history can lead to misconceptions which feed into the popular media.

Edward Said is one of the most famous Arab intellectuals in the Western world. He wrote a book in the late 1970s called Orientalism that laid the foundation of the critique of Western approaches to the Middle East. But actually, I think that this book, although less intellectually challenging, is very important as well. In a sense it is even more important and accurate than Orientalism. He wrote this book initially in 1981. As a journalist who reads a lot of things about the Arab world, I find that I often criticise the media coverage. There is a staggering amount of misinformation about the Arab world in the Western media.