In an interview on Understanding the Arab World

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.