Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 1516-1922 : a Political History / by P. M. Holt

I just finished reading it. This book is absolutely necessary for anyone wishing to comprehend the current situation in the Middle East. It is also a good book for anyone interested in the internal mechanisms of the Ottoman empire. The book jumps back and forth between the three geographical areas under consideration: Egypt, the western Fertile Crescent (what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel), and the eastern Fertile Crescent (Iraq, basically), covering the period of Ottoman rule and more recent European domination. It is well written, concise and serves to draw out the larger patterns involved: the weird twilight zone of Ottoman politics (imagine an empire where frequent, bloody wars between provinces are the accepted norm), the characteristic bipolar "gangland" power distribution among local rulers, the role of Upper Egypt in sustaining local resistance to imperial power, the anarchy of Lebanon, the role of the Hajj (the annual Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca) as a political football, the genesis of nationalism. The endless back-and-forth of tribal and faction politics can get somewhat tedious at points, but I would rather have this level of detail than a distant glossing of events. Some random topics of interest: the Wahabbis--fanatic and militaristic founders of Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the brief appearance of Napoleon Bonaparte; Muhammad Ali, the Macedonian from Albania who became the nineteenth century icon of Egyptian nationalism; the conquest of Egypt by British accountants; in the introduction, a very handy synopsis of Islamic history leading up to the sixteenth century. All in all, I highly recommend it.