The book lives up to its title and reputation as just about the best one-volume introduction to the history of Islam. No jargon here, no battling footnotes. Just a lucid, clear-eyed narrative of Islam's origins, its seemingly confusing branching out (geographically and spiritually), and its modern-day fragmentation.

Extremists, fundamentalists, and terrorists are the squeaky attention grabbers. But Armstrong convincingly shows that Islam's billion followers around the world are overwhelmingly moderate and enthusiastically modern, if in their own ways. Disposizione Tavola Matrimonio Software Informer. She just as convincingly shows why Western democracy-building, with its blood-soaked colonial precedents, has never been trusted in the Islamic world. After laying out the history of early Islam in all its spiritual and military opulence, Aslan explains the meaning of 'jihad' and the various breakdowns that wracked Islam much the same way that Protestants broke away from Catholics in late-Medieval Europe. Aslan then puts forward a fascinating thesis: Whatever is going on in the Islamic world isn't the West's business.

The West can do nothing about it, Aslan argues, because Islam must first go through its own 'Reformation.' Much of the violence we're witnessing now is part of that struggle. If it is to be resolved, it can only be resolved from within. The more the West interferes, the more it delays the resolution. A fiction book on the list? I've always found good a terrific way to look into the soul of national cultures. Could anyone really understand the American South without reading Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor?

Could anyone really understand Arab culture, and particularly Egyptian culture, without reading 'The Yacoubian Building'? Maybe, but this is an enthralling shortcut. An Arab best-seller that quickly gained an audience abroad, the book did to Egyptian culture and literature what Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner' did to Afghan culture in 2002 -- trace the last half century of a nation's history and anxieties while breaking taboos along the way. I loved this book when it was first published, love it still--not because it found its way on a reading list for George W. Bush, but for providing penetrating insights into the lives of Arab women in Iran,, Egypt and elsewhere, and for busting some of the silliest stereotypes about life behind the veil.

Yes, women are often and usually ridiculously repressed, and the veil remains a symbol of that repression. But Brooks shows that, despite the controls, women have still pressed for and gained some advantages, including the abolition of Koranic law in Tunisia, where women won the right to equal pay in 1956; the vibrant political culture of women in Iran; and the small social insurgencies of women in Saudi Arabia.

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At 1,107 pages, this is the 'War and Peace' of histories. It stretches the map eastward to Pakistan and westward to North Africa, and covers every major war and massacre of the last hundred years, going back to the Armenian genocide of 1915. The remarkable tour-de-force here is that Fisk's first-hand reporting is his most for almost everything beginning in the mid-1970s: Fisk, who now writes for Britain's Independent, is the longest-serving western correspondent in the Middle East.

His knowledge is encyclopedic. His obsession with documenting what he writes with his own eyes is Herculean. His love of the Middle East is almost as passionate as his love of detail, which only occasionally gets the better of him. Even though Thomas Friedman's book is approaching its 20th anniversary, it remains a standard for anyone trying to understand the reams of factions and sects and tribes and political camps that have been battling it out all these years in the region. The book is also an excellent primer on the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, the fateful Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the run-up to the Palestinian Intifada in the Occupied Territories.