Middle World

This issue of Christian History explores what life was like for many different types of Christians in the Middle Ages.

When Stink Moody's second grade class goes on a field trip to the Gross-Me-Out exhibit at the science museum, he learns that his very own nose has amazing sniffing abilities - and that some people have real jobs sniffing stuff for NASA! Soon Stink is engrossed in toilet water, corpse flowers, and all things smelly. But is his fetid footwear foul enough to win a Golden Clothespin Award? Loyal fans will be holding their breath for Stink's latest outrageous solo adventure.

Just 70 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity.

تدور على محور أساس هو الحبّ. يغرم الأرقش حتّى الجنون، وهو شابّ أرجنتينيّ مثقّف من أصل لبنانيّ، بفتاة فائقة الجمال. إلّا أنّ الأرقش المغرم لا يلبث أن يكتشف في الحبّ ذينك القطبين الدهريّين المتناقضين اللذين يتنازعان النفس البشريّة، فإذا به مصلوب بينهما؛ نحبّ فنسمو، ونشفّ نشفّ روحًا حتّى لنكاد نلامس عرش الله.

The United Nations is one of the most famous bodies in the world, and its predecessor, the League of Nations, might be equally notorious. In fact, President Woodrow Wilson’s pet project was controversial from nearly the minute it was conceived. At the end of World War I, Wilson's pleas at the Paris Peace Conference relied on his Fourteen Points, which included the establishment of a League of Nations, but while his points were mostly popular amongst Americans and Europeans alike, leaders at the Peace Conference largely discarded them and favored different approaches.

In this recording are presented readings of all five editions of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, translated by scholar Edward Fitzgerald, as well as biographical material about Fitzgerald and Omar Khayyam and a laudatory poem by Andrew Lang.

The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after 15 years of quiet. Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie.

From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Andrew J. Bacevich, one of the country's most respected voices on foreign affairs, offers an incisive critical history of this ongoing military enterprise - now more than 30 years old and with no end in sight.

For more than two millennia, Istanbul has stood at the crossroads of the world, perched at the very tip of Europe, gazing across the shores of Asia. The history of this city - known as Byzantium, then Constantinople, now Istanbul - is at once glorious, outsized, and astounding. Founded by the Greeks, its location blessed it as a center for trade but also made it a target of every empire in history, from Alexander the Great and his Macedonian Empire, to the Romans and later the Ottomans.

Here is the remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy, and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West. For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict. Meanwhile, Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to catch even a glimpse.

In late August 2011, Shahbaz Taseer was driving to his office in Lahore when he was dragged from his car at gunpoint and kidnapped by members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a Taliban-affiliated Uzbek terrorist group. Shahbaz’s father, the late Pakistani governor, had recently been assassinated. His crime: speaking in support of a Christian woman who had been accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu retells 18 of his most treasured New Testament stories, artfully highlighting both the biblical message and the rich cultural heritage in this delightful book. Experience Jesus’ life - from the beginning of his ministry through his ascension - in a way you never have before.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade - in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have also been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation

The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is.

A timely primer on the conflict between the United States and Iran by scholars of Middle Eastern politics who advocate diplomacy and de-escalation.

What are the roots of radicalism? Journalist Carla Power came to this question well before the January 6, 2021, attack in Washington, DC, turned our country’s attention to the problem of domestic radicalization. Her entry point was a different wave of radical panic - the way populists and pundits encouraged us to see the young people who joined ISIS or other terrorist organizations as simple monsters. Power wanted to chip away at the stereotypes by focusing not on what these young people had done but why.

When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs' fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the Prophet. In October 1918, Faisal, Lawrence, and the Arabs victoriously entered Damascus, where they declared a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. At the Paris Peace Conference, Faisal won the support of President Woodrow Wilson.

Rusant pour échapper à son exécution, la belle Chahrazade entame un récit qui durera mille et une nuits : aventure, humour, poésie, cruauté et sagesse composent ces histoires empruntes d'une fascinante atmosphère propre aux contes orientaux, qui ont marqué l'imaginaire collectif depuis des siècles. Un vrai voyage littéraire à la rencontre du monde arabe du XIIIe siècle, un monde où les princesses et les khalifes côtoient les djinns et les voleurs, où la passion parle haut et où la magie fait corps avec le quotidien.

From Graeme Wood comes the definitive book on the history, psychology, character and aims of the Islamic State. Based on Wood's unprecedented access to supporters, recruiters and high-ranking members of the most infamous jihadist group in the world, The Way of the Strangers is a riveting, fast-paced deep dive into the apocalyptic dogma that informs the group's worldview, from the ideas that motivate it to the 'fatwa factory' that produces its laws to its very specific plans for the future.

He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus' classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: He gives his brother a story and a name - Musa - and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.