You want Orient?

Dan Jacobson: Leo Nussimbaum’s self-creation, 18 August 2005

The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught between East and West 
by Tom Reiss.
Chatto, 433 pp., £17.99, July 2005, 9780701178857
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... Shia family tracing its descent from the famous Ibrahim Khan Shirvanshir, ‘who had once helped Hassan Kuli Khan cut off Prince Zizianashvili’s head’. Etc, etc. Nevertheless, the hero himself, and his family, and the locale, and even the hero’s beloved Nino, a Christian girl of Georgian origin and kittenish ...

Learning from Its Mistakes

Charles Glass: Hizbullah, 17 August 2006

... its perceived pro-Syrian stance. Now, Israel has rescued Hizbullah and made its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, not only the most popular man in Lebanon – but in the whole Arab world. An opinion poll commissioned by the Beirut Centre for Research and Information found that 80 per cent of Lebanese Christians supported ...

Diary

Jonathan Steele: In Syria, 22 March 2012

... the ‘old opposition’ – politicians not from the Baath Party, for example – has been. Hassan Abbas, an academic sociologist, founded the Human Rights Association of Syria last year to monitor the regime’s claims. He is a veteran of the Damascus spring of 2000, when the president was new and many hoped he would ...

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
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Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
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Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
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... for Sudan’s neighbours, was that Khartoum chose to lead with Islamism and to do so aggressively: Hassan al-Turabi and his coterie in the capital rightly believed that their revolution stood to thrive by going into expansionist mode. There have been many twists and turns as a result. One of them, in 1994, saw Isaias sending ...

Is Palestine Next?

Adam Shatz: The No-State Solution, 14 July 2011

... in crossing into the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan, including a 28-year-old man called Hassan Hijazi, who made it all the way to Jaffa, his ancestral city, travelling there on a bus with Israeli soldiers who had no idea they were sitting next to a ‘security threat’; he turned himself in to the Israeli police ...

Diary

Colin Kidd: After the Referendum, 18 February 2016

... persuasively realised historical fiction, and with The Strange Death of Labour Scotland by Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw, published in 2012, which uncannily anticipates the party’s recent evaporation. Devine’s story ends at a fork in the road. Is independence imminent? Or has the collapse in the price of oil severely ...

Diary

D.A.N. Jones: In Baghdad , 5 July 1984

... of the city were more gay. Plenty of beer bars and open-air coffee stalls, pastrycook shops for Hassan and balconies for Yasmin, most of them carrying colourful posters of the Rais – reading or praying, fatherly with children or dutiful in uniform. But this was April 1984, remember: confronted by so many pictures of ...

Too Important to Kill

Adam Shatz: Real Men Go to Tehran, 23 January 2020

... most powerful party in Lebanon, is Iran’s cherished ally. On 6 January its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech about Soleimani’s death from his bunker. It was broadcast on al-Manar, Hizbullah’s TV channel, to a gathering of thousands of supporters. Nasrallah said that the ‘resistance axis’ would ...

Made in Tehran

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi: Iran’s Crises, 5 February 2026

Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History 
by Vali Nasr.
Princeton, 408 pp., £30, May 2025, 978 0 691 26892 7
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... including twelve civilians, and around four thousand injured. Days later, Israel killed Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbullah, using a bunker-busting bomb in a densely populated neighbourhood of Beirut, causing hundreds of casualties in the process. In the aftermath of these events Iran launched its ...

Illusions of Containment

Tom Stevenson: Versions of Hamas, 6 February 2025

Hamas: The Quest for Power 
by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell.
Polity, 331 pp., £17.99, June 2024, 978 1 5095 6493 4
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... political religious thinkers in the Islamic reformist tradition: Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia and Hassan al-Turabi in Sudan. Hamas wasn’t a band of criminals but a well-organised political and social force. It divided the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into districts and subdistricts, and subdivided those into local units ...

When Jihadis Win Power

Owen Bennett-Jones, 4 December 2014

The Inevitable Caliphate? A History of the Struggle for Global Islamic Union, 1924 to the Present 
by Reza Pankhurst.
Hurst, 280 pp., £18.99, June 2013, 978 1 84904 251 2
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... that called for the selection of a new caliph; nothing much came of them. Then in 1928, Hassan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt. Banna supported the idea of the caliphate but he was also a pragmatist: given that he was operating in colonial Egypt the restoration was relegated to a long-term ...
... the focus of her attention just before Christmas. The Sudanese Government under President Omar Hassan Ahmed el Bashir, an Islamic fundamentalist backed by the highly influential Muslim Brotherhood, served early notice of its support for Saddam Hussein. The British and Americans in Khartoum were already laying plans for ...

Fundamentalisms

Malise Ruthven, 1 July 1982

Two Minutes over Baghdad 
by Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel and Uri Bar-Joseph.
Corgi, 192 pp., £1.75, April 1982, 0 552 11939 3
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Inside the Middle East 
by Dilip Hiro.
Routledge, 471 pp., £12.50, April 1982, 0 7100 9030 7
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America Held Hostage: The Secret Negotiations 
by Pierre Salinger.
Deutsch, 349 pp., £10.95, May 1982, 0 233 97456 3
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... resignation, the liberals, including Khomeini’s rival protégés Sadeq Gotzbadeh and Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, found themselves engaged in tortuous negotiations with the Americans through a number of intermediaries, principally a progressive French lawyer, Christian Bourguet, and Hector Villalon, an Argentine ...

Is it the end of Sykes-Picot?

Patrick Cockburn: The Syrian War Spills Over, 6 June 2013

... Syria we can take back Khuzestan. But if we lose Syria we won’t be able to hold Tehran.’ Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, made it very clear in a speech on 30 April that the Lebanese Shia also see Syria as a battleground where they can’t afford a defeat. ‘Syria,’ he said, ‘has real friends in the ...

Still Smoking

James Buchan: An Iranian Revolutionary, 15 October 1998

An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari’ati 
by Ali Rahnema.
Tauris, 418 pp., £39.50, August 1998, 1 86064 118 0
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... in 1975 in pieces. The growing civil disorder of 1976-77 took its toll of his dearest pupils. When Hassan Aladpush and his wife, Mahbubeh Motahedin, were killed by the police, Shari‘ati wrote to the Motahedin parents: ‘Being alive, what a grave and unanswerable charge. It is as if we were carrying stolen goods. Oh what ...