“... Shia. The Baath came to be dominated by its military wing, headed by a general from Tikrit, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and, later, his relation, an assassin who headed the security apparatus, Saddam Hussein. Today, the Americans call the area around Ramadi and north of Baghdad ‘the Sunni triangle’. ‘Iraq is now the most ...”

“... he had accompanied Uthman on another trip to Iraq. Back in Ustaz Luay’s house, they had met Ali Hassan Majid, known to the Kurds and others as ‘Ali Chemical’, for the enthusiasm with which he carried out Saddam’s orders to use poison gas in the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. Five thousand people were killed. Ali ...”

“... a similar role and women participated in large numbers. Al-Afghani also wrote to Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi in Najaf, giving the greatly influential but apolitical Shiite cleric an early lesson in the ‘structural adjustments’ that Western financiers would come to enforce in poor countries: ‘What shall cause thee ...”

“... increasingly angry at American interference in their societies in the interest of what Hassan Nasrallah has termed the ‘Western project’. One indication of what voters now want can be gauged from Nasrallah’s speeches. ‘In our region,’ he said in Beirut in March, ‘we witness the serious threat ...”

“... a single candidate from the alliance in each constituency. Mélenchon and the LFI activist Rima Hassan – who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp near Aleppo and has just won a seat in the European Parliament – are fierce defenders of the Palestinian cause, but Mélenchon is a problematic advocate for Palestine. To ...”

“... first half is also an excellent primer on the long prehistory of Pomo. We are reminded that Ihab Hassan made a preliminary canvass of Post-Modernist literature as early as 1971, but later came to deplore a touch of fraudulence in the sell: Post-Modernism, he wrote, looking back, ‘has become a kind of eclectic ...”

“... the Arabs have felt since the 1967 defeat. Erdogan and Hizbullah’s secretary general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, are folk heroes in Egypt. The Islamism of today is very different from the Islamism of the 1980s and 1990s, when radical jihadis rose up against secular-nationalist regimes in Syria, Algeria and Egypt, turning ...”

“... for his own needs. ‘Rebellious sons’​ are still available for exploitation today. Mos’ab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas leader in the West Bank, collaborated with Israeli intelligence from 1997 to 2007. His story made it into bookshops (Son of Hamas) and cinemas (The Green Prince). Human rights organisations in the ...”

“... in an Israeli airstrike. But on the whole Hizbullah’s reaction to the war has been modest. Hassan Nasrallah didn’t speak publicly about Gaza until 3 November, and even then said very little. Iran, too, has been relatively restrained, its response mostly confined to symbolic proxy attacks on US military outposts in ...”

“... tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him loving messages ...”

“... that the fighters could move from one building to another without going into the street. The HQ of Hassan, the unit commander, looked out onto a wide street, and we would take tea on the pavement, huddled around a fire despite the risk of mortar shells: ‘Inshallah,’ the men laughed.One morning, we were woken up by more ...”

“... North Africa, she united several powerful tribes and succeeded in defeating the mighty forces of Hassan ibn al-Nu’man.’ How does Sand know she was Jewish? Well, the renowned Moroccan polymath Ibn Khaldun says she was in his account of the Berbers in his great historical compendium, Al-’Ibar. That Ibn Khaldun was ...”

“... characters is responsible for the death of one of the others. To the Turks, Leila’s husband Hassan dies a hero, sure of Paradise, while the infidel Giaour, who has murdered him, will linger as a vampire before he arrives in Hell. Indeed, the Giaour’s last days, spent skulking around a convent, suggest the later ...”

“... wrong or out of date. But on one occasion it was dead-on: the inspection of the home of Fahel Hassan Hamza, a scientist who in the 1980s had conducted work related to the laser separation of radioisotopes. A cache of three thousand documents was discovered, most of which related directly to Hamza’s work with ...”

“... to find/The workings of a wounded mind,’ the Giaour says disparagingly after murdering Hassan. Seyd, the Turkish ruler in The Corsair, is all business, suspicious of the least ambiguity. ‘The supper done – prepare thee to reply,/Clearly and full – I love not mystery.’ (Years later, in Don Juan, the ...”