Thursday, October 29, 2020

Away from Chaos The Middle East and the Challenge to the West by Gilles Kepel

 Away from Chaos The Middle East and the Challenge to the West by Gilles


Kepel is a new book by Columbia University Press; I attended this summer also the event with the author and the editor of the Financial Times organized by Columbia. I remembered I followed the entire chat because I was driving home, and connection was great. I really enjoyed it!


What can you find in this book?


Many answers to all your questions if you have any, regarding the Middle East! in a lucid and at the same time dramatically reconstruction of the last four decades, sometimes convulsive, sometimes tragical.  Personally I thought that the Middle East was...complicated, but I wouldn't never thought that the level of complication could be so big.


Everything start from that crucial war in 1973 the one of Yom Kippur/Ramadan. More later first Gulf War in 1990's, the birth of al-Qaeda and the horrible, terrible, still unthinkable event of 9/11.


The War on Terror started. It wasn't anymore a war in a battle field, it was a terror spread everywhere, with unknown and for the first time in recent history, innocent victims. Since there, Western countries are attacked pretty often;  today  France is under attack and close to its second lockdown because of Covid-19. 


The Birth of ISIS, was the legacy left by bin Laden; at the same time the wild wind of Arab Spring didn't give answers didn't create later a new democratic system in grade of giving to the population any kind of stability, but just more desperation and necessity of going away; then the arrival of wagons of wagons of refugees in Westwern countries.


The years of Trump were dramatically nasty thanks to his bans, because of his inability of being a good supporter for desperate situations and desperate people, re-changing at the same time again foreign policies.


The most clear book I read till now on the Middle East. 


Highly recommended.


I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.


Anna Maria Polidori 



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