Featured Books

If you look to the left and down, you'll see I have finally jumped on the Amazon referrals bandwagon with some featured books of my own. I expect these to mainly reflect the content of the blog, which means they'll mostly deal with the Middle East and Islam, with occasional forays into other areas. I also plan to replace the links in my "Suggested Reading" posts with amazon referrals once they get off the front page.

The first book I've chosen is the really nice The Oxford History of Islam. The chapters in this book each give an overview of a given topic or geographic region, such as "Science Medicine and Technology" or "Central Asia and China." There's even a chapter on "The Globalization of Islam" dealing with the experience of Muslim communities in the West. The illustrations are excellent, and make this a good thing to set out on your coffee table and just flip through.

Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx, and Mujahid is what looks like an updated version of the work by Ralph Magnus and Eden Naby that was a key general reading for my "Afghanistan" seminar from Spring 2002. After a brief introduction to the aland and people, it goes over developments of the last few decades with an emphasis on the importance of Islam, introduction of Marxism, and the rise of the mujahadeen. The Taliban appear only in the last chapter, but this is still a good introduction to the geopolitical and social landscape into which they came and that we're still dealing with over there today.

Finally, Madawi al-Rasheed's A History of Saudi Arabia is a good one-stop introduction to Saudi history, covering the rise of the Wahhabi movement and their early links with the Saudis to the relationship of foreign powers to the new royal family to the internal developments of Saudi society during the 20th century. al-Rasheed is a historical anthropologist by trade, and I think a couple of parts of this get a bit complex, this is still the place to go to understand Saudi society from the perspective of how it got to be the way it is.