Hugh Pope

I first met Morton Abramowitz as a young reporter when I went to interview him as ambassador to Turkey in the early 1990s, little realizing that I would join the organization that he subsequently co-founded — International Crisis Group. Abramowitz has had a hand in almost everything impacting Turkey and the Middle East in recent decades, so I was really flattered when he took the trouble to give this endorsement of Dining with al-Qaeda:

“Most people learn best from stories. And Hugh Pope’s latest book on his thirty years of reporting on the Middle East is a great learning experience. The tales of his wanderings from Sudan and Egypt to Pakistan are not only fascinating, but they also serve to illuminate Middle Eastern countries in a way that scholarly books often fail to do. His reflections sharply narrow the gap between popular Western perceptions of the region propagated by our media and many politicians and the more complex reality. Freed of the heavy hand of his daily editors on what the public wants to read, Pope has produced a highly informative, provocative, and enjoyable work.”
Morton Abramowitz, former President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former US Ambassador to Turkey