Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Month: November 2009
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To talk to Uygur leader Rebiya Kadeer has been a personal ambition ever since I visited China’s Xinjiang Province in 1999. It was a meeting with the first Uygur leader, the late Isa Alptekin, that inspired my travels through two dozen countries seeking to understand the essence of Turkishness in my 2005 book, Sons of…
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A major theme of Dining with al-Qaeda is the difficulty reporters like me faced in translating what I experienced in the Middle East into reports that really explained the situation to American readers. Sometimes I felt that we’d invented a virtual Middle East with our convoluted attempts to bridge this divide, using artificial one-label-fits-all concepts…
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A first formal review of Dining with al-Qaeda from Publishers’ Weekly — topping the bill in the non-fiction review section on 23 November 2009! The 30 years Pope (Sons of the Conquerors) has spent living and traveling in the Middle East, from a 1980 visit as an Oxford student through a decade-long stint as a…
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How Westerners see their heroes in the Middle East isn’t necessarily how people in the region see them — a misconception that is one of my central themes in Dining with al-Qaeda. A story posted on Inside Defense on 12 November 2009 showed that this problem is alive and kicking in relation to one of the…
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In the early 1980s, Jon Randal‘s book on the Lebanon war was passed around young correspondents and aid workers like a sacred text. It is one of the first accounts of the misadventures of the Middle East to give a fair voice to all sides and satisfactorily explain what really goes on. In later years…
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PROLOGUE I have lived and worked in the Middle East for more than three decades, and this book collects what I feel to be my most compelling insights from journeys and meetings in some two dozen countries. I have visited many of these states repeatedly, first as a traveller, then as a student of the…
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CONTENTS Prologue Map of the Middle East 1. Mr. Q, I LOVE YOU Oriental Studies Meets the Middle East 2. IT’S A FINE LINE Journalism on the Road from Damascus 3. THE PLOT IN THE CONSPIRACY Spies in the Syria-Lebanon-Palestine Triangle 4. HUNTING FOR SCAPEGOATS Foreign interference and Misrule in Lebanon 5. A PILGRIMAGE TO…
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Mariane Pearl, widow of Danny Pearl, my late colleague killed by al-Qaeda in Karachi in 2002, has read Dining with al-Qaeda. It was very important to me that she felt I did justice to the subject of what it was like to meet jihadi folk — and that I had talked realistically through what I…
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Authors love to complain about their publishers, but for me Thomas Dunne is one of the delightful exceptions, as I discovered once again in October when we lunched round the corner from Thomas Dunne/St Martins Press‘s magnificent quarters in Manhattan’s Flatiron building. Aside from enjoying fun conversation and hearing that Dunne’s corner of the book…
Hugh Pope 