Hugh Pope

The French edition of Dining with al-Qaida is now out, available from bookshops, amazon.fr (here) or direct from the publisher, Presses de l’Université Laval!

I guess I have to resign myself once again to the book being symbolised as a lonely man in Arabian costume, perched on a mountain ridge, and contemplating the naked but empty nobility of his desert homeland. Of course, this French-language version does echo the cover of the U.S. edition. The other pictures chosen for the back cover here better make the point of Middle Eastern diversity that I hope the book brings to the reader – a lovely glimpse of the Ummayad mosque in Damascus from upstairs in a carpet seller’s shop in the Souq al-Hamidiyeh, a piece of ‘revenge!’ wall graffiti of a bus bomb sprayed onto a wall in Gaza by Hamas, and some very risque sculpture on the Jeddah Corniche. Even more fortunately, with the help of translator Benoit Léger, there was nothing in the publishers’ blurb this time about my “following in the steps of Lawrence of Arabia”…