This blog started with updates on the themes of my most recent book DINING WITH AL-QAEDA: Making Sense of the Middle East, most recently published as a fine updated paperback in 2020 (available around the world on Amazon). Now I use this platform to review other people’s books, talk about my personal impressions from Turkey and Middle East in general and promote the idea of adding random selection back into our democratic processes.
I studied Persian and Arabic at Oxford University. After five years based in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Cyprus, I moved in 1987 to what became my home base for 28 years in Istanbul, Turkey. During this time I reported as a foreign correspondent from 30 countries in the broader Middle East as a foreign correspondent for various newspapers including UPI, Reuters, the Independent and The Wall Street Journal.
From 2007, I worked as the Turkey/Cyprus Project Director for International Crisis Group, the conflict prevention organisation, specialising in reports on the triangle of disputes between Turkey, Cyprus and the European Union. Between 2015-22, I was Crisis Group’s global Director of Communications & Outreach, based in Brussels. Podcasts and some commentaries I did while at Crisis Group can be found here.
In 2021-23, I led a project to republish my late father Maurice Pope’s last and long-lost book for publication, co-editing it with my brother Quentin. UK publishers Imprint Academic published it in spring 2023 as “The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.” I am also serving as on the Board of Advisers of DemocracyNext, which uses sortition and other ideas for democratic reform to design and implement decision-making institutions of the future that are based on the full participation of equal citizens taking their turn, as in jury service.
I love to write about sortition too. I’ve described attending a school for sortition for The New European and how Citizens’ Assemblies Could Be Democracy’s Best Hope in the World Politics Review. As an official observer at the recent French citizens’ assembly on the end of life, I looked at the pride of participants, how important facilitators were and also the extraordinary role of graphic art. Letters from me making the case for more deliberative democracy have been published in the past year in the Financial Times, the London Review of Books and the Economist.
My own latest book Dining with al-Qaeda begins with my adventures as a wide-eyed student of Persian and Arabic literature and history, illustrates my growing understanding of the Middle East as a reporter, and then shows how frustrating it was to try explain those realities in media reports, particularly for American readers. Ranging from Istanbul to Islamabad and Khartoum to Kabul, Dining with al-Qaeda consists entirely of stories that happened to me, avoids didactic political theories and labels like “Islam”, “moderates” or “terror”, and aims to help bring down some of the wall of incomprehension that divides Westerners from Middle Easterners.
The Economist said Dining with al-Qaeda is “a very good book“. The Guardian in the UK said it’s “terrific“. Publishers’ Weekly called it a “fascinating memoir” with “exquisite photos”. Kirkus Reviews said the writing was “charming” and “a rich life’s work”. Booklist reckons many readers will “enjoy Pope’s bold curiosity.” On Amazon.com, Suzannah McGee said “anyone with any interest in the Middle East should read this.” In Le Monde diplomatique, French professor and expert on jihadism Jean-Pierre Filiu praised its “deceptively innocent humour” and the way it “searches out the dead angles of Western curiosity”. And a review by German Mideast insider Walter Posch counted it “among the handful of books that explain the road to the Arab Spring.”
Additionally, best-selling writer Tony Horwitz says it’s “darkly fun”; musician David Byrne thinks it’s a “great book”, and hopes people listen to its insights on the region; top US diplomat Morton Abramowitz calls it “a great learning experience”; Iranian-American writer Azadeh Moaveni paid it the compliment of being “a page turner”; Mariane Pearl, widow of my late colleague Danny Pearl, believes it “raises essential questions”; and one of my war correspondent heroes, Jonathan Randal, believes it will make a reader “laugh, cry and learn”.
This is the original of the dust jacket author photo. It was taken in a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter over southern Iraq in 2003 by US official Thomas Foley, who, since life is full of strange twists and turns, went on to become an ambassador to Ireland and an unsuccessful Republican candidate to be the next governor of the State of Connecticut.
A ten-minute podcast of me telling stories from Dining with al-Qaeda to my International Crisis Group former colleague Kim Abbott is available here, and a second 15-minute podcast of me talking about the problems faced by reporters in the Middle East is here. For an original, five-minute video guerrilla-style interview about the book by social media guru Thomas Crampton, click here.
A full chronological listing of reviews and comments about the book is here. The musings section are offbeat pieces on themes from Dining with al-Qaeda that I’ve written for the blog – about films like ‘The Hurt Locker’, about Turkish restaurants, about flagellation, about anything really. The Mr. Q’s News is when I see the same problems I describe in the book resurface in today’s news coverage of the Middle East.
The book launch tour in the U.S. from 28th March to 4th April 2010 felt non-stop. Here’s an account of where I appeared in New York, and here in Washington DC. A French translation of Dining with al-Qaeda was published in November 2012 by Presses de l’universite Laval, Quebec. Further rights have now reverted to myself.
My previous book is called Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World (Overlook, New York 2005), which follows my journeys in two dozen lands from Central Asia to West Virginia in search of the essence of Turkishness. It was an Economist magazine ‘book of the year’, and Foreign Affairs magazine listed it top of 20 titles it judged essential to read to understand Turkish politics. It has been translated into Turkish (Vatan Kitap, 2005) and Dutch (Atlas/Olympus 2006) and a French translation appeared in 2011 (Presses de l’univeriste Laval).
My first book is called Turkey Unveiled: A history of modern Turkey (John Murray/Overlook Duckworth, 1997-2004), and is a New York Times ‘notable book’. Co-authored with my first wife Nicole Pope, it has been translated into Turkish. The New York Times put the first chapter of the book on its website here.
Hugh Pope 
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