Author: Hugh Pope
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Thrilled to see top-of-the-bill ranking for my last book, Sons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World ! New York’s Foreign Affairs magazine on 23 September 2009 listed the book’s account of my Central Asian and other Turkic journeys first among the 20 titles judged essential for ‘What to Read on Turkish Politics’…
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One of the Arab world’s leading international magazines, al-Majalla, gave its readers a heads-up about the forthcoming publication of Dining with al-Qaeda in the new titles section of its 9 January edition. The 30 years Pope has spent living and travelling in the Middle East, from a 1980 visit as an Oxford student through a…
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Leafing through the summer 2009 edition of Washington’s “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas”, I stumbled across an interesting critique of the U.S. media performance in the run-up to, during, and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – a central theme of the last quarter of my new book, Dining with al-Qaeda. In the article, Leslie…
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There’s one line in the Publishers Weekly review of Dining with al-Qaeda — the one about the “exquisite photographs” — that made me expecially proud. The reviewers at PW even took the rare step of publishing this image (only viewable in their print edition): When I first sent the book to the publısher there was…
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John Ash writes poetry that I really love, and his new collection “In the Wake of the Day”, just published by Carcanet, once again offers great moments of hovering between East and West, ancient and modern, the personal and the historical. Ash nearly drops his pose of elegant nonchalance once or twice when he edges…
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The French rights to Dining with al-Qaeda have already been sold! The translation will be done by Les Presses de l’universite Laval in Quebec, a respected Canadian university press. PUL will soon also be publishing a translation into French of my second book Sons of the Conquerors as well. The distributor of their French-lanugage edition…
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The penultimate chapter of Dining with al-Qaeda focuses on my experiences during the Iraq war with the Yezidi community, who straddle the northeastern corner of Iraq and patches of southeast Turkey. These 500,000 people seemed to me to be as representative as any of the other pieces of the Iraqi mosaic before, during and after…
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This photo — from Turkish photographer Sıtkı Kösemen‘s fun new album of Istanbul photographs Today is Today — sums up a lot about what I’m trying to say about the many faces of Islam in Dining with al-Qaeda. What do you think these girls represent?
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Sometimes I feel that for Americans, the dramas of the Middle East play out in parallel universe. It was with fascination, therefore, that I saw that the Berkeley Daily Planet in California had spun into an intergalactic war as it tried to bring debate about the region down to earth. I bring this up because…
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Dining with al-Qaeda will be featured at venerable Washington DC bookshop Politics & Prose on 31 March 2010. I’ve been invited to do a reading, discussion and book signing at 7pm – hope to see you there! Politics & Prose 5015 Connecticut Ave NW Washington, DC 20008 (202) 364-1919
Hugh Pope 