Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Author: Hugh Pope
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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…
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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…
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I first met Tony Horwitz when he was a Wall Street Journal correspondent, determined to see every inch of every border with Iraq to test a theory about sanctions against that country during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. We spent a week bumping up and down mountain roads along the Iraq-Turkey border together, and…
Hugh Pope 