Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Category: Mr. Q's News
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When I was wondering what to call my new book on the broader Middle East, I went to Homer’s bookshop in Istanbul to check out the many shelves full of competition. I soon decided I didn’t want my title to be heavy with dry theorification about Islam, democracy, politics, or terrorism. It also seemed a…
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I love reading the Economist from cover to cover. Their Middle East coverage can be especially good, even if I sometimes disagree with their editorials. The way the Economist really writes the news makes a more lasting imprint on my mind than other media. I always envy the pithy puns in the headlines, too. In…
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In its Spring 2010 edition, the Washington DC-based periodical Democracy: A Journal of Ideas published this letter from me arguing that American media’s responsibility for the U.S. invasion of Iraq results from a broader problem than just a tendency to kow-tow to the former government of President Bush … a situation I’d come to see…
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What’s an author to do when he hears that, before his new book is even printed or presented, it’s been sold in the charity shops for a couple of bucks? I love being a writer. I wouldn’t want to be anything else. But sometimes my trade feels like an uphill struggle. My first commercially published…
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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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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 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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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…
Hugh Pope 