Hugh Pope

Author, Reporter, Editor

recent posts

about

Writer of books on Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Formerly Director of Communications & Outreach and Turkey/Cyprus Project Director for International Crisis Group. Ex-Turkey & Middle East staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

  • The headscarf struggle

    I didn’t write much about the women’s headscarf debate as a journalist — it always seemed too complicated — but I had a go in a chapter on Middle Eastern women in Dining with al-Qaeda. Barçin Yinanç of Hurriyet Daily News in Turkey picked up the story (original here).

    An outsider’s look at Turkey’s headscarf issue

    BARÇIN YİNANÇ

    Friday, October 8, 2010

    The issue of the headscarf is back on Turkey’s agenda. The heated debate coincided with my reading of Hugh Pope’s recent book, “Dining with al-Qaeda.” As the subtitle, “Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East,” suggests, the former journalist explains to his readers the many and rather complex faces of the Middle East, emphasizing that the region is much more than a monolithic “Islamic World.”

    One of the 18 chapters is dedicated to women in the Middle East. Some of the passages of “Subversion in the Harem: Women on the rise from Cairo to Istanbul” pertain to issues that are directly related to the current debates in Turkey.

    One may recall the war of words between the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, on the different way the headscarf is worn in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.

    Pope also compares Turkey with Iran in his book. Changes to the traditional moral and household duties of women are recent in the Middle East, following the lead of the West, says Pope. Family honor and submissiveness are still usually considered to be essential and symbolized by the appearance of women, yet women also use their appearance to make political points, according to Pope. “The Turks consciously unveiled in their 1920s secular revolution to show how they were turning toward the West. Iranian women covered up during the 1979 Islamic Revolution to turn their back on the West and its support for the shah’s dictatorship. In the 2000s these two countries swapped places, with Iranian women pushing back their head scarves to register opposition to the regime and Turkish women wrapping themselves up,” he says. “Each nation had its own struggle with modernity rushing in, and paradoxes abounded.”

    He says Turkey is almost schizophrenic in its attitude toward women. The country’s republican secularists and its religious conservatives use women as their favorite political playground. But, argues Pope, this conflict is not only about the place of Islam in society, it is also a “new front in a long-running conflict about communities and social class. The religious-minded two-thirds of the population that is rooted in the villages of Anatolia tend to be pragmatic and open-minded about headscarves, whereas the more secular third is urban and often descended from refugees who built the Turkish Republic up from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after the 1920s and views headscarves as the nemesis of their ideological goal to create a modern state.

    For those who know Turkey and the headscarf issue, Pope’s analysis might not be so new. But in the following passages he touches on one dimension that rarely comes up:

    “The problem for me lies more in the Islamists’ other main justification for headscarves; that they are part of women’s duty to stop men lusting after them. Innocently enough, many young women therefore wear a chic headscarf that signals not that they are fundamentalists, but that they are morally upright and marriageable or are dutiful wives. But for exactly the same reason, the secularists are quite right, as in France, to insist that no headscarves be allowed in schools. A schoolgirl wearing a headscarf implies that I, as a man, might be lusting after her. I find the insinuation repugnant – if people really think there is such a general problem, they should first start educating the men.”

    Let me put it in different words. The headscarf also symbolizes in conservative Turkey that the woman wearing it is not an easy woman; implying in reverse that those who are not wearing it have the potential of being easy.

    One of the drivers of the daily I was working at 10 years ago once told me how his daughter, living in Southeast Turkey, decided to cover her head, as her husband, a soldier in the Turkish army, used to go away for long periods of time. That way, she thought, she would not be harassed by men.

    That’s the point when I, as a woman not wearing a headscarf, perceive this attitude as insulting. Just because I am not wearing a headscarf does not make me “less Muslim” or less “dignified.”

  • 9 Nov 2010 at National Press Club, Washington DC

    Dining with al-Qaeda has been selected as one of the books on show at the National’s Press Club’s annual Book Fair & Authors’ Night on 9 November 2010! This year the jamboree showcases 90 journalist-authors who sign their books that have appeared in the preceding year. NPR’s Diane Rehm is the honorary chairperson of the event, which runs from 5.30pm and ends “promptly” at 8.30pm. I will be joining the authors gathered at the 13th floor ballroom of the National Press Building near Metro Center at 529 14th St NW, at the corner of F & 15th Sreets NW in downtown Washington. Hope to see you there!

  • “Vast” – Hürriyet Daily News

    This interview and concise summary of the themes of Dining with al-Qaeda appeared in one of Turkey’s own English-language newspapers, Hürriyet Daily News, on the day that HDN co-sponsored the Istanbul launch of the book. (Original here). Thanks again to editor David Judson, executive Michael Wyatt and associate editor Barçin Yınanç for all this unexpected rallying round your fellow Istanbullu!

    Note for readers in Turkey: Homer Bookshop in Galatasaray (tel: +90 212 249 59 02) almost always has copies of Dining with al-Qaeda and can cheaply courier them anywhere in the country.

    Veteran journalist Pope explores Mideast in new book

    —

    BARÇIN YİNANÇ
    ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News
    Wednesday, September 15, 2010

    —

    Simplistic reporting that skirts deep-seated conflicts and cultural complexity has made it difficult for the West to come to terms with the Middle East, according to one journalist with long experience in the region.

    The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been just one of the crucial issues Western reporters have failed to explain, said journalist-turned-analyst Hugh Pope, the author of the new book “Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East.”

    “As a reporter [for the Wall Street Journal], I tried to explain to Americans why it is that Palestinians feel they are so unjustly treated, but I could not get the story across,” Pope told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in an interview Monday. “There is such a gap between what Americans think is the case and what the case is on the ground.”

    The author illustrates this phenomenon in “Dining with al-Qaeda” with a story he wrote about the plight of Palestinians. According to Pope, the published version portrayed a situation in which Palestinians and Israelis had lived happily for a long time until the Palestinians started shooting – failing to give the full picture of why they felt the need to fight. Such small, but critical, omissions made to cater to the assumed tastes of an American audience become bricks in a wall of incomprehension, he said.

    “In order to reach readers, you need to communicate. In order to communicate, you need to find common ground. That forces you to compromise,” said Pope, who has spent more than 30 years in the Middle East, much of it based in Istanbul. “But while searching for that compromise on what the American reader can take, often you end up confusing the situation even further.”

    Concerned about keeping readers on board, editors often avoid subjects seen as difficult for them to digest. To keep readers’ attention, journalists likewise feel obliged to appeal to expectations by focusing on Americans in the region, the spread of American values such as progress or democracy, themes of disaster and redemption and uplifting or happy endings – all things that are thin on the ground in the Middle East, Pope said. The lack of understanding of how every country in the Middle East has been to hell and back compounds the problem.

    In a previous book, “Sons of Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World,” Pope took readers on a journey through a geography that spreads from China to Europe and even to America, introducing largely unknown figures such as the Turkish mufti in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the leaders of Uighur Turks in China. His latest book is equally vast. In it, he seeks to break down the broader Middle East, ranging from Sudan to Afghanistan – and better known to Western readers, whose deep-seated convictions based on simplistic ideological labels such as “Arabs,” “Islam” or “terrorism.”

    “There is an overemphasis on Islam in understanding the Middle East,” Pope said. “There are ideologues who want you to believe that Islam is a monolith. They can be neo-conservatives in Washington, right-wing Israelis or Islamic fundamentalists. But look at the religious practice of core Muslim countries like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and you see very different religious cultures, almost different religions.”

    He added: “It is wrong to use Islam as a major analytical tool. You can’t explain everything with it.”

    In his 329-page book, which devotes significant space to journalism in the Middle East, Pope gives examples of how some reporters distort news, or even make things up, to make their stories fly. He also reflects his frustration with those who try to give a genuine, full picture but often fail.

    “As President Obama’s new American administration took office explicitly promising to listen and reassess its approach to the Middle East, I hope my observations can be a source of new ideas, empathy and change,” Pope wrote in the prologue.

    U.S. and European understanding of Iran could be served by the book as they seek to engage Tehran.

    “What you see in Iran is not what you get,” Pope said.

  • Launch in Istanbul

    The Istanbul launch of Dining with al-Qaeda will take place on at 4pm on Thursday, 16 September 2010, at the Istanbul Policy Center in Karakoy, the heart of the grand old Ottoman banking district. Co-hosts are the Istanbul Policy Center, Hurriyet Daily News and Homer Bookshop. The introduction will be by Joost Lagendijk, the former Euro-MP from Holland and one of Europe’s most famous faces in Turkey, now at Sabanci University. Author Hugh Pope will sign copies and give a talk about the book too. Below is a map with the formal invitation from HDN’s Michael Wyatt. All are welcome to come along, just RSVP to the address below!

    For those who can’t make it and want a copy of Dining with al-Qaeda in Turkey, Homer Books (details here) nearly always has the book in stock at its shop just round the corner from Galatasaray on Istiklal Cad., and is ready to courier it to any Turkish address for little extra cost.

    Dear Friends/Sevgili Dostlar,

    Joost Lagendijk, Senior Adviser at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, along with David Judson, Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review Editor-in-Chief, and Ayşen Boylu and Tolga Ölmezses of Homer Books, cordially invite you to join Hugh Pope for the launch of his new book, Dining with al-Qaeda: three decades exploring the many worlds of the Middle East.

    Joost Lagendijk, Sabancı Üniversitesi Istanbul Politikalar Merkezi’nde Kıdemli Danışman, David Judson, Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review Genel Yayın Yönetmeni, ve Homer Kitabevi’nden Ayşen Boylu ile Tolga Ölmezses, Hugh Pope’in yeni kitabının, Dining with al-Qaeda: three decades exploring the many worlds of the Middle East, tanıtımına sizleri aramızda görmekten mutluluk duyacaklardır.

    Mr Pope will greet guests and sign copies of his book on September 16th 2010 at 4:00pm at Sabancı University İletişim Merkezi, Bankalar Caddesi No:2 Minerva Han, Karaköy, Istanbul.

    For map, click here.

    Please RSVP to cbalcioglu@sabanciuniv.edu<

    Can Balcioğlu
    Project Administrative Officer
    Istanbul Policy Center at Sabancı University
    Tel: +90 212 292 49 39
    Güler Turunçoğlu, Michael Wyatt
    Business Development Associates
    Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review
    Tel: +90 (0)212 449 69 97

  • “Polemical Polyglot” – Denmark’s Weekendavisen

    I always feel odd when referred to as a ‘polyglot’, since I speak no language as well as I speak English, but flattering comments like these in Denmark’s leading magazine Weekendavisen are always welcome. Danish TV news anchorman Adam Holm says in his review that Dining with al-Qaeda has an “exceptional overview” and “by example sets a noble standard: learn to communicate with ‘the other’ on the same level and eye-to-eye”. Many thanks!

    (Although it’s probably short-sighted to make fun of Google Translate — which is pretty good and will doubtless be taking the jobs of all aspiring polyglots in a few short years – I can’t resist relaying its pidgin version of Weekendavisen‘s elegant Danish prose: “Pope with his insight rejects the kind vulgar nonsense. He is also noticeably disillusioned, because he has realized that three decades of attempts to sneak between bills and shades of in its reports have not shaken by large grandfather delusions…But he has not only an eye for West faux passport. Pope also takes the blade from his mouth and criticizes the ill objective tendency among many Arabs to blame for their debacle at all other than itself. Has heard the album once one knows the melody, and though it be raised with different degree of elegance and wit, it is refrænet same: it is the fault of others (read: Israel and the U.S.).”)

    POLEMISK POLYGLOT

    Af Adam Holm

    BRITER og fremmedsprog er sædvanligvis ikke to komplementære størrelser. Shakespeares efterkommere taler jo det globale lingua franca, så why bother?

    En klassisk sketch fra BBC rammer hovedet på sømmet. Et ældre ægtepar sidder på en restaurant i Paris. Manden henvender sig til tjeneren: »Garçon, je voudrais a beefsteak, please!«, hvortil hans bedre halvdel beundrende kvidrer: »Oh Harold, dear, I didn’t know you spoke Italian!«

    Men hvis uformåen på kontinentale tungemål således er karakteristisk for en brite, er Hugh Pope (f. 1960), mangeårig Mellemøsten-korrespondent for avisen The Wall Street Journal og forfatter til Dining With Al-Qaeda, meget lidt britisk.

    Med orientalske sprogstudier fra Oxford på sit CV og en barndom i Damaskus behersker han ikke blot arabisk, men tillige persisk og tyrkisk. Unægteligt brugbare arbejdsredskaber for en mand, der i knap tre årtier har beskæftiget sig med de arabiske lande og Iran og nu bor og arbejder i Istanbul som konsulent for The International Crisis Group.

    For tidligere generationer af Orient-rejsende var polyglote egenskaber en selvfølge, men det er dyder, som flertallet af nutidens udenlandske pressefolk – mange kvaliteter ufortalt – ikke er i besiddelse af. Kun en lille håndfuld af de internationale reportere, der til daglig forsøger at gøre os andre klogere på virkelighedens Mellemøsten, er i stand til at forstå arabisk endsige hebraisk.

    At Hugh Pope kan lave interviews uden tolk og læse lokale aviser og tidsskrifter (og alt det, der står mellem linjerne) giver ham et exceptionelt overblik. I 18 velfortalte kapitler skildrer Pope alt fra arabisk homoseksualitet (den i øvrigt heteroseksuelle Pope synes at have en særlig appel til irakiske bøsser) over borgerkrig i Libanon og iransk revolutionskultur til sult i Sydsudan, afghanske krigsherrer, kurdiske separatister og saudiske wahhabister.

    Ind imellem dette og meget mere fra regionens trykkoger tegner Pope et billede af en korrespondents uvejsomme tilværelse. Nogle af de lande, Pope har haft som sin arbejdsmark, har budt på udfordringer og strabadser, som rummede en gedigen risiko for at komme voldsomt af dage, sådan som det er sket for en håndfuld af Popes kolleger og nære venner. Pope er fl ere gange i voldsom knibe, ikke mindst under et interview i Riyadh med en ung saudiarabisk al-Qaeda-tilhænger, som kendte terroristerne bag angrebene 11. september 2001. »Nogle vidunderlige gutter,« lyder det fra fundamentalisten, som samtidig over et stykke kylling iskoldt forklarer Pope, at han strengt taget burde have halsen skåret over som den vantro, han er. Man kan bogstaveligt talt høre Popes strubehoved snøre sig sammen, og man skynder sig frem til afsnittets sidste side for at forvisse sig om, at forfatteren rent faktisk slipper uskadt fra den makabre samtale.

    DER er mange enerverende stunder i en korrespondents liv, men ind imellem sættes nervesystemet på overarbejde. I den forbindelse kan Pope ikke stå for fristelsen til at lade et par polemiske ord falde om landsmanden Robert Fisk, Mellemøstenjournalistikkens store hvide ronkedor, som angiveligt har en uvane med at dramatisere lidt for trivielle hændelser. Man aner antydningen af et karaktermord på manden, som Pope vedgår, han beundrede til hudløshed som yngre. Men i lighed med det falmede forbillede har Pope indset, hvor kompleks en størrelse Mellemøsten er, og derfor slår bogens undertitel fast, at der eksisterer flere »mellemøstlige verdener«.

    Ligesom Europa ikke er ét fedt, er det ingen nyhed, at Mellemøsten dækker over en stor variation af identiteter, religioner, kulturer og etniske grupper. Men denne trivielle indsigt er desværre, hvis man skal tro Pope, ikke så selvfølgelig blandt visse amerikanske avisredaktører og bigotte kolleger. De har regnet Mellemøsten ud som et sted befolket af fundamentalt anderledes – og derfor potentielt fjendtligtsindede – mennesker.

    Overflødigt at sige, at Pope med sin indsigt i kulturelle modsætninger og mangfoldigheder afviser den slags som vulgært nonsens. Han er dog også mærkbart desillusioneret, fordi han har indset, at tre årtiers forsøg på at snige mellemregninger og nuancer med i sine reportager ikke har rokket stort ved hævdvundne vrangforestillinger. Hverken blandt almindelige avislæsere eller beslutningstagere.

    Irak-krigen og særligt dens forløjede optakt gav Pope et skud for boven. Invasionen af Saddam Husseins diktaturstat, hvor umenneskelig den end var, har bombet bestræbelserne på et dybtstikkende tillidsforhold mellem vores del af verden og de ofte skeptiske autoritære stater i Mellemøsten adskillige årtier tilbage, mener Pope.

    Men han har ikke kun øje for Vestens faux pas. Pope tager også bladet fra munden og kritiserer den ulyksaglige tendens blandt mange arabere til at skyde skylden for deres misere på alle andre end sig selv. Har man hørt pladen én gang, kender man melodien, og selvom den bliver fremført med forskellig grad af elegance og vid, er refrænet det samme: Det er de andres skyld (læs: Israel og USA).

    POPE er som antydet ingen hardliner, når det gælder den vestlige kurs over for regimerne i Mellemøsten, men dårlige undskyldninger, inerti og religiøs formørkelse fylder ham med irritation. Han gider ikke længere lægge øren til beretninger om fornemme videnskabelige bedrifter tilbage i kalifaternes storhedstid, når nutidens oplysningsniveau er så beskæmmende ringe i mange af de arabiske stater.

    Selv om Popes bog ikke rummer en GPS for en mere farbar vej til fred og fremgang i Mellemøsten, har han dog med sit eget eksempel sat en fornem standard: Lær at kommunikere på lige fod og i øjenhøjde med ’de andre’. Det er de små skridts vej. Måske værd at prøve, når idealismens syvmilestøvler engang bliver kasseret.

  • “Terrific” – Ian Black in The Guardian, UK

    A lovely review of Dining with al-Qaeda in The Guardian of the UK by Ian Black, who paired my book with Joris Luyendijk’s Hello Everybody!, newly published in English. I thought Luyendjik’s book was great and I found that we shared many perspectives, even if the Dutch reporter based his assessment on a quite short experience. One thing I couldn’t understand was why he often felt disadvantaged by not working for a US publication: I would have thought that it would have been liberating working for the excellent Dutch media he represented. Maybe US reporters enjoyed somewhat more privileged access, but I think that over the years all of us were given less and less time with real decision makers in the region. Original review here.

    TWO JOURNALISTS PONDER THE HAZARDS OF REPORTING ON THE MIDDLE EAST
    —

    Hugh Pope and Joris Luyendijk describe their experiences in the Middle East in Dining with Al Qaeda and Hello Everybody

    By Ian Black, Middle East Editor

    18 May 2010

    Foreign correspondents covering the Middle East are the first to admit that it isn’t an easy beat: partisan views, authoritarian regimes and marginalised opposition movements are routine hazards. Add in issues as divisive as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, al-Qaida, oil, the US invasion of Iraq and theocracy in Iran – and the word “minefield” conveys just how treacherous the territory can be. Real war-zones and men with guns are part of the landscape too. And so are expectations and agendas back in the newsroom.

    Two excellent new books describe some of the tricks and dilemmas of this trade. Hugh Pope left the field after nearly 30 years reporting for British and US news agencies and papers. Hello Everybody! Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five years in the region in a breezy but self-critical account of “one journalist’s search for truth”.

    Pope’s book Dining with Al Qaeda is terrific on spice-scented bazaars, maddening border crossings, sinister secret policemen and sexual mores in unlikely places – as well as Islam, democracy and other staples. But he is also thought provoking on the difficulty of conveying the reality of the “dysfunctional backyard” that is the Middle East to western, especially American, audiences who are used to a diet of infotainment and familiar, easily digestible narratives.

    The Guardian's caption to this photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters: "Hugh Pope tackles the difficulty of conveying the reality of the Middle East to western audiences." However, while I did once interview a Burka shopowner in Kabul in a futile attempt to discuss the situation of Afghan women with the women themselves, this photo has nothing to do with me!

    In his final media job at the Wall Street Journal he battled to keep his stories “out of the ruts of traditional coverage of good ‘moderates’ versus bad ‘radicals,’ a misleading focus on an Arab-Israeli ‘peace process’ that has yet to proceed anywhere, and the way many people overemphasise the role of ‘Islam’ as an analytical tool in assessing the Middle East”. An editor at the Los Angeles Times urged him not to use the word “Kurd” if he wanted his stories published. It reminded me of the joke of hard-bitten American correspondents in Lebanon in the hostage-taking 1980s: “What’s a Druze and who gives a shit?”

    This can be a frustrating and dangerous craft: not only did Pope struggle to explain Saudi Arabia to suddenly interested readers after 9/11 but had to draw on his Quranic knowledge to convince a jihadi interviewee it was not his duty to kill him as an infidel. His Jewish WSJ colleague Danny Pearl was not so lucky when he encountered al-Qaida in Pakistan.

    Changing technology is part of this story: Pope is old enough to have filed copy by telex and fiddled with those crocodile clips used to attach early laptops to hotel phone lines. Luyendijk, using mobile phones and the internet from the start, recalls how Syrian censors blocked his Hotmail account and moved on to YouTube a few years later. Facebook and Twitter helped the opposition in last summer’s Iranian presidential elections.

    Both fretted about how to deal with the pressure to deliver stories that filter, distort and manipulate reality. Notebooks bursting with hard-gained insights can count for little if the item has been pre-scripted according to stock assumptions and prejudices back at base in New York, London or Amsterdam.

    Pope is an accomplished linguist with Arabic, Persian and Turkish under his belt: he wears his learning lightly but it shows in the quality of his writing – short on pyrotechnics but long on understanding. Luyendijk is good on bridging the gap between the modern standard Arabic most foreigners study and the different dialects spoken in every country and region. Too little ability to speak means over-dependence on local fixers and translators on the payroll of the ministry of information.

    Pope bravely tackles the reputation of his onetime Independent colleague Robert Fisk, for many a cult figure who “manages to step around the cautious conventions of Middle Eastern reporting and drive home at an emotional level the injustices of the dictators and the cruel side of US policies”. But he is not the first journalist to wonder with envy and irritation how Fisk “managed to get an amazing sounding story from a dull day we all spent staking out Israeli anti-insurgency troop movements in south Lebanon”. Drama and colour may be easier to deliver than accuracy, analysis and insight: “Our readers were too far away, physically and mentally, to grasp the emotional context of careful reporting,” he gloomily concludes.

    Reporting on the run-up to war in Iraq for the WSJ, he says, was a depressing time: a carefully researched article warning of “unintended consequences” for foreign conquerors had no effect on the pro-war juggernaut: it was published a few days before the tanks began to roll. Shortly afterwards Pope got his first call from the paper’s baffled opinion page editor who wanted the correspondent to explain why Iraqis were resisting their American liberators. It was a short conversation.

    Pope’s book, acclaimed in the US, has yet to be published in Britain. Luyendijk’s, now out in English (Profile Books), sold an extraordinary 250,000 copies in the Netherlands. It’s just as well neither heeded the advice one old hack offered the young Dutchman. “If you want to write a book about the Middle East, you’d better do it in your first week,” he counselled. “The longer you hang around here, the less you understand.”

  • ‘Intelligence and wit … with [a] characteristic smile’ – Washington Report

    I didn’t realize that I was perceived as having a ‘swashbuckling style’, but reviews don’t get much more flattering than this Adam Chamy take on my April presentation of Dining with al-Qaeda at the New America Foundation. It was published in the Music and Arts section of the July edition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, pages 52-53.

    Music & Arts: Hugh Pope Discusses Mideast Politics, New Memoir

    LONGTIME foreign correspondent Hugh Pope, currently director of the Turkey/Cyprus Project at the International Crisis Group, discussed his new memoir, Dining with al-Qaeda, at an April 23 event hosted by the New America Foundation, International Crisis Group, and Foreign Policy Magazine. Pope, who has spent more than three decades in the Middle East as a traveler, journalist and student of Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages, said one of the most important things he has learned is that the Middle East is not a monolithic “Islamic World.” With intelligence and wit, the British journalist fielded difficult questions concerning ongoing political changes in the region.

    Clearly, war correspondence in the Middle East is not for the faint of heart. Pope’s perilous assignments included reporting on the Lebanese civil war and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Even as a polyglot, he encountered difficulty in finding reliable and safe sources in a region dominated by autocratic, media-sensitive regimes and a sometimes hostile Arab street.

    The author of Dining with al-Qaeda really did dine with a member of al-Qaeda soon after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. At the time a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Pope met in Riyadh with a young militant who’d worked in Afghanistan and had helped prepare many of the hijackers for their deadly mission.

    In addition to dangerous assignments, Pope said he’s faced editorial room intrigues as a result of pressure by powerful pro-Israel lobbying groups and a media-sensitive Bush administration.

    “Most journalists are honest,” Pope said, “and what you read in the newspaper is mostly right, but it is not the whole story. You do have to search for other sources of information to compare and think about what you are hearing and take a variety of points of view.”

    Expressing optimism about the changing narrative surrounding Israel and Palestine, Pope noted that several mainstream media outlets have reported issues that would have been wholly taboo during his tenure as a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent. Likewise—citing the example of Turkey and the power of the Internet on young people in the Middle East—he seemed cautiously hopeful about the gradual prospects for media, social, and political freedoms in Ba’athist Syria, and with the prospect of elections in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

    As for his swashbuckling style of foreign journalism, Pope—with his characteristic smile—joked that a life like his would probably be unrealistic in the future, given the dangers, costs, and demise of traditional reporting, but praised the potential of Twitter and bloggers as tools for future journalists.

    Pope’s memoir is available from the AET Book Club for only $19. To order, call (202) 939-6050 ext. 2 or visit <www.middleeastbooks.com>.

    —Adam Chamy

  • Oxford, Cambridge and some places in between

    The fortunes of my books among British readers has always felt complicated by my ambivalent relationship with the United Kingdom. I love the high English liberal culture of my parents and my education, but I never fully connected to England itself. Perhaps this was because I spent the first decade of my life in South Africa, and the three decades since leaving Oxford University in the Middle East and Turkey. On top of that, my former wife was Swiss, my present wife is Dutch, my daughters went to French and German schools, and I have almost always preferred the rigour and vigour of working for Americans. My lack of a true anchor in Britain may be why my first two books seemed to do better in U.S. and international markets than in England.

    So it may prove for Dining with al-Qaeda as well. High-octane UK publications like the Economist and Prospect Magazine have reviewed it (here) and excerpted it (here), but the book is not yet formally published in Britain. Independent stores like Daunt Books and the London Review Book Shop display and stock the US edition published in March, as does amazon.co.uk, but if asked about it, mainstream bookstores scratch their heads or announce that it has been ‘sold out’.

    Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist when invitations arrived to give public talks about the book in May in three English venues: the first a presentation of the themes of the book to a dozen friends of International Crisis Group over dinner in London, and then talks in Cambridge and Oxford.

    I was met at Cambridge station by Ata Akiner, president of the university’s Turkish Society and the prime mover in inviting me to speak. We first headed to Magdalene College, where I was greatly looking forward to staying. If my life had taken a different turn, I would have become the fourth generation in my family to be a student there; but, bruised by high 1970s drop-out rates in Oriental Studies, and probably wary of my rebellious school record, the college had dismissed my application to study Persian.

    Talk at Department of International Studies

    Akiner and the Turkish Society proved the perfect hosts, setting me up in a delightful senior fellow’s room overlooking a leafy courtyard on a sunny afternoon that was flattering every corner of Cambridge’s lawns, gardens and lilac-garlanded stone walls. We then gathered followers to my talk in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and it became clear that Cambridge now helps prove a paradox: its collection of ethnically Turkish students from Belgium, Germany and England were another example of how the Turks of Europe can sometimes appear more cosmopolitan and borderlessly ‘European’ than Europeans themselves. They were also efficient in broadcasting news of the talk and directing people to the lecture hall through a departmental labyrinth. Even at this time of finals exams and gorgeous weather, they also defeated elite institutional ennui and filled every seat in the room.

    Euroturks dining at Pembroke College, Cambridge

    Dr. Geoffrey Edwards, the Reader in European Studies who introduced my talk, then spoiled me and the Turkish Society with a formal dinner in the hall of Pembroke College, replete with gongs, academics in flowing gowns, Latin graces, long silver-decked tables and a gorgeous light flowing in from windows opening out onto the honey-coloured quadrangles all around.

    Geoffrey Edwards, Hugh Pope, Ata Akiner

    Edwards turned out to be following the same lonely path as I do in trying to draw attention to the benefits of EU integration, and Turkey’s role in that, and gave me new strength in my conviction that Europe needs more unity rather than less.

    Two days later I headed over to Oxford, where my invitation was of a different nature. On being called up several months before to be asked if I would contribute cash to my old college, Wadham, I had said I had little money to spare but would be happy to give something in kind – a talk to the new generation of Oriental Studies students, perhaps. Within an hour my offer had been accepted. Wadham Arabic student and lead organizer Jessica Kelly filled a fine new room on the front quadrangle with an impressive number of students, and wrote up a pre-talk interview published in the student newspaper Cherwell (here). A lively barrage of questions ranged from my views on the film the Hurt Locker (more here) to a discussion of why, after I described International Crisis Group’s efforts to mobilize information behind policy recommendations, academics did not make the same effort to be currently relevant and accessible.

    Oxford was looking so beautiful that I happily lingered for two days more, punting on the river, lunching on a lawn near the Oriental Institute to chat with students about what post-Orientalists like us can expect from the world. I also took in a Balliol college lecture by Rory Stewart, an Etonian, Balliol man, army officer and diplomat, who, after writing successful books on his experiences in Afghanistan (The Places in Between) and Iraq (The Prince of the Marshes), has now stormed into the British parliament. By chance I sat exactly in front of him as he spoke, which doubled the impact of his words. He sports a well-trained memory, a clear rhetorical style, a confident strutting around and leaning on the lectern, a well-cut suit with a dashing extra waist pocket, and a political ambition that is only highlighted by his quotations from T.S. Eliot about the need for humility. I was soon convinced me that he has his sights firmly on Britain highest political office.

    Good for Rory Stewart. I found myself agreeing with all his arguments about the need for a far lighter footprint for troops in Afghanistan, and his account of the hypocrisy and irresponsibility that led to the build-up of troops there in the first place. Above all, I appreciated his attack on the great theoretical and academic infrastructure that continues to justify these self-defeating Western deployments, a mesmerising mixture, as he pointed out, of paranoia and megalomania.

    His comments about the UK’s predicament, and the misrepresentations of Middle Eastern reality that make it so hard to change policies, mirrored he arguments I make in Dining with al-Qaeda about U.S. policy and American media. I hope that in our different ways, people like us pushing together will in the end result in some better understanding of how to let the Middle East become a more constructive place.

  • ‘These are real people’ – Andrew Stroehlein, Reuters AlertNet

    Andrew Stroehlein

    A lovely review from Crisis Group media director Andrew Stroehlein, posted on Reuters AlertNet (original here). As for Stroehlein’s concern in the last paragraph, let me state that I had never thought that anyone would be uncomfortable at my occasional mentions of girlfriends in the Middle East! I reckoned that eyebrows would more likely be raised at the book’s opening, in which I escape the attention of  lustful Iraqi truck drivers in an Aleppo brothel — an episode chosen, as ever, as much for its comical as its dramatic content.

    Dining with al-Qaeda

    By Andrew Stroehlein
    —————————-

    Let’s start with full disclosure: I work with the author of this book. So, yes, I’m likely to say good things about it.

    But, to be honest, I would anyway, because what my colleague Hugh Pope has done in Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East, is at once revealing, convincing and, um, sort of fun.

    The first two adjectives won’t surprise anyone who knows Hugh or who is familiar with the reputation he earned for serious reporting from the Middle East over decades. The third, well, let’s save that for now…

    What I find most interesting in these memoirs of a newspaper foreign correspondent — from the good old days before newspaper foreign correspondents joined the endangered species list — are the parts of the book where Hugh describes the challenges of presenting ground-level truth in the Middle East to American audiences via US editors.

    Examining both the editors’ own biases and their perceptions of their readers’ biases, Hugh demonstrates in case after case how stories got watered down, had their emphasis altered, were scarred by a cliched headline, or otherwise ended up conveying meanings at odds with his original field reporting. It was frustrating, sometimes embarrassing, and it occasionally made his job more difficult by damaging important relationships in the countries concerned.

    Of course, this kind of thing happens between correspondents and editors, and reporting from the Middle East probably falls victim to it more often than that from most other regions. But the detail Hugh gives about the individual stories he was working on — what he saw on the ground, how his original text was framed, what the editors’ input was, where the problems crept in, and how the final copy read — is illuminating. For a news and media junkie like me, this sort of thing is fascinating.

    What Hugh also does is is show the diversity of people in the region, breaking down the all-to-common stereotypes. These are real people, not ideologies or symbols, and they have their individual interests and concerns. They laugh, cry, hope and express outrage for reasons Hugh makes clear.

    This is, of course, exactly why Hugh wrote the book: to break down some of the misconceptions the outside world, particularly the US, has of the Middle East due to one-dimensional media coverage — which, of course, he feels somewhat guilty for having played a small part in, however unwilling and unintentional. Dissecting the distortions step-by-step, Hugh exposes the problem. Day after day, much of the US mass media dehumanises people in the Middle East, deepening divides between cultures. Hugh’s book is one small push in the opposite direction.

    And many parts of the book are just fun. Well, they would be for most readers. Humour changes to discomfort for me somewhat at certain passages, and I must confess I rather wish I didn’t know the author. It would be much easier to read about Hugh Pope’s sexual misadventures around the region if I had never met him. Hugh, you dark horse…

  • ”An occupational prerequisite’ – Oxford’s Cherwell

    Oxford University’s student newspaper Cherwell published this interview (here) ahead of my 20 May talk in Wadham College. My dinner with interviewer and Oxford Oriental Studies scholar Jessica Kelly and two of her fellow Oxonians was fun and memorable. While we discussed Hollywood’s portrayal of Iraq and America’s mission in the Middle East, it became clear that one of the party, recently awarded a first class degree in Arabic, was able to take a heated part in the debate without even having seen the film. Now that’s an Oxford education …

    The Real Hurt Locker

    by Jessica Kelly | 20:22 GMT, Thu 20 May 2010

    I meet Hugh Pope for the first time when I am stuck in the lift leading to his sixth floor flat on Istanbul’s main drag, Istiklal Caddesi. I couldn’t read the sign that read in Turkish, ‘Danger: lift faulty’, and the lift stopped between the third and fourth floor. Through the chink of light between the floors I hear Pope say, ‘Ah yes. The lift doesn’t work. There is a sign…’

    This isn’t an ideal start to an interview with a man for whom the ability to speak Turkish is an occupational prerequisite. Finally easing the lift doors open, we retreat to Pope’s local restaurant. First topic of conversation is the film ‘The Hurt Locker’. He wants to be clear that every scene in the film conveys a mesage that is entirely anti-Arab and neo-conservative.

    Later Pope explains that if a degree in Arabic taught him anything, it was that he must never become an ‘Orientalist’. He was determined to discover ‘the real Middle East’ and so a month after leaving Wadham he set off to Damascus to become a writer.

    He worked his way up from fixer to stringer to correspondent for the Independent, the BBC and the Los Angeles Times before settling at the Wall Street Journal. But Pope soon realised that not much of what he wrote about ‘the real Middle East’ would make the final edit; “About 20% of the story would normally be missing, because it was considered too discomforting for the American reader”. When referring to the 3 million Palestinians living outside of pre-1948 Palestine as “refugees, barred from return” he would be told to change this to “original refugees and their descendants”.

    With each of these omissions or white lies, he writes in his new book, Dining with al Qaeda, “we laid another brick in the great wall of misconception that now separates America and the Middle East.” He characterizes this misconception as the tendency to view the Islamic world as a monolithic bloc. All this, he says, is one of the reasons that the US stumbled into the war in Iraq and is finding it so difficult to get out of Afghanistan. Pope belives that if the media had not given such a sanitized version of what America was doing in the Middle East, their foreign policy might have turned out differently.

    I ask about the title of his book, an effort to compete with ‘Tea with Hezbollah’ or ‘Recipes from the Axis of Evil’ (both recently published titles), perhaps? Pope tells me that it’s meant to grab people’s attention, “but it does also specifically refer to the time I went for a Chinese meal in Riyadh with a missionary from one of al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan camps.” The missionary began by asking Pope why he shouldn’t kill him. “I persuaded him that my invitation into the country was legitimate and that it would be ‘un-Islamic’ to harm a guest, especially an innocent journalist just trying to present al-Qaeda’s side of the story.” The missionary calmed down and then began to tell Pope all sorts of secrets about the system of recruitment in al-Qaeda’s training camps.
    But secrets they remained; Pope explains that “back at the office of the Wall Street Journal the story was tossed aside. Much too provocative.” He’s certainly tetchy about this issue and quickly moves back to our first topic, ‘The Hurt Locker’.

    “Have you ever seen such an absurd load of militarist nonsense? It clashes with almost every aspect of my experiences of Iraq, war zones and American soldiers…Although it’s shot with no overt politics there is a clear agenda behind all those brilliantly filmed slow-mo pressure waves, sinister improvised explosive devices and the cocky gait of Sgt. James as he lopes into action in his bomb suit.”

    He points out that one by one Iraqis are portrayed as cowardly, poor, inadequate, base, stupid, treacherous, and threatening. “The only half-positive character is a cheeky DVD-selling boy who pretty soon is killed off by a booby-trap planted in his stomach by his fellow Iraqis.”

    In 2007 Pope decided to leave journalism behind; the situation in Iraq and the realisation that what he wrote wasn’t having any impact on American public opinion forced him to seek other outlets. He became director of the Turkish branch of the International Crisis Group. This position, he says, has given him more freedom to ‘bridge gaps’ than journalism ever could have done.
    Pope is optimistic about the future; he believes that an upside of the Middle Eastern ‘brain-drain’ is that more and more Middle Easteners are now writing for American papers. This means that the grossly misinformed Western public are now increasingly exposed to hitherto hidden truths.

    Hugh Pope’s new book ‘Dining with al-Qaeda’ (Published by Thomas Dunne Books) is now available. RRP: £18.99.

    I meet Hugh Pope for the first time when I am stuck in the lift leading to his sixth floor flat on Istanbul’s main drag, Istiklal Caddesi. I couldn’t read the sign that read in Turkish, ‘Danger: lift faulty’, and the lift stopped between the third and fourth floor. Through the chink of light between the floors I hear Pope say, ‘Ah yes. The lift doesn’t work. There is a sign…’

    This isn’t an ideal start to an interview with a man for whom the ability to speak Turkish is an occupational prerequisite. Finally easing the lift doors open, we retreat to Pope’s local restaurant. First topic of conversation is the film ‘The Hurt Locker’. He wants to be clear that every scene in the film conveys a mesage that is entirely anti-Arab and neo-conservative.

    Later Pope explains that if a degree in Arabic taught him anything, it was that he must never become an ‘Orientalist’. He was determined to discover ‘the real Middle East’ and so a month after leaving Wadham he set off to Damascus to become a writer.

    He worked his way up from fixer to stringer to correspondent for the Independent, the BBC and the Los Angeles Times before settling at the Wall Street Journal. But Pope soon realised that not much of what he wrote about ‘the real Middle East’ would make the final edit; “About 20% of the story would normally be missing, because it was considered too discomforting for the American reader”. When referring to the 3 million Palestinians living outside of pre-1948 Palestine as “refugees, barred from return” he would be told to change this to “original refugees and their descendants”.

    With each of these omissions or white lies, he writes in his new book, Dining with al Qaeda, “we laid another brick in the great wall of misconception that now separates America and the Middle East.” He characterizes this misconception as the tendency to view the Islamic world as a monolithic bloc. All this, he says, is one of the reasons that the US stumbled into the war in Iraq and is finding it so difficult to get out of Afghanistan. Pope belives that if the media had not given such a sanitized version of what America was doing in the Middle East, their foreign policy might have turned out differently.

    I ask about the title of his book, an effort to compete with ‘Tea with Hezbollah’ or ‘Recipes from the Axis of Evil’ (both recently published titles), perhaps? Pope tells me that it’s meant to grab people’s attention, “but it does also specifically refer to the time I went for a Chinese meal in Riyadh with a missionary from one of al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan camps.” The missionary began by asking Pope why he shouldn’t kill him. “I persuaded him that my invitation into the country was legitimate and that it would be ‘un-Islamic’ to harm a guest, especially an innocent journalist just trying to present al-Qaeda’s side of the story.” The missionary calmed down and then began to tell Pope all sorts of secrets about the system of recruitment in al-Qaeda’s training camps.
    But secrets they remained; Pope explains that “back at the office of the Wall Street Journal the story was tossed aside. Much too provocative.” He’s certainly tetchy about this issue and quickly moves back to our first topic, ‘The Hurt Locker’.

    “Have you ever seen such an absurd load of militarist nonsense? It clashes with almost every aspect of my experiences of Iraq, war zones and American soldiers…Although it’s shot with no overt politics there is a clear agenda behind all those brilliantly filmed slow-mo pressure waves, sinister improvised explosive devices and the cocky gait of Sgt. James as he lopes into action in his bomb suit.”

    He points out that one by one Iraqis are portrayed as cowardly, poor, inadequate, base, stupid, treacherous, and threatening. “The only half-positive character is a cheeky DVD-selling boy who pretty soon is killed off by a booby-trap planted in his stomach by his fellow Iraqis.”

    In 2007 Pope decided to leave journalism behind; the situation in Iraq and the realisation that what he wrote wasn’t having any impact on American public opinion forced him to seek other outlets. He became director of the Turkish branch of the International Crisis Group. This position, he says, has given him more freedom to ‘bridge gaps’ than journalism ever could have done.
    Pope is optimistic about the future; he believes that an upside of the Middle Eastern ‘brain-drain’ is that more and more Middle Easteners are now writing for American papers. This means that the grossly misinformed Western public are now increasingly exposed to hitherto hidden truths.

    Hugh Pope’s new book ‘Dining with al-Qaeda’ (Published by Thomas Dunne Books) is now available. RRP: £18.99.