Hugh Pope

The updated, UK paperback edition of Dining with al-Qaeda is out! The book has a new subtitle “Making Sense of the Middle East”, a striking new cover and inside cover artwork from the Naranjestan Palace in Shiraz, Iran.

The only way to buy this edition is by messaging me here (hughpopebooks@gmail.com). The book costs £22/€26/$31. Sending to an address in the UK adds £3 in postage, making £25. For sending to an address in Europe and the rest of the world, the cost including postage is £39/€43/$50. (The previous US rate is now no longer valid after changes in postage rates). Registered post is 5 euros extra. Payment can be made by Paypal or bank transfer in the UK, EU, Turkey or the US. Typically, delivery is made in about 10 days.

Encouraged by praise from Publisher’s Weekly for the first edition’s 40 “exquisite photographs”, I’ve added another 50 of my favourite black and white images and given them all more space. Fine-tuned and rearranged by designer Kjell Olsson, they now pop out of the page on sleek 100g white paper. The new text also now uses British English spelling, has a larger and smoother typeface and, whisper it, has bid farewell to most of the U.S. edition’s Oxford commas.

There’s a new prologue too, explaining the other reason I’m putting the book back into wider circulation: I think it is still as relevant as it was in 2010. I’ve added a few lines here and there to underline that point from time to time. But Dining with al-Qaeda remains a personal bildungsroman based on my three decades of exploration, adventures and newspaper reporting in the region. I wrote it to give readers a feeling for Middle Eastern peoples, places and dynamics, not to detail a blow-by-blow account of the latest news. 

Focused as it was on describing the Middle East as I lived it, including previous “springtimes” of democratic hope, the first edition was not about the Arab uprisings that began a couple of years after I finished the original text. But the underlying need for more understanding is just as urgent today as then. The turmoil of the past decade – popular hopes for greater freedoms, grim repressions and wars – follows pre-existing patterns that are the warp and weft of this volume.

“[Dining with al-Qaeda is] among the handful of books that explain the road that led [to 2011’s Arab Uprisings]. This book is recommended not just for its easy readability and its rich colours [but also] as an introduction to how stories become articles … particularly impressive is his skill in presenting the various sides, for example seeing the same event from Palestinian and Israeli, or through Arab and American eyes.”

Walter Posch, Journal for Intelligence Propaganda and Security Studies, Aug 2013

The first edition was excerpted in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines, as well as being translated into French. Dining with al-Qaeda has been widely praised as “a very good book” (The Economist ), “terrific” (Ian Black in The Guardian), and a “fascinating memoir” (Publishers’ Weekly ). You can find many other reviews here.

I hope you enjoy this now even more readable book!