Alp Yenen and Erik-Jan Zürcher, "A Hundred Ye...

In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian ...  Show more

Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest? Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becomi ...  Show more

Alp Yenen on “A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments” (Leiden University Press). The book includes 100 chapters, written by over 70 scholars, examining different aspects of Turkey's political, social, cultural and economic history on the centena ...

Christine Philliou, associate professor of history at UC Berkeley, on “Turkey: A Past Against History” (University of California Press). The book examines the life of the writer Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965), interrogating the shifting meaning of political dissent from Ottoman to ...  Show more

Spyros Sofos on “Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism” (Edinburgh University Press). The book delves into the ambiguities behind the term “the people” from the late Ottoman era to today, and how religious, secularist, left ...

Ramazan Aras on “The Wall: The Making and Unmaking of the Turkish-Syrian Border” (Palgrave Macmillan). The book examines the effect on local Kurdish communities of the foundation of the Turkey-Syria border in 1923 and its later hardening, leading most recently to the building of ...  Show more