Search results for ""Author Nicolas Pelham""

The news from the Middle East these days is bad. Whatever hopes people may have for the region are being dashed over and over, in country after country. Nicolas Pelham, a veteran correspondent for The Economist, has seen much of the tragedy first hand, but in Holy Lands he presents a strikingly original and startlingly optimistic argument. The Middle East was notably more tolerant than Western Europe during the nineteenth century, because the Ottoman Empire permitted a high degree of religious pluralism and self-determination within its vast borders. European powers broke up the empire and tried to turn it into a collection of secular nation-states; it was a spectacular failure. Rulers turned religion into a force for nationalism and the result has been ever increasing sectarian violence. The solution, Pelham argues, is to accept the Middle East for the deeply religious region it is, and try to revive its tradition of pluralism. Holy Lands is a work of vivid reportage--from Turkey and Iraq, Israel and Palestine, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Bahrain and Jordan--that is animated by a big idea. It makes a region that is all too familiar from news reports feel fresh.

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Nicolas Pelham explores how America's overthrow of the Baath partyin Iraq, and the failures of Washington's post-invasion regime spawned a Shiite revolution in the heartland of the Arab world. Through first hand accounts from Saddam's rule to that of the post-Bremer rulers, he traces the turning of the tables from a Sunni- to Shia-led state. Pelham recounts how Shia clerics led the largest protests the region had seen since the Iranian Revolution to topple Paul Bremer, America's Shah in Iraq. As Washington struggled to back peddle, Pelham reveals how the Ayatollahs' drive for elections won power for their acolytes to draft the constitution for a utopian Shia state.

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