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Making the Arab World

Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East

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In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift in Egypt and the Middle East: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. In Making the Arab World, Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region from the 1920s to the present.

Gerges tells this story through an unprecedented dual biography of Nasser and another of the 20th-century Arab world's most influential figures - Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the father of many branches of radical political Islam. Their deeply intertwined lives embody and dramatize the divide between Arabism and Islamism. Yet, as Gerges shows, beyond the ideological and existential rhetoric, this is a struggle over the state, its role, and its power.

©2018 Princeton University Press (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books 20th Century Egypt Islam Middle East Modern Political Science Politicians Politics & Activism Politics & Government Religious Studies World Africa Iran Middle Ages Socialism Royalty Liberalism Capitalism Arab World
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This is a scholarly book for those interested in deep analysis of the subject. The author has had extensive access within both the brotherhood and parts of Egypt’s various regimes. The tone is academic as you’d expect, with a bit more sociological jargon than I’d have liked, but it flows reasonably and makes important points. It was a shame there wasn’t more about the current government but that would be a tall order. The narration performance is a bit mechanical, which is a shame. The quality of the research makes up for this though

Phenomenal research on the Muslim Brotherhood

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Superbly researched, nicely paced, detailedfascinating history of the modern Arab world. Highly recommended in kindle or physical book form.

AVOID THE AUDIOBOOK LIKE THE RONA!!

The audiobook is shoddy, lazy, cynical, dispiriting, money grabbing tripe. In almost every way it is an unlistenable affront to the obvious amount of effort, care and diligence displayed by the Author.

The narrator pronounces almost every possible name wrong, sometimes the same name, different ways in the same paragraph.

I don't blame him. He has a nice voice. He was just hired to do a job, he obviously had no idea he would struggle with Arabic names.

However, everyone involved with the audiobook behind the scenes, should be utterly, utterly ashamed.

Imagine, an audiobook about WW2 centered around Stalin, Churchill and the Nazis, except the narrator tells tales about "Starline, Shorshill and the Narzize". For 10 hours. And nobody even bothered to check. Not once. Then just released it and waited for the cash to roll in. Absolutely terrible, I pity the poor author. They must have been so excited about their work becoming an audiobook.

I sincerely hope the physical book sells enough copies for the author, and his subject matter, to be afforded a modicum of respect in future.



Wonderful book. Appalling audiobook.

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