
A Concise History of the Middle East, 13th Edition
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Narrated by:
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John Lescault
About this listen
A Concise History of the Middle East provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of this region.
Spanning from the pre-Islamic era to the present, it explores the evolution of Middle Eastern institutions and culture, the influence of European colonialism and Western imperialism, regional modernization efforts, the struggle of various peoples for political independence, the Arab–Israel conflict, the reassertion of Islamist values and power, the issues surrounding the Palestinian Question, and the Middle East following 9/11, the 2011 Arab uprisings, and the regional crisis that erupted after October 7, 2023.
The thirteenth edition has been fully revised to reflect the most recent events in, and concerns of, the region, including its future in the face of climate change and challenges in Iraq and developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In addition, the important role of Middle Eastern women in the history of the region is woven into the narrative. New parts and timelines will help listeners grasp and contextualize the long and complicated history of the region.
With updated biographical sketches and new concluding chapters, this book remains the quintessential text for students of Middle East history.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Part I. The Rise of Islam to the Zenith of Abbasid Power 2. The Pre-Islamic 3. Muhammad and the Rise of Islam 4. The Early Arab Conquests 5. The High Caliphate
Part II. The Turkic Empires from the Seljuks to Ottomans 6. Shi’a and Turkic Empires 7. The Crusader and Mongol Invasions 8. Islamic Civilization 9. Firearms, Slaves, and Empires
Part III. European Incursions and the Nationalist Reaction 10. European Interests and Imperialism 11. Westernizing Reform in the Nineteenth Century 12. The Rise of Nationalism
Part IV. World War I and its Aftermath 13. Arab Nationalism and the First World War 14. Modernizing Rulers in the Independent States 15. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent Under European Control
Part V. The Arab-Israeli Conflict 16. The Contest for Palestine 17. Israel’s Formation and the Arab Response 18. Wars and the Quest for Peace
Part VI. The Islamist Resurgence 19. The Iranian Revolution and Rise of Islamist Movement 20. The 1991 Gulf War and the Peace Process 21. Jihadism and America’s “War on Terror”
Part VII. The Arab Uprisings and Middle East Cold War 22. The Arab Uprisings of 2011 23. The Regional Cold War in the Twenty-First Century 24. The Middle East and the Environment into the Twenty-First Century 25. Conclusion
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Story
Israel's Black Panthers tells the story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country's establishment and change the course of Israel's history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass.
By: Asaf Elia-Shalev
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The Envoy
- The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II
- By: Alex Kershaw
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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December 1944. Soviet and German troops fight from house to house in the shattered, corpse-strewn suburbs of Budapest. Crazed Hungarian fascists join with die-hard Nazis to slaughter Jews day and night, turning the Danube blood-red. In less than six months, thirty-eight-year-old SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann has sent over half a million Hungarians to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Now all that prevents him from liquidating Europe's last Jewish ghetto is an unarmed Swedish diplomatic envoy named Raoul Wallenberg.
By: Alex Kershaw
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A History of the Middle East
- By: Peter Mansfield
- Narrated by: Richard Brown
- Length: 17 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In this masterly work of synthesis, Peter Mansfield, drawing on his experience as a journalist and a historian, explores two centuries of history in the Middle East. He forms a picture of the historical, political, and social history of the meeting point of Occident and Orient, from Bonaparte's marauding invasion of Egypt to the start of the Gulf War. For more than four thousand years, the Middle East has provided a setting for titanic struggles between great civilizations and religions.
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am i the only one who liked this?
- By Colin on 03-24-03
By: Peter Mansfield
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The Foundations of Western Civilization
- By: Thomas F. X. Noble, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Thomas F. X. Noble
- Length: 24 hrs and 51 mins
- Original Recording
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What is Western Civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.
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Not Engaging or Very Interesting
- By Tommy D'Angelo on 03-05-17
By: Thomas F. X. Noble, and others
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The Age of Reason Begins
- The Faiths Fight for Power
- By: Will Durant PhD, Richard Smoley - foreword
- Narrated by: Cory Herndon
- Length: 18 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The early modern era in Europe set the mold for the Western world today. It was a complex, tragic, yet pivotal time. It marked the transition between the dominance of the Catholic church throughout Western Europe and the present age of science, reason, and skepticism. The path through this transition was an exciting yet bloody and sorrowful one. The wars between Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rivaled those of the present in cruelty and atrocity. Durant takes us through the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in France.
By: Will Durant PhD, and others
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The Middle East and Islamic World Reader
- An Historical Reader for the 21st Century
- By: Marvin E. Gettleman - editor, Stuart Schaar - editor
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 17 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In this insightful anthology, historians Marvin E. Gettleman and Stuart Schaar have assembled a broad selection of documents and contemporary scholarship to give a view of the history of the peoples from the core Islamic lands, from the Golden Age of Islam to today.
By: Marvin E. Gettleman - editor, and others
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Israel's Black Panthers
- The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth
- By: Asaf Elia-Shalev
- Narrated by: Tova Katz
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Israel's Black Panthers tells the story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country's establishment and change the course of Israel's history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass.
By: Asaf Elia-Shalev
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The Envoy
- The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II
- By: Alex Kershaw
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
December 1944. Soviet and German troops fight from house to house in the shattered, corpse-strewn suburbs of Budapest. Crazed Hungarian fascists join with die-hard Nazis to slaughter Jews day and night, turning the Danube blood-red. In less than six months, thirty-eight-year-old SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann has sent over half a million Hungarians to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Now all that prevents him from liquidating Europe's last Jewish ghetto is an unarmed Swedish diplomatic envoy named Raoul Wallenberg.
By: Alex Kershaw
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A History of Korea (Third Edition)
- By: Kyung Moon Hwang
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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This accessible and engaging new edition continues to be one of the leading introductory textbooks on Korean history. Fully revised throughout, the author takes a thematic and chronological approach to guide listeners from early state formation and the dynastic eras to the modern experience. Episodic accounts in each chapter are discussed in context with extensive examination of how the events and themes under consideration have been viewed up to the present day.
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A Biased Story
- By Amazon Customer on 12-26-22
By: Kyung Moon Hwang
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Politics for People Who Hate Politics
- How to Engage Without Losing Your Friends or Selling Your Soul
- By: Denise Grace Gitsham
- Narrated by: Lauren Pedersen
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Politics can be infuriating. From unjust policies to unholy politicians, there are justifiable reasons to be upset or walk away altogether. Yet we must stay involved if we are to protect and sustain our fragile nation from the divisions that threaten it. With more than two decades of experience working in the highest levels of government, insider Denise Grace Gitsham offers a remedy to America's dark political reality: Christians filled with light, love, and Christ's heart for unity.
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Politics is just the backdrop of how God moves US!
- By KCJoe56 on 09-07-24
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Ocean
- A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus
- By: John Haywood
- Narrated by: Ben Eagle
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.
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Prehistory of the Atlantic
- By Sarah C on 03-14-25
By: John Haywood
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A Century of Tomorrows
- How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present
- By: Glenn Adamson
- Narrated by: Glenn Adamson
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. Beneath the chaos of competing tomorrows, Adamson reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what’s next. Helping him to tell this story are remarkable characters, including self-proclaimed futurologists such as Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, as well as an eclectic array of other visionaries who have influenced our thinking about the world ahead.
By: Glenn Adamson
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Making the Arab World
- Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East
- By: Fawaz A. Gerges
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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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: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. 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.
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Why didn’t anyone tell the narrator he was mispronouncing the name of the guy the book was about?
- By Amazon Customer on 05-03-23
By: Fawaz A. Gerges
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Arabs
- A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires
- By: Tim Mackintosh-Smith
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 25 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia.
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Good book bad narration
- By Anonymous User on 09-18-19
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Unmasking Lucy Letby
- The Untold Story of the Killer Nurse
- By: Jonathan Coffey, Judith Moritz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Coffey, Judith Moritz
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucy Letby seemed like a totally ordinary young woman: fun-loving and popular. She had a happy childhood with devoted parents, and after university she landed her dream job as a nurse looking after sick babies. She even became a poster girl for the hospital where she worked. And yet today, Lucy Letby is officially the most prolific child killer of the modern era. Following one of the longest murder trials in British legal history, she's been convicted of murdering seven babies, and attempting to murder seven others.
By: Jonathan Coffey, and others
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Weapons of the Weak
- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
- By: James C. Scott
- Narrated by: Alex Boyles
- Length: 17 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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This sensitive picture of the constant and circumspect struggle waged by peasants materially and ideologically against their oppressors shows that techniques of evasion and resistance may represent the most significant and effective means of class struggle in the long run.
By: James C. Scott
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Gangster Hunters
- How Hoover's G-men Vanquished America's Deadliest Public Enemies
- By: John Oller
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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J. Edgar Hoover was the face of the FBI. But the federal agents in the field, relentlessly chasing the most notorious gangsters of the 1930s with their own lives on the line, truly transformed the Bureau. In 1932, the FBI lacked jurisdiction over murder cases, bank robberies, and kidnappings. Relegated to the sidelines, agents spent their days at their desks. But all of that changed during the War on Crime. Hunting down infamous public enemies in tense, frequently blood-soaked shootouts, the Bureau was thrust onto the front pages for the first time.
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Good story, Too much clutter.
- By Amazon Customer on 02-22-25
By: John Oller
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Palestine Hijacked
- How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea
- By: Thomas Suárez
- Narrated by: Curtis Michael Holland
- Length: 13 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The Israel-Palestine "conflict" is typically understood to be a clash between two ethnic groups—Arabs and Jews—inhabiting the same land. Thomas Suárez digs deep below these preconceptions and their supporting "narratives" to expose something starkly different: The violent take-over of Palestine by a European racial-nationalist settler movement, Zionism, using terror to assert by force a claim to the land that has no legal or moral basis.
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Most Thorough Research Into Israel’s Crimes Yet
- By Theo Horesh on 01-17-25
By: Thomas Suárez
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The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902
- Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City
- By: Scott D. Seligman
- Narrated by: Peter Lerman
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 tells the twin stories of mostly uneducated women immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power and of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices.
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Compelling story of activist citizenry, well done!
- By OpenTheBooks&Listen on 12-09-24
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Central Asia
- A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present
- By: Adeeb Khalid
- Narrated by: Aaqil Ahmed
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Central Asia is often seen as a remote and inaccessible land on the peripheries of modern history. Encompassing Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang province of China, it in fact stands at the crossroads of world events. Adeeb Khalid provides the first comprehensive history of Central Asia from the mid-18th century to today, shedding light on the historical forces that have shaped the region under imperial and Communist rule.
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Great History of a Forgotten Region
- By Than on 07-07-21
By: Adeeb Khalid
What listeners say about A Concise History of the Middle East, 13th Edition
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rana R.
- 01-04-25
Narration is robotic
The narrative is excellent, Unfortunately, the narration is terrible. It sounds like it’s computer generated-very robotic.
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