Showing titles in Middle East

On August 4, 2020, a huge explosion in the heart of Beirut killed hundreds of people – it is the apocalypse of a sequence of events that have led to Lebanon’s unprecedented collapse. Journalist Dalal Mawad has interviewed tens of Lebanese and foreign women - victims of the explosion, and those stuck in Lebanon - and weaves an extraordinary story of survival, corruption and impunity.

On May 2, 2011, at 1:03 a.m. a satellite uplink was sent from Pakistan crackling into the situation room of the White House: "Geronimo, Echo, KIA." These words, spoken by a Navy SEAL, ended Osama bin Laden's reign of terror. SEAL Target Geronimo is the story of Neptune's Spear from the men who were there. After talking to members of the SEAL team involved in the raid, Pfarrer shares never-before-revealed details in an exclusive account of what happened as he takes listeners inside the walls of Bin Laden's compound.

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the history of the Islamic world through its religion, thinkers, poetry, empire and rulers. Since 1998, In Our Time has been the go-to radio programme for knowledge seekers and inquiring minds. This special themed collection provides a focussed, wide-ranging introduction to 25 of the ideas and events that shaped the Islamic world, highlighting the numerous connections between Islamdom and the West throughout history.

Nephi puts us on notice in his very first sentence that The Book of Mormon was written by temple worshippers and for temple worshippers. He and the other prophets of The Book of Mormon, who called themselves the visionary men and the peaceable followers of Christ, knew and practiced a mystery, an ordinance by which they ascended through the temple and entered into the presence of God. This ordinance was embodied in a dramatic representation of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and their return to it, in which initiates played the roles of Adam and Eve or their descendants.

In southern Iraq, a crushing silence hangs over the dunes. For nearly 5,000 years, the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization: the Sumerians. When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century, they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars.

The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before.

In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make takes Syria's refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home?

No one ever understood the mythology and ritual of Ancient Egypt so well as Gerald Massey since the time of the ancient philosophers of Egypt. This audiobook is one of the best when it comes down to Egyptian mythology, occultism, and interpretation. It's a standard work no one wants to miss.

There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism.

In early October 2023, Palestinian Plestia Alaqad was a recent graduate with dreams of becoming a successful journalist. By the end of November, she would be internationally known as the 'Eyes of Gaza'. Millions of people would be profoundly moved by her social media posts depicting daily life in Gaza amid Israel’s deadly invasion and bombardment. Written as a series of diary extracts, The Eyes of Gaza shares the horrors of her experiences while showcasing the indomitable spirit of the men, women and children that share Plestia's communities.

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.

From what we know of history, Egypt, along with Sumer, were the foundations of civilization. The Fertile Crescent, which stretched from the Nile Valley to the twin rivers in Mesopotamia, gave us our earliest glimpse of organized man. But organized how? For one, both locations gave us writing -- hieroglyphics in Egypt and cuneiform in Sumer. There is still some debate about who was first.

Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the longest serving Prime Ministers of Israel. For much of the world, Netanyahu is a right-wing nationalist zealot; for many Israelis he is a centrist who is too soft on Arabs and backs down too easily in a fight. Love him or loathe him, Netanyahu has been at the very centre of Arab-Israeli politics since 1990, when he became the telegenic Israeli spokesman for CNN's coverage of the Persian Gulf War, arguably ushering in the Americanization of the Israeli media.

Combat veteran and author Hans Halberstadt takes listeners deeper inside the elusive world of snipers than ever before, from recruitment and training to the brutality of the killing fields. Shadow Team is probably the most productive sniper team in American military history, accounting for 276 confirmed kills in a six-month span with no casualties of its own.

In Mythologies Without End, Jerome Slater argues that US policies in the region are largely a product of mythologies that are often flatly wrong. For example, the Israelis' treatment of Palestinians after 1948 undermined its claim that it was a true democracy, and the argument that Arab states refused to negotiate with Israel for decades is simply untrue. Because of widespread acceptance of these myths in both the US and Israel, the consequences have been devastating to all of the involved parties.

Born to Palestinian refugees, Kassem Eid grew up in the small town of Moadamiya on the outskirts of the ancient city of Damascus. The streets that he and his many siblings played on were perfumed with jasmine. A precocious child, he excelled at school and had a natural gift for languages. But it didn't take long for Kassem to realise that he was treated differently at school because of his family's resistance to the brutal government regime.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were murdered under the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. Some four thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed. Betrayed again and again by the nations of the world, the Kurds were as decimated as any people in history. Then came the Kurdish Miracle, that combination of ancient wisdom and modern economic genius that is now making the Kurdish homeland one of the most prosperous places on earth.

Antiquities of the Jews, otherwise known as Judean Antiquities, is a twenty-volume historiographical work composed by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in the thirteenth year of the reign of Roman emperor Flavius Domitian which was around AD 93 or 94. Antiquities of the Jews contains an account of history of the Jewish people, written in Greek for Josephus' gentile patrons. In the first ten volumes, Josephus follows the events of the historical books of the Hebrew Bible beginning with the creation of Adam and Eve.

You may have studied the ancient Persian Empire in school, but have you ever wondered what kinds of stories the ancient Persians told to themselves and their children? The roots of Persian myth extend back more than five thousand years to the culture of the Aryan people who migrated into Iran from India. Ideas from this ancient culture have enjoyed amazing longevity and are alive even today as part of the Zoroastrian faith, which is still practiced in Iran, India, and several other places around the world.

Many students, history enthusiasts, and concerned observers yearn for a factual, balanced understanding of the decades of turmoil and tense relations in the Middle East. Presenting 'The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Simplified,' an all-encompassing guide that will empower you by unmasking the complexities and historical depths of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, offering a well-researched, unbiased, and accessible digest of the grand story of two nations intertwined in an enduring and heartrending struggle.