The Making of the Modern Middle East review: Solid guide to a complex region

The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History

Author: Jeremy Bowen

ISBN-13: 978-1509890897

Publisher: Picador

Guideline Price: £20

One wonders if Jeremy Bowen felt haunted in reading proofs of this book, as it is streaked with so much pain, bloodshed and death. It’s a heart-wrenching read; it matters little if you have followed affairs in the Middle East for years, somewhat inured to the train of tragedies intertwined with this fascinating part of the world.

It must be hard to bear witness sometimes, even for an experienced correspondent such as Bowen who has been covering the region for more than 30 years. Here, he often questions risks for the sake of a story, the ethics of reporting from a dictatorship (“The price of lifting the edge of the curtain to throw light on what’s happening.”) We should be thankful for his journalism; and for this work, too, with its rich historical details, its composure and balance, and its readability. The book is boosted by Bowen’s voice registering in the reader’s mind, in a narrative sprawling across centuries and borders. The writing is like his reporting: steady and clear, considered, compassionate; Bowen’s voice here is the same instrument of old, although one senses a more plaintive tone.

Trump’s folly

Recollections begin in the 1990s: the breaking-up of the USSR and the end of the cold war and its impact on the Middle East, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War (“My first proper story in the Middle East,” says Bowen.) From there, he guides us through Palestine and Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Yemen and many other countries, sketching their terrains, traditions, religions and cultures. We encounter familiar figures that once dominated the territory (Rabin, Arafat, Gaddafi) and those that still do (Bashar al-Assad, Masoud Barzani, Hassan Nasrallah). Bowen analyses the West’s long and conflicted involvement in the region, taking us up to Donald Trump’s recent foreign policy folly there as US president. Ordinary people are at the heart of this “personal history” though – it is they who always pay the highest price: war, terror, starvation, corruption and death.

In the end, Bowen makes no predictions and offers no ready solutions to a region where unpredictability seems to be the only predictability. He simply describes the problems there as “everyone’s”. A Personal History is a solid footing for anyone stepping into a complex and compelling region, into lands Amos Oz described as “pregnant with suppressed violence”.