The 21 “Best” Books
in Middle East Studies
W E HERE AT MESC WANTED TO MAKE A LIST of
the best Middle East studies books. So we emailed just over
two hundred MES professors and experts and asked them for
the ten books they found to be the most “interesting,
informative, and readable” in the field. We received just over
fifty responses and from these we compiled the Top 21 list.
We are very happy with the results and are making plans for
a future improved list. This next list compilation—slated to
begin this summer—will give professors more time to consider
their choices, will be sent out during a less hectic time in the
academic year, and will reach out to ask recommendations
from those neglected by this list. Eventually, we would like to
produce two yearly lists at the end of summer: a list of the best
MES books of the last century and another, more dynamic list
of the best MES books of the last decade. But let us first
explain our flagship list that we have now compiled.
What Do You Mean, “Best?”
This list would be more accurately titled, “the twenty-one
Middle East studies books that experts in the field found the
most interesting, informative, and readable.” But for brevity’s
sake we kicked ourselves loose of subjectivity’s chains and
called our results the twenty-one “best” books in Middle East
studies.
Some of the responses expressed understandable confusion
about what exactly we were looking for. Our original request
was for, “the ten most interesting, informative, readable books
in Middle East studies… Your selections do not need to be
well known or broad in scope.” And while we were rather
pleased with the descriptive trio of “interesting, informative,
and readable,” not everyone found the request so lucid. As one
respondent put it:
This is no easy task. The trouble is you say
“interesting, informative and readable” and while
there are some books that fit all of those categories,
they may not be the most important. Many important
books may be interesting for a specialist but not for
general readers, many may be of great importance
scientifically but difficult to read, and informative is
rather a strange category because many great
scientific books are addressed to specialists who
already are informed but make an argument.
Perhaps a look at how the respondents themselves described
their
their recommendations will give more insight into what it means
for a book to have been listed as one of the “best” of Middle East
studies. Respondents described their recommendations as,
“provocative books [that] set me to thinking,” “books that either
inspired me in one way or another or that I have found to be
especially useful,” “books that I find interesting or think they are
very important in the history of the field.” These books
sometimes “forced us to rethink our approach to the field,” and at
other times were just “the ten books I enjoy most.”
Why 21?
The books are ranked based on the number of times they were
recommended. We cut off the list at twenty-one because after the
twenty-first book, many of the candidate books are tied for the
same rank. For example, there were thirteen books tied for
twenty-second place in that each was recommended three times.
This also happened higher up in the list: there are eight books
tied with four recommendations each, five books tied with five
each, and Hodgson’s Venture of Islam and Mitchell’s Colonising
Egypt were tied with eight recommendations each. In order to
give the list a more ordered look, we broke these ties by giving
the higher rank to books that had received especial
recommendations by a professor. In our request email, we asked
professors to provide ten books recommendations and to then
write a blurb about the book most highly recommended. And so
Venture of Islam was given fifth and Colonising Egypt relegated
to sixth—although they were each recommended by eight
professors—because Venture of Islam had received two especial
recommendations and Colonising Egypt only one.
What Do You Mean “in Middle East Studies?”
Our original decisions about which professors to contact
obviously influenced the shape that the compiled book list would
take. Most of the professors we contacted were political
scientists, modern historians, and economists. Our bias was not
lost on the respondents: “Your list of faculty contacts is very
heavily weighted to modern studies… I am almost the only
medievalist in the lot. I assume your list will also be skewed in
this way.” This will be one of the issues addressed in the list we
will compile this summer.
There is also the question of who constitutes an expert in
Middle East studies. Although we emailed two librarians, a
handful of think-tank experts outside academia, and one Major
General, our list is heavily, heavily weighted towards professors.
And so, for convenience, we refer to the group of professors,
Continued on page 10
1. Orientalism
Edward Said, 1978
2. The Old Social Classes and the
Revolutionary Movements of Iraq
Hanna Batatu, 1978
3. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age
Albert Hourani, 1962
4. A History of the Arab Peoples
Albert Hourani, 1991
5. The Venture of Islam
Marshall Hodgson, 1975
6. Colonising Egypt
Timothy Mitchell, 1988
7. The Mantle of the Prophet
Roy Mottahedeh, 1986
8. Contending Visions of the Middle
East
Zachary Lockman, 2004
9. Women and Gender in Islam
Leila Ahmed, 1992
10. The Emergence of Modern Turkey 20. Society of the Muslim Brothers
Bernard Lewis, 1961
11. Over-stating the Arab State: Politics 21. Arab Politics: The Search for
and Society in the Middle East
Nazih Ayubi, 1995
12. A Political Economy of the
Middle East
Alan Richards & John Waterbury,
1990
13. A History of Islamic Societies
Ira Lapidus, 1988
14. Rule of Experts
Timothy Mitchell, 2002
15. Ambiguities of Domination
Lisa Wedeen, 1999
16. The Muqaddimah
Ibn Khaldun, 1377
17. A Peace to End All Peace
David Fromkin, 1989
18. Armed Struggle & the Search for
State
Yezid Sayigh, 1997
19. State, Power and Politics in the
Making of the Modern Middle
East
Roger Owen, 1992
Richard Mitchell, 1969
Legitimacy
Michael Hudson, 1977
 these 52 UC Berkeley
As’ad Abu Khalid

runner-ups: professors
Nezar Alsayyad

UCLA
these books were all tied for
twenty-second place with contributed: Sondra Hale
Michael Ross
three “votes” each UC Santa Barbara
AUB (Beirut) Juan Campo
• Abrahamian’s Iran Between Two John Meloy Lisa Hajjar
John Waterbury Garay Menicucci
Revolutions
• Abu-Lughod’s Veiled AUC (Cairo) University of Arizona
Enid Hill Julia Clancy-Smith
Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in David Dunford
Hazem Kandil
a Bedouin Society Walid Kazziha
Bahgat Korany University of Calgary, McGill
• Batatu’s Syria's Peasantry, the Emad Shahin Rex Brynen
Descendants of Its Lesser Rural
Notables, and Their Politics Begin-Sadat Center University of Chicago
Efraim Inbar Orit Bashkin
• Cole’s Colonialism and Amikam Nachmani Fred Donner
Revolution in the Middle East Martin Stokes
Binghamton Univeristy Lisa Wedeen
• Cook’s Commanding Right and Richard Antoun
Donald Quataert University of Durham
Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Emma Murphy
Thought Columbia University
University of London, SOAS
• Doumani’s Rediscovering Richard Bulliet
G. R Hawting
Hossein Kamaly
Palestine: Merchants and Laleh Khalili
Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700- Georgetown University Charles Tripp
1900 Barbara Stowasser
University of Michigan
• Kerr’s The Arab Cold War Harvard University Susan Waltz
Susan Kahn
• Lewis’ The Middle East: A Brief Susan Miller University of Oxford
History of the Last 2000 Years Ahmed .Al-Shahi
Indiana University Homa Katouzian
• Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety John Walbridge Eugene L.Rogan
A. R. Sheikholeslami
• Owen’s The Middle East and the Princeton University
World Economy, 1800-1914 Michael Barry University of Texas, Austin
Julie Taylor Mounira Charrad
• Seale’s The Struggle for Syria: A Robert Tignor Clement Moore Henry
Study in Post-War Arab Politics,
Shenandoah University University of Utah
1945-1958 Peter Sluglett
Calvin Allen
• Slyomovics’ The Object of
Tel Aviv University University of Washington
Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate Meir Litvak Alwyn Rouyer
the Palestinian Village Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
Eyal Zisser Yale University
• Vatikiotis’ The History of Michael Gasper
Modern Egypt Ellen Lust-Okar

Continued from page 7
librarians, etc. that we contacted for the study as “professors.”
We hope the others will not take offence at this umbrella term.
Especially not the Major General.
This preliminary list is also weighted towards American
professors. We created our email list by going to each of the
university program sites listed on the very helpful MESA
website links page (http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/links.htm).
In most cases we selected six professors from each Middle East
studies center or department. This initial list consisted entirely
of universities in the United States, with the exception of a dash
of British schools, a sprinkle of Israeli institutions, and the
American Universities in Cairo and Beirut. We then
supplemented the list with about eight other universities not
found on the MESA page. We also sent in a combined twenty-
two emails to the Washington Institute and the Brookings
Institute but we assume that we were thwarted by an email
filter in that we did not receive any responses from these. We
would have liked to include more professors from various
countries, especially from the Middle East itself, but it was
difficult and sometimes impossible to obtain faculty lists or
email addresses (in English) from the websites of the Middle
East studies centers in these countries.
Why Only Books From the Last Century?
Limiting the list to books written in the last century was the
result of an early email response: “What is your timeline? Are
these to be books that are in print and circulating in this century
and last (20th century), or would they go all the way back to
Ibn Batuta?” We were cautious about being temporally
provincial, so we decided to request entries written within the
last hundred years, from 1905 to 2005.
But the time span also spawned problems in that found that
some respondents were trying to make their list represent both
the early and latter part of the century, which had not really
been our intent. Also, even after we included our timeline
limiting recommendations to the last century, professors
continued to list Ibn Khaldun’s 1377 work The Muqaddimah.
Why List?
But I suppose some explanation is necessary for the idea of
listing the “best” Middle Eastern studies books. What
possessed me to want to reduce such brilliant literature to such
bean-counting and ranking? Well, for starters, I have long
enjoyed both reading and categorizing. When my parents used
to take me out to breakfast as a child, I would invariably find
myself sorting the individual jelly servings into columns of
their different flavors—at least until the food arrived.
So I was very interested when, in 1998, Random House
composed a list of the 100 Best (English Language) Novels of
the Twentieth Century. I thought that whoever put Joyce’s
Ulysses at the top of the list should be drawn and quartered.
Beginning October 13th, we sent out two-hundred
and two requests for book recommendations. This
was the template for those requests:
My name is Garth Hall and I am a graduate
student in Middle East Studies at the American
University in Cairo.
We are compiling a "Top 25 Books in Middle East
Studies" list for our MES office newsletter. I am
basing this list on feedback from professors and
experts across America (and some abroad) and I
wanted your input.
I realize that you must be busy, but if you could jot
down what you think are the ten most interesting,
informative, and readable nonfiction books in the
last century of Middle East studies it would make
for a very interesting compiled list. Your
selections do not need to be well known or broad
in scope.
And if you could, please write one sentence on why
you chose the book you did for your first choice. If
you like, just ask and I can send you the final
results.
Thank you for your help,
Garth
But perhaps this is the curse of the first place selection in
“best of” lists: in order to be a safe choice, it needs to be either
beyond reproach or incomprehensible. You can guess how I
interpreted Ulysses’ placement (and AFI’s placement of Citizen
Kane, for that matter). But I loved the list and felt that, if
nothing else, it provoked discussion about what books were the
“best” (or “people’s favorites,” depending on one’s
interpretation of objectivity) and stirred up the pot of English
literature.
And so, come October 2005, I set about creating a list for
Middle East studies. I’m always forgetting book
recommendations, so I liked the idea of having them all in one
place. Also, I liked the idea of having a consolidated list of
Middle East knowledge. A concentrate of Middle East studies
juice, if you will. A beating heart of MES literature, compiled
into list form in Cairo, the beating heart of the Arab world.
Garth Hall
Middle East Studies Graduate Student, MESC Editor
Please send comments and suggestions to garth.trevor@gmail.com
with “Top 21 Book List” as subject heading.