Quotes from Fred Halliday

outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was not a result of some global strategy, but of a set of specific, regional calculations and miscalculations; on one hand, Israel's long-standing wish to strike at the growing military power of Egypt and, on the other, the tactical mistakes of Nasser in May of that year, through which he requested the withdrawal of UN buffer forces and so left himself open to the Israeli attack.

Yemen was, in the years prior to World War I, the 'Vietnam' of the Ottoman Empire, but not that of Egypt. In Yemen, Egypt attained its political goals. The republic survived.

But by any broad human rights criteria, the republican regimes of the region were responsible for far more killing, brutality, oppression and, often, corruption and theft of the people's wealth than were the monarchies. Between, on the one side the Shah of Iran, Nuri Said of Iraq and King Faruq of Egypt and, on the other, the Islamic Republic, the Iraqi Ba'th Party and the militaristic junta that has ruled Egypt since 1952, there is no comparison.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, leading up to its first coup in March 1963, the Ba'th in general, and Saddam Hussein in particular, had relations with the US intelligence services. On the testimony of King Hussein of Jordan, we learn that the CIA collaborated actively with the Ba'th in its coup of March 1963, which led to the killing of thousands of communist opponents.

The conclusion is that far from Kirkuk being the Kurdish Jerusalem, Jerusalem had become the Jewish and Arab Kirkuk, i.e. an overblown, chauvinist fetish, and the object of arbitrarily intransigent nationalist demands on both sides.

person competent in fiqh is a faqih – generally a term of respect, but in modern Arabic usage also a term for (in politics but also love) a person out of touch with reality, a 'dreamer'.

the majority of women in the Muslim world across the ages, who worked in the fields, did not cover their faces and do not do so to this day. Full veiling is an urban and largely modern institution.

the past decade or more. The term originated in the film The Philadelphia

The most costly and protracted Middle East conflict of this era, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–8, had nothing to do with the Cold War, as cause or effect.

the USSR, far from having engineered the April 1978 communist seizure of power in Kabul, and plotting then to send in troops as part of some broader drive to the Indian Ocean and the oilfields of the Gulf, was reacting in a cautious and often confused way to the growing instability inside Afghanistan.

Following their withdrawal, the PDPA regime survived, only falling in April 1992 after the withdrawal of Russian financial support. The campaign of the counter-revolutionary Islamic guerrillas, and the later ending of Moscow's material aid to Kabul, were organised by Western, Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services