Eugene Rogan's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

Travel In Syria And The Holy Land

John Lewis Burckhardt

3.5

Johann Ludwig (also known as John Lewis, Jean Louis) Burkhardt (1784-1817) was a Swiss traveller, geographer and orientalist, best known for rediscovering the ruins of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra in Jordan. After studying at Leipzig and Gottingen universities he travelled to England in 1806 hoping to join the civil service but was unsuccessful. Instead he took employment with the African A

Recommended by Eugene Rogan.

Eugene Rogan

Burckhardt really was the original Lawrence of Arabia, the Westerner who goes out to the Middle East, studies Arabic, dresses in the local fashion, and travels right through the Arab world. And he came away with a depth of understanding about the people among whom he travelled that was just unsurpassed in its day. Burckhardt was actually preparing himself not to be an Orientalist and Middle Eastern traveller, but to go and try to find the sources of various African rivers – he was fascinated by the origins of the Niger river. He was preparing himself to go into Central Africa but he never actually made it – he went up the Nile and made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and then came back to Cairo, where he got ill and died in 1817. So he never fulfilled the objective for which he was learning the language and travelling through the region. But in the process he left behind a couple of fantastic books. One was his travel book, Travel in Syria and the Holy Land, and the other one was a study of the Wahabis in Arabia, from the time of his pilgrimage to Mecca. [source]

Cover unavailable

2

An Imam In Paris: Al-Tahtawi's Visit To France 1826-1831

Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, Daniel L. Newman

4.1

This is an annotated translation of al-Tahtawi' s "Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz," the first translation of an in-depth Arabic account of a visit to Western Europe by a Muslim from the Near East. In addition to its historical and literary value, the book offers invaluable insight into misconceptions about the continent and the ' other', and the disorientation that follows a descent into a new

Recommended by Eugene Rogan.

Eugene Rogan

Al-Tahtawi was sent by the ruler of Egypt as the chaplain of an educational mission to France. The aim of the mission was to train young Egyptians in the languages and the arts and the sciences that had made Europe so strong in that first quarter of the 19th century. And he was a very insightful observer, who presents us with a pretty unique example of an Arab or Muslim traveller describing the manners and customs of an exotic people: in this case the French. He was very curious and he wasn’t particularly judgmental. So he went with an open mind and wide open eyes. He was fascinated by the relations between men and women, by how they dressed, by how they worked, by the way they decorated their homes and even how they set their tables. There are wonderfully vivid descriptions of all these things, which were so different from the way in which society worked in his native Egypt. He was also very interested in the way the politics of French society worked; he was fascinated by constitutional government, the idea that there could be rules that applied on rulers as well as on subjects. And he’s the first person to introduce the idea of a newspaper to the Arab world. At the time, in the 1820s, there were no newspapers in Arabic. He’s the first one to describe how they worked, how they allow accountability, how people’s actions can be put under scrutiny, and how anybody, whatever their standing in life, was able to write for these things called newspapers. The book was a bestseller from the moment it was published in Arabic. It was instantly translated into Turkish, so it reached the Ottoman world at large, and really is more responsible than any other book, in the first half of the 19th century, for setting reformist debates in Ottoman and Arab society. But it’s also just a great read – a fascinating, fantastic book, and there’s a wonderful new translation of it by Daniel Newman. [source]

3

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

Tom Segev

4.2

Great Britain ruled Palestine from 1917 to 1948. The British presence replaced 500 years of Turkish control and led to the State of Israel, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1998. The British brought Palestine into the 20th century: when they arrived the country lay in a Levantine nirvana; by the time they left it had become the arena for one of the century's major international conflicts.

Recommended by Eugene Rogan and Michael Goldfarb.

Eugene Rogan

The irony of the title is, of course, that Palestine was made, by the British, into a twice-contested land: between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionist immigrants. [source]

Michael Goldfarb

Both groups in Palestine had a major bone to pick with the colonial power – Britain. And there was a fair amount of terrorism from both camps. [source]

4

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War

Robert Fisk

4.5

Account of war in the late-20th century both as historical document and as an eyewitness testament to human savagery. Written by one of Britain's foremost journalists, this book combines political analysis and war reporting: it is an epic account of the Lebanon conflict by an author who has personally witnessed the carnage of Beirut for over a decade. Fisk's book recounts the details of a terrible

Recommended by Eugene Rogan.

Eugene Rogan

Fisk writes the most compassionate and engaging prose about his own experiences in Lebanon. As a journalist he seems to get underneath the skin of that society better than just about anyone I know. And it’s a book I relate to very personally, having lived for five years in Lebanon and having been forced to leave the country because of the outbreak of the civil war. So I felt very close to his subject. Fisk, of course, stayed through the very worst days of the conflict, when any rat worth his skin was going to get on a ship and get out of Lebanon. And so he wrote the story of the horrors that he saw in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it probably stands as the best example of a book of political journalism of conflict in the Middle East that I can think of. He just writes like an angel. [source]

5

A History of the Arab Peoples

Albert Hourani

4.2

Encyclopedic and panoramic in its scope, this fascinating work chronicles the rich spiritual, political, and cultural institutions of Arab history through 13 centuries.

No region in the world today is more important than the Middle East: no people more misunderstood than the Arabs. In this definitive masterwork, distinguished Oxford historian Albert Hourani offers the most lucid, enlightening histo

Recommended by Eugene Rogan and Tarek Osman.

Eugene Rogan

Hourani picked up on Khaldun’s cyclical notion of the rise and fall of Arab empires, and these almost Weberian notions of loyalty, as the key themes with which to weave a history of the Arab peoples. [source]

Tarek Osman

The key illuminating point is how the culture that has emerged in that part of the world has gathered those people and really united them by a common thread. [source]