Description: This compelling analysis of the modern Middle East - based on research in 19 archives and numerous languages - shows the transition from an internal history characterised by local realities that were plural and multidimensional, and where identities were flexible and hybrid, to a simplified history largely imagined and imposed by external actors. The author demonstrates how the once-heterogeneous identities of Middle Eastern peoples were sealed into a standardised and uniform version that persists to this day. He also sheds light on the efforts that peoples in the region - in the context of a new process of homogenisation of diversities - are exerting in order to get back into history, regaining possession of their multifaceted pasts.
Brief description: Lorenzo Kamel is a Full Professor of History at the University of Turin and at Luiss University in Rome. He has taught in many universities in the Middle East, the US, and Europe, including the University of Bologna, the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, where he served as a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher, and Harvard University, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow for 2 years. He published ten books on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean affairs, including Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times (2015), winner of the 2016 Palestine Academic Book Award.
Review Quotes: This important book is a multidisciplinary analysis of the cultural, social and religious history of the Middle East... Thanks to its meticulous philological rigor, the book provides a reconstruction of a complex history characterised by a local milieu that has been often simplified, imagined and imposed by actors and observers external to the region.--Dino Messina "Corriere della Sera"