Channel Surfing in Riyadh

Whatever else you can say about Neil MacFarquhar’s new geopolitical travelogue about his years in the Middle East, you have to give the book its due for what might be the best title in recent memory.

This semi-comical mouthful comes from an e-mail that the crack Hizbollah media shop sends to reporters on their birthday, and MacFarquhar uses it as a jumping-off point for his at times depressing exploration of the myriad ways in which politics and religion define all aspects of life throughout the region. Sprinkle into the pot a variety of longstanding grievances against the West (particularly Israel and the United States), and the end result is a dangerous, contradictory brew of inferiority and xenophobia. This is the world that MacFarquhar, who served as Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times from 2001 to 2006, tries in his own quiet way to untangle.

The Middle East that MacFarquhar sketches in the book is in the midst of a grudging, sometimes painful transition—the latest in a chain of fitful eruptions that have repeatedly shifted the balance of power in the region. There were the early, freewheeling decades of the last century; the secular pan-Arabism of the 1960s; the decadent oil-boom years; and the moral rot of nepotistic police states that have simultaneously nurtured and suppressed a variety of Islamist movements. At the moment, the Middle East appears to mingle all these ingredients in a combustible mix...

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review...