Cruelty and Silence

Makiya, Kanan

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

Shelf wear to dust jacket, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Cruelty and silence : war tyranny, uprising, and the Arab world

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Norton

Whose rock is enshrined inside the golden Dome of Jerusalem? The rock of Moses or of Muhammad? Kanan Makiya gathers together the stories, legends, and beliefs that define the Rock—the place where Adam landed in his fall from Paradise and where Abraham attempted to sacrifice his first-born; where Solomon’s Temple stood and where Jesus preached; the rock from which Muhammad ascended to heaven—and transforms them into a narrative of novelistic depth and drama. This brilliantly imagined, historically based account of the building of the Dome of the Rock reconstructs the paths of the actual individuals whose spiritual journeys revolved around the seventh-century lore of the Rock. The chief protagonist is Ka’b al-Ahbar, a learned Jew who accepted the prophecy of Muhammad and who accompanied the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab during his conquest of the Holy City. The story is narrated by Ka’b’s son, Ishaq, who years later is commissioned to design the first monument of Islam, the Dome of the Rock. As he imagines the construction of the Dome—and the complex reasons behind its creation—Makiya gives us a meditation on the common terrain of the world’s three great monotheistic religions and a remarkable investigation into what the Rock symbolizes—beyond its various stories and names, beyond even the three faiths at whose heart it sits.

The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem

United States

Pantheon

The Rock of Jerusalem is one of the world’s most spiritually resonant and politically contentious sites: where Adam first stepped upon leaving Paradise, Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac, Jesus preached, and Muhammad began his night journey to heaven,. Sorting through the rubble of the three competing faiths, Kanan Makiya haswoven a vivid tapestry from centuries of legend and belief to imagine the origins of Islam’s first monument, the Dome of the Rock. A narrative of mythic power, The Rock offers a grand tour of seventh-century Jerusalem and–by reminding us of how much Jews and Muslims once shared–serves as a bracing talisman for our times.

Literary

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

An examination of atrocities in the Middle East, the result of a clandestine mission to Iraq to investigate allegations of mass murder, questions why Arab intellectuals would dismiss Saddam Hussein's treatment of the Kurds.

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World

History

Middle East

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

"One of the most important books ever written on the state of the modern Middle East." ―Geraldine Brooks, Wall Street Journal The Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya brought the attention of the world to the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime in his powerful 1989 bestseller Republic of Fear. Now, writing for the first time under his own name, Makiya confronts the broad realities of tyranny in the Middle East and the moral failure of Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals to repudiate it. Makiya first gives us the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour―the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. Their testimony, revealing the true extent of occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence, is a compelling example of the literature of witness. He then links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, comparing the flood of condemnation of the West with the trickle of protest over Saddam's mass murder campaign against the Kurds. In his exploration of these "landscapes of cruelty and silence," Kanan Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underlie them. He calls for a new politics in the Arab world―a politics that puts absolute respect for human life above all else.

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World

W.W.Norton&Company

Explores the connection between art and totalitarianism, using Saddam Hussein's "Victory Arch" in Baghdad as a starting point for a discussion on how dictators use art to legitimize their regimes

The Monument: Art, Vulgarity, and Responsibility in Iraq

Arts & Photography

Al-Khalil, Samir

Architecture

Univ. Of California Pr.

First published in 1989, just before the Gulf War broke out, Republic of Fear was the only book that explained the motives of the Saddam Hussein regime in invading and annexing Kuwait. This edition, updated in 1998, has a substantial introduction focusing on the changes in Hussein's regime since the Gulf War. In 1968 a coup d'état brought into power an extraordinary regime in Iraq, one that stood apart from other regimes in the Middle East. Between 1968 and 1980, this new regime, headed by the Arab Ba'th Socialist party, used ruthless repression and relentless organization to transform the way Iraqis think and react to political questions. In just twelve years, a party of a few thousand people grew to include nearly ten percent of the Iraqi population. This book describes the experience of Ba'thism from 1968 to 1980 and analyzes the kind of political authority it engendered, culminating in the personality cult around Saddam Hussein. Fear, the author argues, is at the heart of Ba'thi politics and has become the cement for a genuine authority, however bizarre. Examining Iraqi history in a search for clues to understanding contemporary political affairs, the author illustrates how the quality of Ba'thi pan-Arabism as an ideology, the centrality of the first experience of pan-Arabism in Iraq, and the interaction between the Ba'th and communist parties in Iraq from 1958 to 1968 were crucial in shaping the current regime. Saddam Hussein's decision to launch all-out war against Iran in September 1980 marks the end of the first phase of this re-shaping of modern Iraqi politics. The Iraq-Iran war is a momentous event in its own right, but for Iraq, the author argues, the war diverts dissent against the Ba'thi regime by focusing attention on the specter of an enemy beyond Iraq's borders, thus masking a hidden potential for even greater violence inside Iraq.

Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition

University of California Press

From the best-selling author of Republic of Fear, here is a gritty and unflinching novel about Iraqi failure in the wake of the 2003 American invasion, as seen through the eyes of a Shi‘ite militiaman whose participation in the execution of Saddam Hussein changes his life in ways he could never have anticipated. When the nameless narrator stumbles upon a corpse on April 10, 2003, the day of the fall of Saddam Hussein, he finds himself swept up in the tumultuous politics of the American occupation and is taken on a journey that concludes with the discovery of what happened to his father, who disappeared into the Tyrant’s gulag in 1991. When he was a child, his questions about his father were ignored by his mother and his uncle, in whose house he was raised. Older now, he is fighting in his uncle’s Army of the Awaited One, which is leading an insurrection against the Occupier. He slowly begins to piece together clues about his father’s fate, which turns out to be intertwined with that of the mysterious corpse. But not until the last hour before the Tyrant’s execution is the narrator given the final piece of the puzzle—from Saddam Hussein himself. The Rope is both a powerful examination of the birth of sectarian politics out of a legacy of betrayal, victimhood, secrecy, and loss, and an enduring story about the haste with which identity is cobbled together and then undone. Told with fearless honesty and searing intensity, The Rope will haunt its readers long after they finish the final page.

The Rope: A Novel

In the beginning there was a rock deemed the point of creation of the cosmos and the place of assembly on the Day of Judgement. Then there was a dome built over the rock - the Dome of the Rock. Few sites in the world have been held as sacred, or has been fought over

The Rock: A Tale of Seventeenth-century Jerusalem

Constable

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Books by Makiya, Kanan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Makiya, Kanan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Cruelty and Silence

Cruelty and silence : war tyranny, uprising, and the Arab world

The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem

The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World

The Monument: Art, Vulgarity, and Responsibility in Iraq

Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition

The Rope: A Novel

The Rock: A Tale of Seventeenth-century Jerusalem