The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands
Turkish Memoirs and Testimonies of the Great War
The Great War is still seen as a mostly European war. The Middle Eastern theater is, at best, considered a sideshow written from the western perspective. This book fills an important gap in the literature by giving an insight through annotated translations from five Ottoman memoirs, previously not available in English, of actors who witnessed the last few years of Turkish presence in the Arab lands. It provides the historical background to many of the crises in the Middle East today, such as the Arab–Israeli confrontation, the conflict-ridden emergence of Syria and Lebanon, the struggle over the holy places of Islam in the Hejaz, and the mutual prejudices of Arabs and Turks about each other.
Currently at the Lebanese American University, Selim Deringil was a professor at the Bosphorus University and a visiting professor in the United States, France, Japan and Hungary. His numerous publications include The Well Protected Domains and Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire, both of which won the Turkish Studies Association Koprulu Prize.
