* indicates a book that appears in our feature "Around the World in 80+ Books"published in the April 2002 issue of National Geographic Traveler.
*Arabian Sands,by Wilfred Thesiger (1959). Simply said, a classic. Thesiger journeyed among the nomadic camel-breeding peoples of southern Arabia, fell in love with the desert and the Bedouin, and wrote a rich account of his experiences.
Baghdad Without a Map,by Tony Horwitz (1991). Horwitz spent the late 1980s as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. His adventures, told with humor and empathy, ranged from chewing the hallucinogenic qat in Yemen to covering an anti-American rally in Tehran. Despite friendships with locals and invitations to their homes, he admits that the Middle East remained a tantalizing mystery to him.
The Journey of the Magi, by Paul William Roberts (2005). Captivating scholarship and hilarious travel writing are seamlessly integrated in Roberts's account of his passage across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, following the path of the Magi's legendary pilgrimage to Bethlehem. Along the way he meets criminals, priests, and everyone in between, and his experiences prompt thoughtful explorations into the history and geopolitical climate of these Biblical lands.
Egypt
A Café on the Nile,by Bartle Bull (1998). Bull artfully chronicles an old-fashioned adventure of espionage and valiant acts starting at Cataract Café on a barge in Cairo and journeying on safari in pre-World War II eastern Africa. The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, by Naguib Mahfouz (2001). Originally published in 1956-7, this sweeping saga of a merchant-class family in Cairo spans the first half of the 20th century, from British colonial times to independence and modernization. The Nobel Prize-winning author takes readers both inside homes where Muslim wives and daughters live cloistered lives and outside into streets loud with political demonstrators. *In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale,by Amitav Ghosh (1993). Indian author Ghosh moved to the Egyptian farming village of Lataifa and became engrossed in the history of an Indian slave in 12th-century Egypt. Through this exploration, Ghosh shares keen insights on ancient Muslim traditions and the modern Egyptian identity. The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado (2007). Lagnado evokes the cosmopolitan glamour of mid-century Cairo as she remembers it—as a young Egyptian Jewish girl whose father consorted with British officers and Egyptian royalty at French cafés instead of spending time at home with his family. Forced to flee their beloved homeland in 1963 under the Nasser regime, Lagnado's family escapes to Paris and ultimately winds up in Brooklyn—armed with 26 suitcases filled with trinkets from their former lavish lifestyle hidden in sealed marmalade tins.
Midaq Alley,by Naguib Mahfouz (1947). This superb slice-of-life tale from Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz is set in the seedy back alleys of 1940s Cairo, where the lives of an eccentric cast of characters intertwine, including a coffeehouse owner, an orphan drawn into prostitution, and a man who earns his livelihood disfiguring people to help them become more successful beggars. The Yacoubian Building: A Novel,by Alaa Al Aswany (2002). A vision of faded Art Deco glory, the Yacoubian Building is home to a fascinating mélange of modern Cairenes living in downtown's smog. The bestselling novel's taboo-breaking sexual frankness, and depiction of religious extremism and political corruption, caused immediate scandal in the Arab world upon publication.
Iran
*Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey, by Alison Wearing (2000). When Wearing decided to travel through Iran with a male companion—in the guise of a honeymooning couple—she raised a few eyebrows. She also blasted through Western notions of Iran as an anti-American warren of fanatical repression to reveal, instead, a place of compassionate, philosophical people.
Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran, by Azadeh Moaveni (2005). Moaveni thrusts herself—and readers—into the churning, chaotic, exasperating world of Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini as she returns to Tehran as a reporter. Eager to revisit her homeland, she finds herself a foreigner in a restive, desperate, and repressively decadent society.
Mirrors of the Unseen, Journeys in Iran, by Jason Elliot (2006). Based on three years of travel in Iran, bestselling author Jason Elliot writes of a nation often deemed a "rogue state." Exploring the desolate hills of Kurdistan and the monuments of Persepolis, as well as the symbolism of Persian art and the urbanization of Tehran, Elliot journeys through both physical and cultural landscapes to expose Iran's rich heritage—a must for any reader interested in looking past the news headlines.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,by Azar Nafisi (2003). Slip into a secret book club in revolutionary Iran as author and literature professor Nafisi remembers her clandestine discussions of Austen, Nabokov, politics, marriage, and everyday life—weekly pockets of freedom for Nafisi and students, insight into another world for us.
The Saffron Kitchen,by Yasmin Crowther (2006). Maryam, married to an Englishman and living in London, returns to her small village in her native Iran after a tragic incident involving her daughter Sara, to confront ghosts from her past. This debut novel paints a picture of Iranian society now and during the Shah's reign, and the personal consequences of war and exile.
The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer (2007). Isaac Amin, a Jewish jeweler in Tehran, is arrested one morning in 1981, accused of being an Israeli spy. Sofer's compelling first novel recounts the consequences of his imprisonment on his family, including his son studying in New York, and evokes the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in the days following the Iranian Revolution.
*The Valleys of the Assassins: And Other Persian Travels,by Freya Stark (1934). It's fully appropriate that the intrepid Stark—who traveled on a shoestring to Luristan, the mountainous (and dangerous) region of western Iran—is acknowledged in Lonely Planet's Iran guide. Stark was romantic and bold, as is her chronicle of travels among the nomadic peoples of the Middle East.
Iraq
The Marsh Arabs, by Wilfred Thesiger (1964). This epic account of Sir Wilfred Thesiger's 1950s travels in Iraq's little-known southern Marshlands remains a travel literature classic.
Israel
A Beggar in Jerusalem,by Elie Wiesel (1970). The Nobel Peace Prize-winning author describes the spiritual journey of a Holocaust survivor forced to confront the ghosts of his past in post-1967 Jerusalem.
Dying for Jerusalem: The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City,by Walter Laquer (2006). The renowned historian and journalist revisits the city he lived in half a century ago.
Murder in Jerusalem: A Michael Ohayon Mystery, by Batya Gur (2006). The human complexities of the city and contemporary Israel are seen through the eyes of Jerusalemite serial detective Michael Ohayon.
O Jerusalem,by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (1988). This is a slightly dated but still riveting account of the events leading to the establishment of Israel and the division of Jerusalem in 1948.
Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems,by Yehuda Amichai (1992). "I remember that the city was divided/Not only between me and you/When we lived there together," writes Amichai, one of Israel's leading poets, in this collection.
Shira,by Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1971). The Israeli Nobel prize laureate's novel tells the story of an adulterous relationship between an educated German immigrant and a Jerusalem-born nurse in 1930s Jerusalem.
A Woman in Jerusalem,by A. B. Yehoshua (2006). A woman killed in a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market raises questions of morality, personal identity, and nationality in a traumatized city, in this compelling novel.
Jordan
Live from Jordan, by Benjamin Orbach (2007). This memoir, written as a series of letters home, follows an ordinary 27-year-old American through his travels in the Middle East—if ordinary Americans were Middle East Studies graduates and spoke Arabic and Hebrew. Orbach's knowledgeable but down-to-earth style is refreshing, and it's a delight to follow him on his 13-month sojourn, whether he's buying kosher pastries (for his Orthodox Jewish relatives) from a Palestinian in Jerusalem's Old City or playing dominoes with "three old guys in galabayas" in Cairo.
Lebanon
The Hakawati,by Rabih Alameddine (2008). Middle Eastern fables, both new and reinterpreted by Alameddine, weave throughout a modern-day story: Lebanese narrator Osama al-Kharrat's arrival in Beirut from Los Angeles to visit his ailing father, himself the son of a hakawati, or storyteller. In the end, the tales create an intricate tapestry that displays the complexities of a family and a culture.
Saudi Arabia
Wolves of the Crescent Moon,by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed (2003). Banned in his native Saudi Arabia, this novel is Al-Mohaimeed's first book to be published outside the Middle East and interweaves the stories of three underclass outsiders in Riyadh: a Bedouin ex-bandit, a Sudanese eunuch, and a one-eyed orphan. Al-Mohaimeed provides rare insight into the drastic changes that have transformed this desert kingdom in just half a century.
United Arab Emirates
Coffee and Dates,edited by Shihab Ghanem (2007). This anthology of Emirati poetry and short stories touches on a gamut of topics from love and marriage to the loss of traditional life.
Dubai Tales (1990) and The Wink of the Mona Lisa and Other Stories From the Gulf (1994), by Mohammad Al Murr. These two collections of charming, occasionally controversial, and compelling short stories provide a peek into Emirati homes, domestic life, and personal relationships. Al Murr is one of Dubai's few Emirati authors translated into English.
Telling Tales: An Oral History of Dubai,by Julia Wheeler and Paul Thuysbaert (2005). Dubai's most prominent citizens recount in their own words how dramatically everyday life has changed in Dubai in its rapid metamorphosis from tranquil fishing village to frenetic Arabian metropolis. Stunning black-and-white images accompany the text.
West Bank
Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,by Raja Shehadeh (2007). Author and human-rights lawyer Shehadeh presents six sarhat—aimless wanderings designed to nourish the soul and rejuvenate the self—taken in the hills around Ramallah and the nearby wadis of the Jerusalem wilderness and the ravines by the Dead Sea from 1978 to 2006. His account is imbued with a quiet passion to preserve—in memory if not in fact—this wild landscape that has been increasingly demarcated and developed before his eyes.
Yemen
*Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea, by Eric Hansen (1991). Ten years after he was shipwrecked on an island in the Red Sea and rescued by goat smugglers from Eritrea, wily Hansen returns to Yemen in search of journals he buried in the sand. This book is everything travel writing should be: insightful, personal, informative, and entertaining.
