Jeremy Bowen has incredible knowledge and pulled together the different parts of the Middle East brilliantly.

Michael Gasper - Sage Publications Inc

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, we’ve got a package with an explanatory article about the secret accord, an argument the accord still underlies the discontent in the Middle East (below) and the counter-view that its influence is overstated. Sir Henry McMahon was the British high commissioner in Egypt and Hussein bin Ali was the Sharif of Mecca.

The settlement reached for Turkey meant that France - thus far wary of Kemalist meddling within Syria - became more self-confident in pushing its hold onto Syria, which eventually led to the outbreak of Great Syrian Revolt (1925). Within the framework he sets out for himself, however, Provence is ultimately successful in challenging nationalist teleologies by illustrating the complexities of national origins, while raising important historiographical questions that will hopefully provoke some serious discussions well beyond the confines of the field of modern Middle Eastern Studies. He carried on killing his people and driving them out of the country –and he continued to use chemical weapons.

Sykes-Picot Agreement and the making of the modern Middle The Sykes-Picot Agreement and the making of the modern Middle

An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony. On one photo taken in 1942, the grand mufti al-Husaini, Iraq’s former prime minister Rashid Ali al-Kailani, and the Hindu nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose inspect Trebbin’s satellite camp of the concentration camp Sachsenhausen near Berlin along with two Nazi officials who were involved in the Holocaust.

His funeral and the symbolism of the procession through Damascus once again highlighted the clear linkages to the Ottoman past instead of the national present. Yet, to what extent did the last Ottoman generation share a common revolutionary political culture, a shared way of conducting politics, and waging warfare - indeed, a radicalized worldview that supplemented their struggles of ‘saving the state’? Shortly afterwards another article by Oren was published by Foreign Policy, which argued that Obama's outreach to the Muslim world as highlighted by his Cairo speech was partly rooted in "abandonment" by his father and stepfather. Educated under the watchful eyes of influential German officers such as Colmar von der Goltz, and infused with his notions of militarized nations, it was this last Ottoman generation that posed as ‘the saviour of the Ottoman nation’ in a series of wars that wrecked the empire from 1911 to 1918. The victors of the war, namely Britain and France, had made plans to partition the Ottoman territories, but it proved to be a rather complicated business to reconcile a variety of promises they had made to different parties and reach a post-war settlement.