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As a young man in the early 1960s, Amir leaves his small village in Pakistan to make his way in the world. He comes to Britain as an illegal alien and embarks on a life of dodgy jobs, cheap housing and rip-off landlords, of letters home and dreams of belonging. Thirty years on, Amir now has a home and family, including Parvin, his nineteen-year-old daughter. Parvin has a mind of her own. She answers back, she refuses to do as her father says. As Amir and Parvin battle it out, Amir remembers his early years in Birmingham, specifically a brutal crime of passion which profoundly altered the course of his life. From the leading novelist in the Urdu language, Emigr? Journeys is a poignant comedy of outsiders caught between two worlds and seeking an identity.
Jordan has long been regarded as a pivotal country in the Middle East, one whose policy choices carry strong implications for regional stability. Jordan in Transition offers a cogent and compelling analysis of the country's domestic and international politics. Ryan argues that there have been four dramatic transitions in Jordan's recent past: ambitious economic restructuring; efforts toward political liberalization; realignments in foreign relations (culminating in the 1994 peace agreement with Israel); and the succession of King Abdullah II. Exploring these transitions, and how each in turn affects the others, he provides a major contribution to our understanding of Jordan.
A highly accessible account of the domestic and regional politics of Jordan.
More than forty years on the throne have given King Hussein and the Hashemite Kingdom an aura of security, stability and permanence. In the face of numerous enemies and adversaries, Hussein's resilience has remained constant. From Abdullah to Hussein examines the most turbulent period in the history of Jordan's ruling house, the six years following the assassination of the kingdom's founder, Abdullah, in 1951. Those years witnessed the country's lone episode of weak monarchy, when the king - the novice Hussein or his ill-starred father, Talal - was not the preeminent political actor in the land. Rather, it was during that time that the regime was left in the hands of a mix of Palestinian, Tr...
Published in 1963, Abdullah Hussein's The Weary Generations (Udaas Naslein) was an instant bestseller in Urdu. Now beyond its fortieth edition, it has never been out of print. Hussein leads you into a story of love and marriage between two people from starkly different social backgrounds, which also mirrors the uneasy 'marriage' between the British and their empire - both ultimately ending in estrangement. Naim, the son of a peasant, marries Azra, the daughter of a rich landowner, and their union is doomed from the start. Fighting for the British during the First World War, he loses an arm. Invalided home, he becomes angered at the subjugation of his countrymen under the Raj and aligns himself with the opposition. His ideals are swept away after Independence in 1947 when he realizes that, as Muslims, his family is no longer safe in their home and that they must migrate to the newly created Pakistan.
The Algerian Islamist Abdullah Anas, 'perhaps the greatest warrior of the Afghan Arabs', fought the Soviet Union for a decade. As one of the earliest Arabs to join the Afghan jihad, he counted as brothers-in-arms the future icons of Al-Qaeda's global war, from Abdullah Azzam to Osama bin Laden to Omar Abdel-Rahman, and befriended key Afghan jihadi figures such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir. To the Mountains is an intimate portrait of this brutal war, tracing Anas's involvement in the conflict, as well as his experiences of the Algerian civil war (1992-8) and his sojourn in 'Londonistan'. Brushing shoulders with everyone from Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi to Jala...
A dying King Hussein of Jordan shocked the world when he chose his son rather than his brother to be the next King of Jordan. In this candid memoir, King Abdullah II tackles the two toughest issues he faces: how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian standoff and how to become an intermediary between the United States and the Arab world.
"The Exile, however disillusioned by his people, is never able to escape his longing for them. How terribly strange it all is." Downfall by Degrees takes the reader on a journey that explores the nature of alienation and exile. The drawing rooms of Lahore's high society, the ghettos of Britain, an estate in the Pakistanin countryside, the bedroom of a beautiful woman - these are the setings for these stories of love and identity, longing and becoming, exile and return - stories that probe with masterful precision and exquisite balance the condition of modern man at odds against himself.
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For most of his long reign (1953-1999) Hussein of Jordan was one of the dominant figures in Middle Eastern politics, its most continuous presence, and one of the most consistent proponents of peace with Israel. This is the first major account of his life and reign, written with access to many of his surviving papers, with the co-operation (but not approval) of his family and staff, and extensive interviews with policy-makers of many different nationalities.