141: Why Western ideas crash and burn in the Middle East, with Simon Sebag Montefiore
About this episode
Haviv Rettig Gur interviews historian Simon Sebag Montefiore about the complexities of Western ideas in the Middle East and the historical context behind them.
To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur). And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur). -- Why does the West misunderstand the Middle East? Best-selling historian Simon Sebag Montefiore returns to the pod to discuss The Cauldron, his sweeping new history of the region, from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of its modern states to oil, Islamism, revolution and the Arab Spring. The book is a kind of prehistory of present-day Western stumbling in the Middle East. Western powers repeatedly arrive with grand political theories — imperialism, nationalism, socialism, liberal democracy — only to watch them change beyond recognition or collapse on contact with the region’s deeper identities, loyalties and social contracts. It is a conversation about the states that endured, the ones that failed, and why the Middle East remains so intensely debated in the West — and so poorly understood. -- This episode is…
Topics covered
- Western misunderstanding of the Middle East
- history of the Middle East
- political theories in the Middle East
- impact of Western ideas
- Arab Spring
- Islamism
- nationalism
Sponsors
Technion
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