The best books to understand Middle Easterners and their lives in the Muslim Middle East

This book is an amazing introduction to the Middle East, despite it being written decades ago.

When I first lived in the Middle East, I realized that I had to learn a whole new framework of customs, practices, and expectations if I wanted to fit in. This book is still the best guide to values and practices, despite many changes since it was written.

Newly-married to a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago, Elizabeth Fernea traveled to a Shia Muslim village in faraway Iraq in the mid-1960s. While Bob Fernea sets out to meet the officials in the town and surrounding area, Elizabeth is isolated in a small house, hindered by little local Arabic and being new and foreign as she works to make friends. The most respected and powerful man in the village is the local sheikh. 

Unfortunately, Elizabeth doesn’t know what proper behavior for a sheltered Iraqi wife would be, and normal behavior for an American graduate student’s wife can be scandalous. As she learns how to live as a proper Iraqi woman, she teaches her readers that reputation and honor—all brought by proper behavior—brings status and esteem.

Elizabeth (known by her nickname B.J.) brings up all that I wanted to know about living in the Middle East with total honesty and humor. Elizabeth questions how she should act, what she should wear, and what is acceptable behavior.

In order to support her husband’s position in the village, she first learned and then adapted to local customs in dress, behavior, and housekeeping. She develops friendships with curious neighbors, and they teach her how a proper woman runs a household.

I found this book to be entertaining and a delight to read, as well as introducing me to traditional norms of behavior in the region. As Elizabeth learns how to live as a respected resident of her village, I likewise learned answers to many of the questions I had about how Middle Easterners live and what is important to them.

This book brilliantly depicts life in Iranian mountain villages. Erica Friedl has spent years on and off over decades living quietly among her friends in Deh Koh.

Friedl, an anthropologist, writes with feeling and telling detail as she tells of her friends and neighbors. As I read her “stories,” the women in Deh Koh ceased to be characters in a book but people with concerns that helped me understand how their motivations inspired actions.

I especially loved the story about the woman who was now approaching middle-age and was expected to stop having physical relations with her husband. She loved her husband, and he loved her, and sex was an expression of her love. She couldn’t give him up. Then, she became pregnant!

I read with fascination as Friedl’s expressive account of Iranian life and the connections between men, women, their children, larger families, and neighbors played out in small intimate conversations and glances.

While I had lived in Iran for a few months and understood the newspaper accounts of the Shah’s departure, the imposition of Islamic Revolution, the horrible toll of the Iran-Iraq war, I had no entry into a village in the high peaks of Eastern Iran. Friedl’s exquisite stories of life told me and tell readers far more about Iranian lives and values than any newspaper can explain.

First, I need to explain that the title of this book is deceptive as Riverbend, an Iraqi tech expert, is a well-educated young woman, not a girl. The book is taken from her blog, written from August 2003 through September 2004, and details the changes that war between Saddam Hussein and American forces brings to Iraq.

I lived in the US during these years and followed the news closely as the US organized and launched its attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime with “shock and awe”. However, Riverbend’s account taught me far more than all the media accounts. Her formerly quiet life as a computer tech ends as a woman is no longer allowed to come into the office, or even be safely seen on the street. Almost every page contains contrasts of Iraqi everyday life as lived by her family with the changes the invasion brings—changes no U.S. reader was privy to. Riverbend describes the Islam her family practices and worries as more extreme beliefs eventually took root in Iraqi government circles. 

As religious conservatives push for subordinate roles for women and traditional dress in public, Riverbend finds herself marginalized and endangered. A particularly telling parallel that hit me hard as an American reader is the chaos brought by US attacks using high-tech weapons while Iraqis were attempting to keep their electricity and water systems running. Even more hard-hitting was her contrast of the US promise of democratization made before the war with the lack of representation and security that resulted as the US—acting out of its own interests—parachuted unacceptable and often hated candidates into leadership positions following the fall of Hussein’s regime.

Riverbend’s eloquent exposition of her values—her family, her country, her religion, her career, her place in society— made me continually consider whether her personal values differ from mine.

Over the past forty-plus years, the Middle East has seen more than its due of wars and chaos. Kim Ghattas, a Lebanese journalist who currently writes for The Atlantic, writes in Black Wave of the impact throughout the Middle East of three heavy-duty events—the fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, the attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca by a Saudi Arabian fundamentalist, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and gives a sense of the why and the how behind the events she documents.

Ghattas tracks the impact of these events throughout Iran and Afghanistan but also in Pakistan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. She handles the sheer volume of material by focusing on the repression of regimes and the ideologies they represent as seen through the voices of novelists, journalists, intellectuals, and religious figures. Her account emphasizes issues often seen as marginal to the politics of the region, such as dialectical differences and actresses choosing to veil, but which, under examination, prove to be meaningful as dictators use social issues to keep their political pots boiling. 

One of my favorite sections was the Pakistani woman news announcer who began her career as a top-notch star, then gradually lost freedom to dress as she chose, and then even to appear on air. I was also fascinated by an unconventional story of love and free speech. A well-known Egyptian literature professor’s life was upended by conservative Muslim scholars critical of his publications. In court, they won cases that declared that in looking at the origins of Islam through a critical eye, he was an apostate under Islamic law. They undermined his private life by ruling that—no longer considered a Muslim—he could no longer be married to his wife, a Muslim woman.

All of these stories help readers understand the everyday impact the increasing political Islamization had on Egyptians, Pakistanis, and other Middle Easterners.  

Syria probably suffered the most from the fall-out of the Arab Spring. It is estimated that around 656,500 died through March of 2025* and around 130,000 died in government prisons**.

Wendy Pearlman, a political scientist, writes about the Syrian Civil war as Bashar al-Assad with the strong backing of the Baathist military and secret police fought to put down civil opposition to his rule as hundreds of thousands of unarmed citizens throughout the country took to the streets demonstrating for freedom, human rights, and a voice in their government. In return, the Assad forces decimated the country, bombing city after city, and holding tens of thousands prisoner in unspeakable conditions. 

Pearlman concentrates on the human scale of the conflict, writing persuasively of the opposition to the state’s forces. She relates testimonies of individuals from different occupations and backgrounds. These narratives range from a few lines to pages and express the frustrations, hopes, and pain of Syria under assault.

I loved the short passages that men and women—mothers, computer programmers, poets and playwrights, graduate students, protesting students, journalists, engineers, doctors, shop owners, accountants, graphic designers—from all over Syria gave of their experiences in the demonstrations and ensuing danger.

One of my favorite stories tells of Marcell, a Christian activist whom the police had an eye on. She was interrogated by the security forces in the morning and then protested at night. Her mother was accidentally shot by troops at a checkpoint while returning from a wedding. Marcell says that after her mother’s death, “I realized that I was no longer a normal person.” She couldn’t grieve normally, worried about the impact her mother’s death could have on the activists if her mother were to be considered a casualty of politics and labeled a martyr. Her funeral could turn into a riot and those in attendance beaten by security forces. Marcell carefully plans a scenario where 500 mourners assembled calmly and silently, holding red roses and successfully keeping regime forces at bay.