Among his other credits, Ibrahim has been with Arthur Goldschmidt.
Author of one of the most widely used and respected texts, A Concise History of the Middle East, which has just appeared in its 30th edition.
This copy arrives before you go. Yes.
So it's with pleasure. I welcome the 13th edition of A Concise History of the Middle East and its author.
Back to the very centre. Please give it up for Ibrahim. Very good.
Well, uh, before I begin and before I, uh, thank.
Can you one. I was hoping that, uh, we could just have a moment of silence.
Uh, this is a picture I took in Baalbek. Uh, not too far of where the fighting is happening now.
It's of a cat whose faith I wonder about.
I'm sure all of us have people we're concerned about.
I've been doing this quite a bit since October 7th, but I specifically brought my old school watch.
If we could just have one minute of silence before proceeding.
Okay. Thank you. And the symbolism of watching a hand on a clock is also very symbolic of the trouble writing this book, and I'll tell you how so.
But before I begin, uh, so I wanted to thank you for having me back here.
I wanted to thank Jenny Williams for all the work she did in bringing me here.
Uh, and since there's a good number of students in this class, uh, in this, uh, uh, gathering, here's a question I ask my students before I begin.
And it's also, uh, emblematic of the approach I used to writing this book.
Uh, so this is the question I have.
Which NGO, which non-governmental organisation transformed the international system and world order in the 21st century?
So I wear a couple of hats. I'm a historian. I also teach political science.
So these questions about the international system are very political science and with NGOs.
The other subject I teach is public health and NGOs are the key actors in public health.
So for anyone gathered here, does anyone want to throw a guess about what non-governmental organisation I'm looking for
an NGO that transformed the international system and the world order in the 21st century.
Yes. Okay. The Red cross is a very good example of an NGO I founded in the late 1800s.
Uh, is a good example of a non-governmental organisation that not only is important for the health sector, but also for our rules of war.
Hypothetically, if it transformed the international system, there wouldn't be any war crimes being committed.
Uh, and I wish this is, uh, it would be great if we could have transformed the world.
But for it to be redundant, it would have.
We would see, uh, cessation of all these violations of war crimes and, you know, the perfect delivery of world health on a global level.
Unfortunately, we haven't gotten there yet. Very good. Thank you for giving me the first answer.
That is an NGO, not what I'm looking for. Any other guesses?
Microsoft. Microsoft is a non-governmental corporation.
No, I'm glad you said that because I was looking for the Bill Gates Foundation.
On the other hand, would be a great contender. And if you look at the field of public health, uh, when the Ebola epidemic broke out.
The Bill Gates Foundation was able to work more swifter in its response.
It was more it was more nimble in the face of Ebola than the World Health Organisation.
So ideally, everyone if the Bill Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation start to transform the world as we know it,
we should all be happy getting vaccines, not worried about microchips being implanted in our, uh, bloodstream.
And, you know, problem solved. Unfortunately. And malaria should be eradicated.
These were all goals of the, uh, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Uh, yet to have been achieved. Um, another guest, the Carter Centre.
Carter Centre would be a good one. That is a good example of an NGO.
Uh, you know, gathering of the elders I wish could have, uh, transformed the world as we know it.
Any other guesses as an NGO like PPC?
What does that stand for? Into Intergovernmental Panel?
Uh, so that is technically a multilateral organisation within.
So if it's a United Nations that's multilateral.
Uh, so the W.H.O., the collection of scientists that work for that panel, multilateral organisation, and I wish everyone was listening to them.
Problem solved. We. Climate change is real at the end. That's it.
I missed you. Amnesty international is also a good NGO.
And hypothetically, the death sentence would be abolished around the world because that's why amnesty was established for.
So I would say did not transform the world as we know. Okay, I'll give you the answer.
The NGO I'm looking for was founded by this lanky youth right here.
This lanky youth on a family vacation in Sweden.
You know him as Osama bin laden? Yeah. Now, I want you to look at the way I ask the question.
Okay. Is al-Qaida non-governmental?
Is it an organisation, according to Al Jazeera, that it is.
And did it transform the world as we know it? It did when I began my default here.
Okay. Now who? Of course, using this as a prop to get us to think what is al-Qaida is not me.
But it's from a sociologist named Ulrike Beck.
Okay. Ulrik back basically describes. Now, look, in 2006, the world we were, the 21st century as we enter the 21st century.
Look what he was describing. We live in a terrifying new millennium of global risk.
You could be bombed on your way to work by terrorists. Reference to al-Qaida.
I should you managed to get through the day unscathed. There's a risk of you catching avian flu.
This is BSE is a abbreviation for what's otherwise called mad cow disease or being washed away by a tsunami.
A natural disaster obliterated by a hurricane as you lay lie in bed dreaming of happier times.
And unfortunately, just if you go to my YouTube channel,
one of my students at University of San Diego had to drop out to deal with the hurricanes in the Appalachian Mountains,
which historically never endured hurricanes. This is 2020 for Look back.
Speaking in the year 2006, terrorist networks can be thought as NGOs committed to violence,
while Greenpeace tackles environmental crises, terrorist NGOs have the state monopoly on violence.
In other words, a reference to Max Weber in their sights.
And based on this, this is what I'm writing. A history of the Risk society of the Middle East in the 21st century.
How do you write about natural disasters and now going to the natural disasters?
Okay, as well as a variety of.
Well, let's look at the NGOs. The preferred term in political silent sites is violent non-state actors.
The term terrorism is argue, has lost so much meaning over time that analytically,
okay, the term that everyone agrees on is the violent non-state actors.
Okay, here are the challenges. Writing the environment or the political ecology of the Middle East, new technologies and bringing in gender.
We're all challenges in not only writing the history, but also challenges facing the region in one way or the other.
So just to give you a story, this is not a book reading per se, because I've just seen the copy of the book for the first time.
This is about the Me search that went into the research.
What influenced my history or writing the history when I was an undergrad?
I was assigned this textbook, A Concise History of the Middle East by author Goldschmidt Junior.
As an undergraduate, I began my undergraduate career at UC San Diego, transferred to UCLA, and back then there was no images.
It just had this, uh, you know, geometric pattern. Okay.
Now, uh, back then, when I was a student, when I was a student in the 90s, this obscure group known as al-Qaida had just entered my imagination.
Uh, I was studying at UCLA at a particular time.
And then just to say, I made my way to Georgetown. And finally, I want you to look at this image here.
Where is this image? When and where is this image?
Of missiles being launched, interceptors being fired off to engage and intercept over the skies of Tel Aviv.
When and where is this? Okay, I told you. Where? When was this picture taken?
When was this picture taken? Last month is a good guess. Last month.
Thinking was around September 30th is a good guess. It could be any other guess.
It wasn't the first time. Um, okay.
In March. Yeah. March 2024. This isn't so far.
This is Saddam. This is 1991, you see.
And again, this is another trick question. All right, personalise it. This isn't Iraq.
This is it. Yeah. This is Saddam. This is Iraq launching a barrage of Scud missiles and being intercepted over this guy.
Now, why is this particular incident important?
Of course, this is what had just happened, uh, about close to, uh, almost nine years before the summer of 2000.
Okay. And I want you to think of the timing of this case. Right. So before that summer, uh.
I was in Jerusalem taking a taxi to the airport.
Right. And in the summer of 2000.
Uh, here I am in Jerusalem, and I have to make it to Saint Anthony's College to begin my defence with my supervisor, Eugene Rogan.
Okay. And just to say something about that journey, I have to make it.
I can't do anything risky. And yet, here I am, taking a road trip from Cairo, Jerusalem to Jerusalem.
I met a man. Damascus. Damascus to Lebanon. Why was I doing this road trip?
I'll tell you. But taking the taxi from the, uh, from Jerusalem to the airport.
Sure enough, the minute you enter a taxi anywhere in the Middle East, they want to know where you're from.
Uh, and by the. The easy answer I gave was Iraq.
From the taxi driver who was Palestinian. Turned back to me, started speaking me in Arabic and saying, I love Saddam Hussein.
Now, of course, it's Saddam Hussein who sent me, my family fleeing from Iraq.
I was hoping to write a DPhil about the horrors of Saddam Hussein.
Yet here I am, uh, now engaging this Palestinian taxi driver.
Why does he love Saddam, I ask? And he's basically says Saddam was the only Arab leader this ever stood up for us Palestinians.
Now this is in the summer of 2000. What did I understand from that exchange?
First of all, it was that exchange that pushed me into the direction of writing a thesis on the Gulf War.
As Eugene mentioned, I had a trove of documents to work with. What influenced my decision to do the 91 Gulf War was the following.
It was this paradox. You see, Saddam lost the 91 Gulf War, but apparently he won the war for Palestinian memory.
Based on that anecdote. Based on that anecdote. Here are in 2024.
What do a good number of Palestinians still tell me? If Saddam was still alive, none of this would be happening.
Um, so sure enough, this is an anecdote that influences me on my way to my journey with the DFL, and here I am now in 2024.
And you see, now, in terms of writing, that missile's about that missile strike in 1991,
that Scud missile barrage didn't make it into any of the previous editions of this history.
Okay. Why did I have to write about the 1991 attack?
Because, of course, when I'm writing the 13th edition. Okay, Iran had just launched the barrage around early April,
and it's that Iranian attack that makes me go back into the past and say, how do we make sense of the Iranian attack?
Because what I want to do is shift the narrative.
Everyone kept on saying that this was a defeat for Iran, whether it was in early April or here we are.
Then just a few weeks ago. Right. And basically using that anecdote.
Okay. How do we define victory? And here I was in 2000 and redefining that failed missile strike.
Okay. Uh, with this guts as now kind of a symbolic victory.
So this edition was published in 2018.
And just to give you a story, so author, of course, was the first primary author.
So here I go from reading the author, no pun intended.
And the 1990s to becoming having him approached me to be the co-author.
And of course, for this edition, the primary, uh, matter that we were looking at was ISIS.
So here I began in the 1990s, looking at al-Qaida as a young student reading about it in the textbooks.
By the, uh, 2020, 2018, ISIS had just been defeated.
And this is what takes up most of the final chapter of the book.
Of course, when you revise a chapter, you update it, but usually when you update, you go back into the past and see what could have told us.
What were the indicators that a group like ISIS could have emerged. And here I began a tradition of choosing a convert that was symbolic.
And this is that it's Mosul. I chose Mosul because one of the minarets that you see here would be demolished by the time this, uh, book was published.
That is a Z very old place right there.
Uh, what I assumed to be mosques and, um, basically what was chosen was one church in the background.
Later, I was told by a person named Omar who was responsible for the blog Mosul.
I, uh, that this is just a fantasy.
It's an orientalist fantasy that this scene does not exist in Mosul.
I didn't know that he embarrassed both of us saying that. Yes. What you chose for symbolism is great.
Yeah, but in fact, this image doesn't really exist. This is an orientalist fantasy.
But I'll tell you who. Um, well, how it started a tradition.
Nevertheless, I finished and you can imagine from 2018 what happened.
Well, this is what I'm going to talk about, the evolution of the Middle Eastern society.
What happens is the 2018 edition, I'll tell you on them.
On a particular morning, I was in Madrid and I finished the bibliography for the 13th edition, and they say that number 13 is bad luck.
Well, let me tell you this story. And the 13th edition, where I was just finishing up the bibliography, it was, uh,
the final citation was of a uoa along the making of Jordan tribes, colonialism and the modern state.
I was finishing that citation, ready to send out the text, and then I sent an email to the author.
You're off. Who I met. So did I make it to Saint Anthony's on time?
Just barely. And I met you off. And almost just like with, uh, Eugene, I met them almost exactly 24 years ago.
And the month I met you off right before I entered here. Right here.
That's when I met him in September. That would have been the September 2000.
And I want you to think September 2000, when I met you. What? I remember the anecdote with the taxi driver.
Right. What was the other conclusion?
Not only about Saddam symbolic victory, but something an ill feeling and ill feeling, me questioning, why is this Palestinians celebrating Saddam?
I thought that the Palestinians were on a road to peace in the summer of 2000.
Right. And that was also another indication.
Something is not right for this Palestinian. There's this is not a Palestinian who looks happy and optimistic towards a new future.
And just a week later, when I arrived, the so-called Second Intifada began violence on the part that began.
Okay, now think of that anecdote and that kind of ill feeling.
On the morning when I finished writing your off citation, I sent him an email because he was supposed to be, uh.
Taking a visiting post in San Diego saying you off? Do you have your flight time?
I'll pick you up in the airport. It was the morning of October 7th, 2023.
When I finished this book thinking, that's it, my book is finished.
I'm about to send it to the publisher, writing to you off saying, give me your flight time.
I'm going to be picking you up from the airport on October 7th, 2023.
And then I turned on the news and I realise you off.
It's probably not going to make a flight anytime soon, and I mistakenly had sent off that manuscript too soon as well.
And so this is the question now, what do you write after that day?
First I will tell you, it's quite amazing.
Uh, bringing God's love back into history. This is a screenshot I took from an old Imperial Airways.
Uh, Phil. Right. You see the importance of God's love, then.
And it's not till the events of October 7th that God's have found this place.
Still history. I have to admit, it wasn't till October 7th I did not realise that Alexander the Great besieged Gaza on the way to conquering Egypt.
That Alexander wouldn't have been great had he succumbed to an, uh,
arrow wound that he got outside during the siege of Gaza that he recovered from with this medicine that we all familiar with today,
we call them opiates. Uh, today, in his day, they would have called it opium.
So, of course, not only it was since October 7th did I find a way to try to bring Gaza back into the history of this region.
But let me read, uh, Arthur Goldschmidt.
Our conclusion. Okay. And look at we usually every conclusion we say this all good things must come to an end.
Even history textbooks.
Any historian writing a textbook must deal with the recent path, with the acknowledgement that events occur suddenly in the Middle East.
You think of that morning. Yeah. Projections are hazardous. Who knows what a future reader will see us is having.
We'll see as having been the major Middle Eastern events from the seismic events of 2011.
Let us give you an example.
By looking backwards at the dawn of the 20th century, a burning issue was the building of a Berlin to Baghdad railway by a German company.
Our Forebearers believed that this railway would enhance German power and the Ottoman Empire, and harm the interests of Britain, France and Russia.
In contrast,
few notice that a British subject obtained from the Persian government a concession that led to the first big oil discovery in the Middle East.
Yet today we see Middle East oil as much more important than the railroad then a railroad that was never completed.
By the same token, well, an incident that we now view as a major event seemed trivial by 2030.
Yet it's seen the consequences of the events that began on 7th October 2023 will reverberate for generations to come.
So this is the conclusion of the book.
So going forward now, what I'm going to do is kind of take you on a grand tour, uh, writing the book using a couple of disciplines.
So I said, first of all, the violent non-state actor. And for this, I'm going to bring in, uh, so I already mentioned Ulrich Beck.
I'm going to bring in David Rappaport. He's an American political scientist at UCLA.
He was my professor, and he had a model that really determined the studies of terrorism.
Uh, that really went unquestioned, particularly after 9/11.
So just to give you, uh, an overview, he argues that violent non-state actors had evolved over waves.
Okay. The first wave you dealt with was the anarchist violence that began in the 1880s.
So by anarchist violence is whether it's the brother of Vladimir Lenin was an anarchist who tried to assassinate the Tsar.
Uh, the king of Italy. Umberto, the prime minister of France, uh, I believe the King of Spain,
Empress Sisi of Austria, all in the 1880s, were assassinated by anarchist terrorists.
Okay, then, Rappaport said that wave ended.
And then he looks at another wave. So to show that wave.
And I probably realised, don't worry, I'll read out the titles.
This is a just a um. So this is what political scientists love.
They love their data, their data sets and mapping out, uh, acts of violence.
Everything in red represents a violent act. Everything below our fatalities, casualties.
It's a very grim subject that I like to call necro history.
And I'll get to this. Where did I get the term necro history for?
So I begin with, um, what took us by surprise, both from the political science vantage.
What was surprising about October 7th is the following. Okay, uh, let's look at violent non-state actors.
If you look at the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, here are the Provo IRA.
What do they have in common? They are both groups that are secular nationalist.
And what I add as a category bound by geography.
What do I mean by bound by geography? So secular, even though the LTTE was a group founded by Tamil Hindus, right.
Hinduism wasn't driving their violence. It was a Tamil nationalism on an island dominated by the Sinhalese Buddhists.
Okay, uh, even though they were secular, they were the first group that invented what I call the human cyborg,
or basically fusing explosives to the human body, what we would call the suicide bomber today.
Okay. Uh, in other words, uh, it's a tradition born in a completely different area.
Had nothing to do with the notions of martyrdom that are, you know, associated with the Middle East.
Okay.
Or if you look at the IRA again, uh, both groups, I would argue, had the again, products of the Cold War usually left leaning, bounded by an ethnic.
Rather, we talk about Irish Catholics but not fighting in the name of, uh, Catholicism, uh, Hindu Tamils.
Okay. And bounded by geography, whether it's Ireland, island of Ireland or the island of Sri Lanka.
Okay. If you look at the second wave, again, if you look at the PKK or the Basque ETA, okay, unlike the previous two part of the second wave,
but still bounded by geography, they wanted to create either a Kurdish homeland within the Republic of Turkey.
The Basques wanted to create a Basque homeland within the borders of Spain.
Uh, they didn't care that I didn't care about the, uh, Basques in France.
Uh, the PKK really left the Kurds and Iraq alone.
Okay, that was another group of Kurdish groups. Territory. Okay, so, in other words, left leaning.
Carving out a state out of an existing state. Okay.
And then if you look at the PKK and compare it to San Duro Luminoso of Peru or the Fark of Colombia,
again, these are now groups that are avowedly Marxist, so still fits into that Cold War paradigm.
Still bounded by geography. Sendero Luminoso work through Colombia.
Uh, Park. I'm sorry. Park.
Work for the Columbia. Sendero Luminoso bound to Peru. And again, very much a product of the Cold War.
All Rappaport second wave. And I would argue the caveat bounded by geography.
The third wave is groups like Hamas or Hezbollah.
Now, what do they have in common is this they're still bounded by geography, I would argue.
Okay. They are still more or less bounded by the Cold War to some extent.
But I would argue they're they're more or less influenced by a third pivotal event, the, uh, revolution in Iran in 1979.
Definitely. Hezbollah emergence is tied to the victory of the Islamists in Iran in 1979.
But what's interesting and why does this deserve a third wave is they're not secular, right?
If you look at their flag, they're the Islamic resistance. But we're still bounded by geography in Lebanon.
So that hypothetically, you still have to be born into this group, whether it's Tamil Hindus, Irish Catholics or Lebanese Shia.
And then if you look at, uh, Hezbollah logo again, look what I highlight.
They're still bounded by the geography of the Palestine Mandate.
Hamas. Sorry. What did I say about Hamas?
All right. The again, the movement of Islamic resistance, but still bounded by geography.
And that's the third way. What differentiated the fourth wave?
Okay. If we look at ISIS, al-Qaida, al-Qaida's branch and the Arabian Peninsula.
Shabab. Okay. No longer bounded by geography, no longer bounded by geography.
Anyone. If you looked at al-Qaida founded by. I showed you a Saudi second in command in Egyptian.
Their scope of violence is not bounded by geography per se.
Okay. And hypothetically, this is what made a difference.
You've almost come back to the fourth wave.
Anarchists weren't bounded by any particular ethnic or geography, and everyone thought the future was the fourth wave.
Okay. And then what was the surprise? The surprise on October 7th was look at the language.
I'm using a jolt to the international system.
Nobody thought the third wave was ever going to make a comeback to jolt, let's say, the global imagination.
That was one of the great historical junctures and inflection point of October.
Right. Uh, anyone studied and this was one of the faults of the political science,
but very much based on a kind of neorealist structural reading of the evolution of terrorism.
Rappaport was great for introducing a historical analysis of this phenomenon.
And so if we look at this right, what is the secure axis of Islamist resistance?
Okay, here is something that I did towards the end of the book,
which I found was quite interesting because for all you know, is this more bluster than an actual axis?
I would argue there is an axis in the region. It's quite interesting.
But if you look at it from 2003, the frame that kind of dominated the way we studied the Middle East was sectarianism.
Now it's I mean, if you look at it and you know, only something as, as a historian could appreciate by looking at 2003,
if you look at the, you know, the so-called axis of resistance, a,
you know, 12 hour Shia, Iran, Arab, Alawi, uh, Syria, Hezbollah, Arab, 12 Russia of Lebanon,
uh, had a cut in their Jabar of Iraq, an Arab 12 or Shia group that couldn't have emerged.
If you look at when this axis emerged in 2023,
this was the group that became famous for lobbing drones against the American military base in Jordan, on the Syrian border.
That started off the American involvement in what seems to be kind of a creeping, uh, well, uh, creeping mission creep, so to speak.
Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Arab, Sunni. There are some Shia Palestinians, but they're very small.
And then who? These are Arab fibre Shias. Sure.
ISIS is still there.
And if you're following, uh, kind of, uh, if any of you are fans of a singer known as Taylor Swift, I mean, her concert was, uh, cancelled.
And I want you to think of the transnational element here as these were Austrian Muslims with Croatian,
North Macedonian, Turkish roots, but still not bounded by geography.
Okay. And we all thought it was the fourth way. So the concise history of the Middle East, look at the day it came out October 7th, 2024.
And I don't think I think Rutledge did this on purpose, but this was the problem.
I kept on telling Rutledge the book was not ready. It's still too early to turn and a history.
So to tell you kind of the history of this region just an easy way. It begins with from Nebuchadnezzar to Napoleon to Netanyahu.
If I use a little iteration. Right. Uh, when to turn a book in.
This was the hard part. But Rutledge said, give me a specific date.
I didn't know they wanted it to have it come out on October 7th, 2024.
What was the hardest part? For me to turn it in? And this is what I say, was getting to the necro history of all this.
Well, let's go to the cover. Um, October 7th, 2024.
The cover I had chosen was a town in what is today's Turkey known as Marrakesh.
It's where I get my last name, even though I'm not, uh, ethnically Turkish.
But it's not. That's not the reason I chose. I said, if I'm going to begin a habit of choosing covers with orientalist paintings.
If Mosul was the city suffering in 2017, I chose Mirage.
And this is what I term kind of necro history.
Um, taking a, uh, you know, something from the postcolonial literature as she remembers necro politics that he wrote in 2003.
And basically, necro politics is the study of people left to a slow and certain death.
Necro history is this, um, when I, uh, in this city of ash and its surrounding environs,
all the way to the north of Syria, 55,000 people died in the single night due to an earthquake.
Now, why do I turn this necro history when you leave people to a slow death?
In this case, it was the faulty architecture that could not withstand the seismic shifts, the tectonic plates.
Now, I did not realise this, but should architects have known that Marrakesh was an earthquake prone area?
Well, apparently so. If there was an earthquake in 1114, then an earthquake in 1513, then you almost notice almost 500 years separating it.
Yes, I mean march the whole of southeast Anatolia, never mind Istanbul, are earthquake prone.
And for that reason I chose, uh, not only Marash as the cover.
A place that suffered 55,000 fatalities. Here begins the story of the risk society that on the that talked about that people,
by simply living in shoddily constructed buildings, are at risk for a predetermined slow death.
Uh, what's happened since October 17th?
So, in other words, this is if I use the story of what the Turks named these seas.
I'm going to give you kind of writing a history of the Black Sea, the White Sea and the Red sea since October 7th.
Now, I'm going to go to this spot here, because another place I was, uh, considering is having the cover with a Libyan city known as Derna.
Okay. That city, they had their own September the 11th, on 2023.
Uh, the amount of deaths they suffered. And again, this is what I would argue in natural history.
They were condemned to a slow death. More than 10,000 dead in the single night.
Then in the single night, due to another freak event that's called a mediterranean hurricane.
Okay. Uh. Darren.
I didn't like that. I didn't have to suffer this fate.
The dams that were holding back the waters and Derna could have been strengthened to
prevent the collapse on that particular night due to this anomalous weather event.
So, uh, like I said, that event and you're going to see I have no trouble publishing articles.
But the case with the medication. Daniel, I could not get that article published.
Okay, so here we begin. Now, the story of the. Now before I begin.
So and now I want to do basically what am I alluding to?
I'm writing a good number of history of environmental disasters.
Okay. Since the 2018 event something is worrying that's happening in the history of the region.
Okay, so like I said. This is not Mosul, but who did I choose this image for?
A famous muscle, Allawi that came from Mosul.
Okay. And her name is Zaha Hadid.
I was writing Zaha right before Mosul was liberated from the rule of ISIS.
Okay. And right before Mosul was liberated, a the iconic minaret that defines the city called the hunchback.
Okay. Was it destroyed? Zaha Hadid passed away before the minutes destruction.
And in that tragedy, I was kind of I thought it was fortuitous that she did not witness the destruction of Mosul,
that she passed away before witnessing the destruction of that city that has brother was named for Fuller,
and I had the pleasure of studying him, meeting him at that same time, meeting your wife Eugene,
on that same afternoon, and for love her older brother a few days later.
This was all in the year 2000, and again For love also passed away before witnessing the destruction of his native Mosul under ISIS rule.
Uh, the story of Zaha I find interesting.
And the new field that's developing that I tried to develop, and this history known as the environmental humanities, in other words,
how to put human stories in the history of the environment, how humans shape the environment, and of course, how the environment shapes humans.
And I did not know it was thanks to a children's book, if you could show them that, and I highly,
I'm going to make a shout out for this one building Zaha an excellent children's book that I learned a lot about that.
Zaha uh, architectural techniques. This famous architect, she was inspired by the marshes of the south of Iraq.
Zaha love to stay up late reading and one book she read about how people built floating homes in the Sumerian wetlands.
She was determined to see this for herself. Zaha travelled with her father.
Now this would be Mohammed Hadid. Uh, I mean, a great Iraqi politician of the 1950s.
Um, but I won't go into that diversion.
He would have taken her there. Zaha travelled with her father to Sumer, where watery marshes, reeds and grasses rippled and flowed all around.
It was beautiful, complete harmony and never remained still.
I have wondered whether it was better to live in a modern city like Baghdad, or like this as one with nature.
And if anyone knows that architectural techniques combine both the natural flow with modern cities.
And so sure enough, if you look at the structure here, right, if you go outside and look at this structure here,
what I see influencing it is the smooth leaf of the south of Iraq, the mouth of the marshes.
And, um, if you look at the I mean, if it looks more obvious, if you look at the original design,
but if you look at the interior, where I had the pleasure of having obviously,
um, attend my lecture on Iraq almost a year ago for the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war, it does look like the movie of the Southern Marshes.
And if you don't know, these are the marshes here.
So, uh, on one level is to write about the, uh, environmental history of Iraq and to understand the environmental history of Iraq.
What is interesting is the following. Of course I.
So in other words, I told you I had written about the history of ISIS in the 2018 version.
This version, this history of ISIS, made me realise something that the Islamic State was in the Islamic State of the Euphrates and Tigris.
What did I say? The Islamic State wasn't bounded by geography as an idea.
It wasn't. But the original course states its capital was in Raqqa.
The first city it conquered in Iraq was Fallujah. Uh, the interesting story is give me other cities on the Tigris, Tikrit, Samarra, Mosul.
And so what I did in this, uh, newest version of the Concise History was in the same chapter.
I mean, what I had to work with in, um,
there were very few women's stories when I read the fifth edition of The Concise History of the Middle East as an undergrad was,
first of all, not only trying to put women's stories into this history, but also juxtapose them.
And in one chapter, I have two people, uh.
al-Baghdadi. Now that is full of title.
What was his name? I'm a black daisy.
But what do you like to say? His real name is Ibrahim.
Who's the real Ibrahim al-Baghdadi? My civil registration.
Civil restriction certificate. Um.
Says my name. I was born in 1945, and it says I regret it.
So I'm really pretty mad. Now, here's a real impression that, yes, a chap is a fake.
The other track is a fake. That Ibrahim Baghdadi comes from Samarra.
The al-Baghdadi was so again to just give him the list, just name associated with the Caliph.
But I took that. The first so-called caliph of ISIS and juxtaposed stuff.
Right? Uh, one was, uh, al-Baghdadi, and the first so-called caliph was male from Samarra and a destroyer.
And up the river was a female.
And the creator, you see, and I so what I wanted to do was kind of take the story of two Iraqis shaped by the rivers,
and see how they had two very different life legacies. Saddam Hussein was from Tikrit.
Yeah. What was also his legacy, going back and looking at how kind of environmental histories was and an act of punitive ecology,
he, um, drained the downstream rivers, you see, draining the marshes that inspired Zaha.
And do you see how I can tell the story of Three Rivers? I'm sorry if three seas of three people whose life was shaped by the Tigris.
Then if we go to Yemen. Right? If you go to Yemen and in Yemen, by the way, something used to grow in Yemen.
But by the way, it doesn't need, uh, it has a natural pesticide in it.
Does anyone know what was used to grow in Yemen that has a natural pesticide in it for most of its history, used to grow abundantly in Yemen?
Coffee and the pesticide we call it. Caffeine.
Yeah. Caffeine drives bugs crazy, and it drives us to heaven.
Yes. By the way, just another interesting factoid.
Uh, besides the, uh, caffeine plant, the other one that has a natural built in pesticide, but other plant to the coca plant.
It's called cocaine. Yes. Cocaine and caffeine. There are two drugs that were basically evolutionary designed as a pesticide.
Um, the. Why do you have the remote, uh, area that couldn't sustain a large population,
sending a good number of have the enemies following the monsoon winds to Malaysia,
Indonesia, I think the sultan of Brunei, or in the other direction to Zanzibar, where my father was born and raised.
The monsoon winds would have the remains a society based on the flood.
Um, flash floods can erase large populations.
They either went to Zanzibar on one side of the Indian Ocean or to Malaysia.
Indonesia, of course. Another very famous how the Redmi family went towards Saudi Arabia.
I just showed you that famous father on my family, the bin laden family.
And again, you think again how environment kind of shapes the stories of this region.
But this town here, you might not know it.
Uh, this town is where that coffee was shipped from.
It was Maha, or what we pronounce as mocha.
It was geo strategically important back then. It was where the world's coffee was shipped from.
And, um, coffee. Very little still grows in Yemen.
And it costs $62 a bag for a reason.
Very little survives, very little survives.
It couldn't compete when the Dutch stole it and started growing it in the Indonesian island of Java and their Java moka.
You've heard this term that when the Brazilian, the Portuguese took it to Brazil, uh, Yemen couldn't compete.
Now, the second part of the story is this.
If we look at a tale of two chokepoints, uh, in 1956, it was the Suez Canal that probably dominated any history of the region.
Here we are looking at the Red sea.
And if you look at a lot of these ships that were attacked in the name of solidarity, Hamas, solidarity with Lucy, this isn't a mistake.
It's not Yemen, New York Times, it's Yemen. Right. Uh, what are a lot of these ships carrying?
Of coffee from the greatest.
Now the second largest producer of coffee is Vietnam.
And that has to deal with, uh, the Vietnam War. The U.S. dropped so much Agent Orange on Vietnam.
Very little can grow there except the coffee broth, the coffee, the robusta, not the arabica batch that comes from, uh, Yemen.
And of course, now the other legacy of Yemen was the following.
When they replaced coffee, they replaced it with this very water intensive crop known as pot.
And in 2014, a scholar named Juan Cole, who I also had the pleasure of meeting around,
I think it was 2001, if I'm not mistaken, when he invited Juan Cole, his work on why is Yemen so violent?
Because it's so poor and thirsty again, was one of these elements that's had me start looking at the role of water in the region,
because the great paradigm was of countries, nation states going to war over water in the 1990s.
What we started looking at was whether there was one call in 2014 got me interested in looking at the way ISIS weaponized water.
So I mentioned ISIS being a project of the two rivers. Right.
But let's not forget, if we talk about non-state actors and the control of water, let's not forget in 1964,
a one non-state actor made its name for attacking a water diversionary facility.
Okay. And that faction, you know it. That's Fatah. And so here you see Yasser Arafat making it on the front page of time magazine.
Now, remember what I said about the war for Palestinian memory. I'm going to show you now the next front page of time magazine.
Here's the author of that. And here's some more. Okay.
Now, if I compare them. I want you to look at the cover.
Okay. Of another person. And when I'm talking about wars for memory, this the and this is the reason why I told Rutledge the book is not ready.
I told you, Rutledge, the book is not ready. And I could not covers any words.
Death. That literally occurred as I was getting on the plane over here.
But what am I when I go into the 14th edition?
What am I going to be forced to revise the execution of Saddam Hussein?
Because if you look at the kind of the stoic death that both figures face, even people who hated to admit it.
Even I, who hated to admit it. Right.
That's Adam would go into history for facing his executioners with a certain stoicism where he was defiant towards the very end.
Okay. And that was what Sinwar was given a defiant death.
Were taking a stick, throwing it at the drone towards the very end.
This is how he would be remembered when I write the 14th edition.
Sure enough, what was I saying? I was writing the history of water in the region, coming up with words such as hydro terrorism.
How high wasn't the hydrological state it controlled water gave it to its citizens and flooded water downstream, flooding its enemies.
I remember the sinking feeling I had in the summer of 2000, when I heard the anecdote of the Scuds.
What did I write? And now here brings in the other story of, besides my other teaching gigs.
There's one I couldn't talk about in the bio because that teaching gig is over.
I used to teach in the summer in August. The best place in the world to be in August is a city called Lviv in Ukraine.
The best weather there and there. I was trying to bring Middle East studies and a post-Soviet context.
Uh, so yeah, I used to teach in Ukraine every summer, of course, until 2022.
And of course. Originally, I was planning to look at how water had been weaponized in the case of Ukraine in the summer of 2023.
And of course, when writing about how water was weaponized in Ukraine, what was the conclusion I came to again, I thought of.
Now, of course, every article you see here is feeding into the updated edition.
I thought of one called article referring to Yemen.
Why are people so angry and violent if they're thirsty?
And of course, what I was concerned about in the summer of 2023, June 2023.
And if you go to this article, you will look at the desperate situation of water justice in Gaza or the lack of it.
And asking myself this question.
Now, the thing about Gaza's water crisis, as you say, it wasn't just me writing in 2023, anyone following the history of water in Gaza,
like myself back in 2020, was worried about the water situation in Gaza because it's the same dynamic affecting the marshes in Iraq.
Rising water levels are leading into salinisation of underwater aquifers in Gaza.
And let's not forget, the conflict in Gaza has been raging since 2008, and every single one of those conflicts.
What was I keeping track of? Just like in Yemen, the destruction of water facilities?
Because now we're wearing my public school hat. Public health hat.
Destruction of water facilities leads to rises such of diseases cholera, polio, hepatitis B, so on and so forth.
I looked at the water situation.
Okay, people don't realise this, but Theodor Herzl wrote a science fiction novel on the genre with just born Theodor Herzl.
It's talking about a hydro utopia. And this strip of land that he would later envision.
Okay, Alternate Land is about how if Jews were to settle this land, that hydro utopia would emerge.
Okay. Now, if you look at this eco site,
is now what the term we're using to describe this situation in Gaza is going from was a term such as an environmental napper,
an environmental dystopia. Okay. Among the actual dystopia that I would argue is being lived in the Gaza.
Okay. Uh, other ways.
Now, I end of this book. I want you to look at the houses here, and I'll start to wind up.
If you look at the houses here, look at them with their car all coming together with their Kalashnikovs.
Now let's end with this quote. Let's not forget what was the event that inspired Edward Said.
If you remember I said I finished writing this book October 7th, 2023.
I would have never ended my this version of the book with this quote.
I've said were it not for the events that happened on October 7th, 2023.
Look at this quote here. My interest in Orientalism began for two reasons.
One, it wasn't a media thing. That is to say, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973,
which had been preceded by a lot of images and discussions in the media in the
popular press about how the Arabs are cowardly and they did not know how to fight,
and that there were always going to be beaten because they are not modern.
And then everybody was surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the canal in early October of 1973.
And of course, now we know the date. It was October 7th, 1973, when that crossing occurred.
And demonstrated that, like anybody else, they could fight.
Okay. That was my one immediate impulse. My interest in Orientalism began for two reasons.
It was that immediate thing, that is to say, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, which had been preceded by, oh, sorry, did I just.
Okay. That was it. Right. Okay. So in other words, now when we look at what it means to be modern, right?
Israel weaponized artificial intelligence.
We've entered now a brave new world. But people that you probably don't realise.
And this gets to my school of public health Ahat remember what Arthur was saying?
Who knows what was important back of the 21st century?
Remember back when Covid occurred, we all were thinking about the post-pandemic world, right?
We kept on talking about it. But you don't realise a lot of the artificial intelligence,
a lot of the tracking equipment used to surveil Gaza was introduced into Israeli society thanks to Covid.
A lot of those AI algorithms, a lot of the mass data that generates it.
I was looking at this very closely. A lot of the words being generated due to monitoring people for Covid in Israel.
Okay. But now we bring in the brave new world in terms of technology, what's happening?
Technology. So not only did the Middle East endure a pandemic, and now as I start to round up that I had to cover,
and I want you to think something about the pandemic, uh, we are what was called a post-pandemic world was caused by a coronavirus.
Okay. Basically all what the happened was a bat made what's called a zoo, not a jump to an intermediate animal.
The bat was a vector. And from there, that animal fact. The last humans that happened, uh, probably somewhere in the Yunnan province of China.
Okay. Um, that was the first that was the first jump of a coronavirus, probably around 2019.
Another one where did a break out in the Middle East?
The Middle East respiratory syndrome was simply this a bat which was infected with a coronavirus bitter camel,
and that camel infected a human and Saudi Arabia. That coronavirus was so deadly it never became a pandemic.
We got lucky with that one just because it was so deadly. The great coronavirus that started off the 21st century was around 2003.
I remember I was here. I remember here when a friend I should've mentioned his name.
I'll keep him anonymous. A good Turkish friend, uh, got off the plane and people that he made a joke.
Somebody was coughing on the plane and he got socially distance by his cohorts.
That was SARS, Covid, okay, of 2000.
That's three corona viruses in the 21st century.
Do you know how many coronaviruses may that jump from humans, from animal reservoirs to humans, over the last 4000 years?
For. Something you have to start asking yourself.
And the human history. We only have records of for coronaviruses since we started domesticating animals.
There's a hieroglyph. Okay. You'll be surprised for one of these viruses.
There's even over the span of, let's say, the domestication of animals.
So let's just say good. 4000 years for coronaviruses made the jump from animals to humans before the year 2000.
And then the last 20 years, three have made that jump. Something is going on in terms of the way we are living in the modern world.
And again, the answer to that is all right, back. It's very simple.
We're just living closer to bat reservoirs. And deforestation means, let's just say easy 2000 years for coronaviruses, 20 years.
Three coronaviruses. Uh, there is something going on, but that's it.
This was just a side distraction. I wanted to look at the drones that were mass gathering.
This. The V1 led to the Blitz over London, and it's that same technology.
Who would have thought that throughout history?
So every single addition. Right. It was the Middle East that bought arms from the West, particularly the Soviet Union.
If you're talking about Iran and the Arab countries. Right. Who would have guessed?
It's Iran producing drones that are now being purchased by Russia, the Shah Hydra, the same Ukraine is purchasing most of its drones from Turkey.
Okay. Never in history. What's the Middle East now? The weapons exporters?
Ukraine. You probably don't realise it's one of the world's largest weapons exporters.
It still does. Still exports weapons. But when it needed the drone technology, it needed it from Turkey.
Now, who was the first nation to introduce drones in the Middle East in the 1970s?
It was Israel. Now, one of the arguments it's going to make is when you, uh, create a weapon, your adversaries are going to get it.
If 1970s Israel introduced the first drone in the Middle East who recently attacked Benjamin Netanyahu's home with a drone, okay.
Hezbollah again,
would you have ever told me that a non-state actor would be now throwing drones at the Israeli prime minister's house in the year 2000?
Could any of us have imagined?
So here's an article that here I'm writing, and I'll start to conclude, uh, when I wrote this article about Kyiv in the blitz,
uh, blitz with a fellow Ukrainian, uh, one of my former Ukrainian students.
What does the Shahid mean? It's a witness. And you have to understand, every Ukrainian knows the word Shahid.
Now, every Ukrainian has a story of their daily ontological security being upended.
Finally, as we conclude, I want you to think of this.
What are the two actors are engaged in the first instance of space combat?
In other words, two actors engaged in violence at 100km or 60 miles above the Earth's surface.
Is it Hamas and Israel, the Houthis and Israel, the Houthis and the Blowfish?
That's just a bad joke from the 1980s. This is literally, if you don't know this, I teach the history of the space program.
This is a literal question. On my exam, uh, Hezbollah and Israel were the first two actors that weaponize space.
Any guesses? How was this in Israel?
Yes.
Because, you know, I mean, if you look at this meme, what I imagine every time I hear the Houthi is this is a reference to the jar was from Star Wars.
But yes, literally the whole these have their own Star Wars they inherited.
It's the V-1. It's basically the first drone in human history.
Uh, the second weapon, the V-2, the first ballistic missile was the first human made object that ever entered outer space.
The V2 was it, and the V2 evolved into the same rockets that took humanity to the moon.
The US program and the B-2 became the Soviets got the same missile that Saddam launched towards Israel,
and the same Scud missiles that the Houthis launched towards a lot.
Okay.
Now, the interesting thing here is, yes, for the US, Israel to be able to intercept those missiles, it launched a US designed weapon in outer space.
Finally, I said, I'm going to end this. Uh, let me just forget.
And of course, I saved it to the very end, the gendered aspect. But let me just end with the following.
I'm just going to skip because I saw this image. And some of his office in the image.
Yes. Okay. I don't know how to say I saw the image of Layla College and the office.
There is one film I highly recommend called Paradise Now, which is an obvious reference to Hamas,
and it has an iconic part where the protagonists film their farewell message.
Okay, but if we go to the edge, the second wave.
Okay. And this is kind of an homage to the third wave.
Uh, here's Layla Harland. But what what was interesting was that again.
Okay, uh, the suicide of a mother. Okay, here we get to somebody who originally, actually, who killed herself.
Uh, uh, this became the third wave.
Okay. And like I said, we thought the third wave was over, but no, the third wave never went away.
In other words, you have to ask yourself this. What were the conditions that in the case of Layla Khalid, she was married.
The wedding ring was the grenade pin. The diamond was the bullet.
She was married to the cause. Remarry? Uh, she actually was married and had a child.
Okay, but this is a question. Whether it's access to water or simply this.
What were the frustrations that led to Reem Rashi killing herself?
Well, all matters that I have to go and look back to when I write this history.
Okay. Um. Uh, okay.
So now I promise to conclude. Other women that I wrote about.
In the 21st century. Who would have thought? Angelina Jolie.
Now, when I talk about non-state actors, I want you to think about this.
A single tweet by Angelina Jolie referring to, uh uh uh uh, mass death and the refugee camp gets condemned by the president of Israel.
And again, if you look at the politics of the 21st century, okay, whether it's Angelina Jolie,
remember, she was a U.N. goodwill ambassador, but kind of bringing more women into the story.
Okay. A Syrian swimmer? Yes. Or a mardini.
Okay. Uh, that I used to discuss the fate of Syria and the Arab Spring.
Uh, Amal Alameddine, a Lebanese barrister, uh, working on behalf of a Yazidi sex, uh, violence survivor.
Sexual violence in the 21st century, ISIS weaponized, uh, sexual slavery, weaponized rape.
And then in all of this, can we have some happy stories to conclude with?
Okay, where do we find agency? And, uh, yeah. Well, you see, who am I ending the story with?
Okay, whether it's the Hadi, uh, Habiba Amarachi, uh, the first person to ever create an environmentalist group,
uh, a group together gave it to environmentalism in the UAE of the 1990s.
Of course, she is my aunt. Right. But what was I doing in Jerusalem in the 19?
Uh, really up to in the summer of 2000. What was I there, here.
Therefore, I was on my way to a town called Zactly to search for a side of my family I did not know existed.
And to give you a spoiler, sure enough, in the year 2000, I found.
The Syriac Orthodox Christian side of my family that literally I had no idea existed.
I walked into Zactly and all it took was another taxi driver who said, hey,
does anyone know the woman from Ashley in the 1950s who married the Iraqi Muslim?
And sure enough, the taxi driver said, oh, that story.
This is in the summer of the year 2000, because I want you to think of this,
the idea of a Syriac Orthodox Christian woman, of a Christian for that matter.
He didn't say that.
He just said the Christian woman from this town who married the Muslim from Iraq in the 50s and the mechanic who lived to the year 2000 and said,
oh, that story. That's how scandalous it was to think of a Christian Muslim marriage back then.
And sure enough, in ten minutes I found my, uh, my grandmother's.
And she was not only exactly, but when my grandmother died in Iraq in the 50s.
For 40 years, she had been lighting a candle to the Virgin Mary saying, please let my sisters kids can find me.
She never thought it would be her sister's grandchild that would find her. And I found her exactly in the summer of 2000.
The day before, I caught a flight to London and made it to Oxford. In other words, what was I doing right before I met you?
Two days earlier? I found the Christian side of my family and the mountains of Zactly.
That was the summer of 2000. The thing is.
Does she look at me as a Lebanese Christian and say, you know, you're the product of that marriage to the Iraqi Muslim in the 1950s?
No. All she saw was the grandchild of, uh, her sister, who she had been waving for the side of her family every night lighting the candle.
I say this for a reason. Because when you look at the intense conflict coming, you know, going on there again, it's hard to predict the future.
That was in the summer of 2000. And here I am.
It's February 22nd. Sorry.
February 24th, 2022. Ukraine had just been invaded, and I wasn't sure I would make it into a flight.
And exactly because I was flying through Istanbul, I thought the flights would be cancelled.
And what was the first thing she told me was, I'm worried that you can sneak in a second.
I know the price of bread is going to increase because what comes. You know, how is the woman exactly?
What is she going to be affected? The price of bread coming from Ukraine.
And here she is. When I said goodbye to her.
It was her Ash Wednesday, right? And so I wrote about this story.
Okay. Uh, from Ukraine to Lebanon. A tale of two Marias.
This was all the summer of 2000 when I discovered her.
Uh, she is still in the mountains. Sadly, she can't evacuate.
You know how old people are when it comes to leaving their home. Especially her condition.
Her kitchen. But she decorates with little decorations.
She's still in the mountains of Zactly. And during the bombardments of every bomb, she feels, uh, exactly has evacuated.
But she's still there. She's 98 years old.
And if anything were to happen to her, it's always the Red cross that will come and, you know, take her to the hospital.
She's still there. Uh, I hope that Katherine Baalbek is still there.
Whatever happened to you off? Where happened to you?
Did he make it to San Diego? Yes he did.
He did make it to San Diego. And here we are, the day he's about to fly back.
To Tel Aviv is just a couple of weeks ago. He made it to San Diego.
He he really did not want to come back to Tel Aviv. He did not want.
It's me. You off. And there's supposed to be some turtles in the.
That's a turtle pond that unfortunately, I come get back. But this is what I want.
This is how I. This is the story of me. Search the me search that went into this edition.
Yeah. The research that goes into writing the history, uh, some actual events, some individual stories that I'll never write up.
Uh, but that's the the last the story of the last 24 years of me, uh, the Middle East Centre at Saint Anthony's at Oxford.
My story with Eugene and his students. So thank you.
You never know what's going to happen 24 years from now. For all of you assembled here.
Thank you for coming.