141: Why Western ideas crash and burn in the Middle East, with Simon Sebag Montefiore
· 1 h 08 min · Episode 141
Episode 141: Why Western ideas crash and burn in the Middle East, with Simon Sebag Montefiore
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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.
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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
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