Jeremy Bowen - The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History

Jeremy Bowen is the BBCs Middle East Editor. He has reported from more than eighty countries, covering more than twenty wars. They include all those in the Middle East since 1990, as well as those in Afghanistan, Chechnya, El Salvador, Somalia, Rwanda, former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. His books include Six Days, War Stories, The Arab Uprisings and The Making of the Modern Middle East. He lives in London.

I owe a huge debt to all those people whove agreed to talk to me about the lives they were living in tumultuous times. Quite often, meeting a Western reporter with or without a microphone and a camera was a considerable act of courage.

The idea for this book came from a series I wrote and presented for BBC Radio 4, called Our Man in the Middle East. It was commissioned by Gwyneth Williams, the then controller of the network, who pushed me to come up with a series, aided and abetted by Mohit Bakaya, her successor. Cara Swift and Mark Savage did the hard work of producing twenty-five programmes and forcing me to boil down my thoughts. Cara excavated from the archives and transcribed vast amounts of my reporting in the Middle East since 1990, which was also invaluable when it came to writing this book. Cara and her predecessor, Jane Logan, have been my producers, friends and the driving forces of dozens of trips to the region since the BBC appointed me as Middle East Editor in 2005. Jane introduced me to Jerusalem as my first producer there when I moved to the city in 1995. Cara was with me throughout most of the turmoil that followed the Arab uprisings of 2011. So was Nik Millard, a great cameraman, editor, journalist and friend since the first story we did together, in Libya, in 1991.

The reporting that provides the core of this book was made possible by dozens of BBC colleagues and friends. Its impossible to name everyone, but special thanks to some remarkable people. In Egypt: Angy Ghannam and Amr Aboulfath. In Syria: Lana Antaki and Lina Sinjab. In Lebanon: Tima Khalil, Malek Kanaan and the much-missed Abed Takkoush. Ive relied on Jimmy Michaels great and empathetic pictures and wise counsel in the West Bank since 1995. Thanks also in Jerusalem to Jeannie Assad, Gidi Kleiman, Oren Rosenfeld and Youssef Shomali. In Gaza: Rushdi Abu Alouf and Hamada Abuqammar. In Iraq: Laith Ali, Dylan Kareem and Bader Katy. The late Abu Ali, once Saddam Husseins chef, used to feed us at the BBC house in Baghdad and regale us with stories of his former employers visits to the palace kitchen to see what was for dinner. Thanks also to Juliette Touma and Matt Hollingworth of the United Nations. In Kabul, in 2021, I had the pleasure of working with Mahfouz Zubaide.

My agent Julian Alexander at the Soho Agency gently prodded me to write the book and to finish it. I tried the patience of George Morley and her team at Picador repeatedly and grievously. Writing a book is a full-time job but, unfortunately, I had one already.

Many thanks to Eugene Rogan of St Antonys College Oxford and Sanam Vakil of Chatham House for making invaluable comments and corrections. I own any remaining errors. James Arroyo and Sir John Holmes invited me to seminars at Ditchley Park that helped distil my thoughts. Much of this book was written in the London Library, a haven for anyone trying to turn thoughts and experiences into words.

I took many of the photographs, which wouldnt have happened without the encouragement of my mother Jennifer Bowen, a much better photographer than I will ever be, who let me use her darkroom and cameras when I was still at primary school. I might not have gone into the news business without the example of my late father Gareth, also a BBC journalist, who died in 2016. He was in Lebanon when Israel invaded in 1982. My fathers non-stop support included recording all my reports from Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War on a stack of VHS tapes. Now that my own children are venturing out into the world, I realize how alarming it must have been for my parents to track my movements across the Middle East at times of crisis.

Over many years my partner Julia Williams and my children Mattie and Jack have put up with months of absences while Ive been working in the Middle East or staring at a screen writing about it. This book is dedicated to them.

War Stories

Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East

The Arab Uprisings: The People Want the Fall of the Regime

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Shlomo Gazit,