Middle East

At the height of the Roman Empire, hundreds of merchant ships left Egypt every year to voyage through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, exchanging the produce of the Mediterranean for exotic eastern commodities. Raoul McLaughlin traces their pioneering journeys. 

Disillusionment with Iran’s secular king brought the Islamists to power in 1979. Will the population now oust the ruling theocracy, asks Baqer Moin?

On the eve of the Second World War, the navies of Italy, France and Britain plotted for supremacy in the Mediterranean. Their actions resulted in the fracturing of the sea’s age-old unity, with consequences that persist to this day. Simon Ball explains how the ‘Middle Sea’ became the Middle East.

With a solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as far away as ever, James Barker looks back to Britain’s occupation of the region and the efforts made by the future Viscount Montgomery to impose peace on its warring peoples.

Richard Cavendish remembers Israel's own Iron Lady, who became Prime Minister on March 17th 1969

James Barker reveals how parsimony and muddle in Whitehall in the first years of the British Mandate in Palestine almost led to disaster in August 1929.

David Winter visits a land beset for millennia by the fantasies of outsiders.

Clive Foss introduces the Kharijites, a radical sect from the first century of Islam based in southern Iraq and Iran, who adopted an extreme interpretation of the Koran, ruthless tactics and opposed hereditary political leadership. After causing centuries of problems to the caliphate, they survive in a quietist form in East Africa and Oman.

Penny Young investigates the situation of one of the country’s less-commonly mentioned communities.

The Six Day War spawned the special relationship between Israel and the United States of America. Elizabeth Stephens explores the cultural backdrop to this momentous development which resonates in the Middle East to this day.

Richard Cavendish explains how plans for a coup against King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan eventually melted away on April 13th, 1957.