Growing up is a universal experience, but the particularities of homeland, culture, ethnicity, religion, family, and so on make every childhood unique. To give Western readers insight into what growing up in the Middle East was like in the twentieth century, this book gathers thirty-six original memoirs written by Middle Eastern men and women about their own childhoods.

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, a well-known writer of books and documentary films about women and the family in the Middle East, has collected stories of childhoods spent in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait,...

This study of modern Egypt aims to open the debate regarding new terms and methods for understanding the Middle East and Islamic societies. Sonbol shows continuity in the division of Egyptian society into two groups: the Khassa which tried to impose a hegemonic culture, and the opposing Amma.

In 1958 a group of nationalist military officers overthrew the Iraqi monarchy and established a republican regime. This book assesses the social, political and economic consequences of that revolution, which led to the domination of the Ba'ath Party, and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The contributors are Hanna Batatu, Norman Daniel, William Roger Louis, Nicholas G. Thatcher, Frederick W. Axelgrad, Joe Stork, Rashid Khaldi, Marion Farouk-Sluglett, Peter Sluglett, Robert A. Fernea, Fodger Owen, Abdul-Salaam Yousif and Sami Zubaida.