Since the West's very early flirtations with the modern Near East, and especially in the past 100 years of East-West relations, there has been considerable difficulty in understanding and defining the Middle East, the Arab world, pan-Arabism, Arab nationalism, and Middle Eastern identities in general. The Western impulse of conflating national identity with language, state, and ethnicity--often subsuming Arabic language into Arab ethnicity--has contributed to this misunderstanding and misreading of the region. For, while the Middle East can be accurately referred to by way of the generic...

Charles Corm: An Intellectual Biography of a Twentieth-Century Lebanese "Young Phoenician" delves into the history of the modern Middle East and an inquiry into Lebanese intellectual, cultural, and political life as incarnated in the ideas, and as illustrated by the times, works, and activities of Charles Corm (1894-1963). Charles Corm was a guiding spirit behind modern Lebanese nationalism, a leading figure in the "Young Phoenicians" movement, and an advocate for identity narratives that are often dismissed in the prevalent Arab nationalist paradigms that have come to define the canon of...