The Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi Revolutions: Some Observations on Their Underlying Causes and Social Character

by Hanna Batatu

Genres: History, Middle East, Politics, Egypt, Nonfiction

29 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1984

About the author

was a Palestinian American Marxist historian specializing in the history of Iraq and the modern Arab east. His work on Iraq is widely considered the pre-eminent study of modern Iraqi history.

Born in Jerusalem in 1926, Hanna Batatu emigrated to the United States in 1948, the year of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He gained his doctorate at political science in Harvard University in 1960, with a dissertation entitled The Shaykh and the Peasant in Iraq, 1917-1958. From 1962 to 1982 he taught at the American University of Beirut, then from 1982 until his retirement in 1994 at Georgetown University in the United States

Reviews

[Kurt Rongey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at the urban and rural origins of revolutionaries in the Arab Middle East and an overview of social movements in answer to changes in political economy. I benefitted from immersing myself a bit in the names and terminology.

Included on Counterpunch's reading list "100 Best Non-Fiction Books (in Translation) of the 20th Century … and Beyond."