The Middle East into the 21st Century: The Japan Lectures and Other Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the Gulf Crisis and Political Islam

This book is the author's way to fulfil a belief in ideas as movers of a history in the making. In a Middle East where the Arab-Israeli and Gulf conflicts cannot be thought separately there is a need for an effective redirecting of the structural frameworks towards a comprehensive and innovative peace where borders and armies count less, and for a practice of change in Iraq which is based on working opposition institutions. Whilst the appreciation of Iranian Islamic expansionism should operate primarily with a view to Iran's own fault-lines and the domestic set-ups in the countries concerned, the whole search for a kinder and richer Middle East must refine its language by a series of detours. The detours include the weaving of the classical tradition of Islamic law into modern legal experiments, the appreciation of what really makes a state stable, the difficult theoretical questions raised by Islamic movements, and the need for new constitutional frameworks and a legal fluidity in the region as a whole, in which nation-states get less rigid, and freedom of movement and political expression for the individual are made issues of priority.