OneWorld Magazine: Deserts

Peter Mansfield

From the book "The Arabs", © 1996, Peter Mansfield by Penguin USA. - All Rights Reserved. (*) - Photo Credits, Wade Fairley
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Peter Mansfield was born in 1928 in Ranchi, India, and was educated at Winchester and Cambridge. He has spent the last thiry years writing and broadcasting about the contemporary affairs and history of the Middle East. In 1955 he joined the British Foreign Office and went to Lebanon to study Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. In November 1956 he resigned from the foreign service over the Suez affair but remained in Beirut working as a political and economic journalist. He edited the Middle East Forum and and corresponded regularly for the Drawing considerable experience as historian and journalist in the Middle East, Peter Mansfield explores social, political and historical aspects - from the pre-Islamic nomads of Arabia, the life of Muhammad and the rise of Arab power that followed to the the Western colonial period, to the tragedy of Palestine and the modern Arab renaissance, reinforced by the power of oil. He shows that the consequences of centuries of struggle for dominance between Christendom and the Islamic world survive to this day in various forms. Bringing events into the 1990s, he explores the causes and consequences of the Gulf War, the continuing conflict over Palestine and the difference in attitude between Arab liberals and fundamentalist as to the future outlook of the Arab world.

(*) Permission Pending

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