Top Highlights

• My second purpose is to establish some link between the Middle East that we know today and the ancient civilizations of the region that we know from ancient texts and monuments. During the early centuries of the Christian era, that is to say, in the period between Jesus and Muhammad, the regions west of the Persian Empire were transformed by the co...
• In outward appearance this Middle Eastern café patron does not look very different from a similar figure sitting in a café in Europe, particularly in Mediterranean Europe. He will look very different from his predecessors in the same place fifty years ago, still more a hundred years ago. That of course is also true of the European sitting in his ca...
• It is very likely that the man sitting in the coffee-house is still wearing some form of headgear, perhaps a cloth cap, probably—except in Turkey—something more traditional. Anyone who has ever visited a cemetery of the Ottoman period will recall that many of the headstones over the graves include a carved representation of the form of headgear wor...
• Change in dress began, as did most aspects of modernization, with the military For the reformers, Western military uniforms had a certain magic. As Muslim armies were defeated again and again on the battlefield by their infidel enemies, Muslim rulers reluctantly adopted not only the weaponry but also the organization and equipment of their opponent...
• necessary for them to adopt Western uniforms. This was a social, not a military choice, and it has been followed in virtually all modern armies in Muslim lands, including even Libya and the Islamic Republic of Iran. They have to use Western weapons and tactics because these are the most effective; they do not have to wear fitted tunics and peaked c...