A Middle East reading list is John Kiriakou’s answer to a viewer who asked how far back into the history books a newcomer would need to go to understand the region as it is today. His reply was both a chronological boundary and a short bibliography.
Where to start
Kiriakou’s boundary is the Second World War. “I would say you only really need to go back to the end of World War II,” he says. The deeper history is conceded as legitimate but not necessary: “listen, you can go back 5 5,000 years if you want to study Egypt and Mesopotamia and ancient Persia, of course. But, to get an idea of of today’s Middle East, you really only have to go back to the end of the Second World War.”[1][2]
The books
The first recommendation is a book about Saudi Arabia. “Start with um with a book called The House of Saud,” Kiriakou says, and he gives his own use of it as the reason: “even as a CIA analyst who already knew a lot about Saudi Arabia, that book really put me on the right path.”[2]
What the book supplied, in his account, was the sense of the country as a recent construction — “you can see how Saudi Arabia was created out of nothing, nothing but sand.”[2][3]
After that he sends the reader to the settlement documents and the founding of the states. “Then take a look at things like the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for example, and the creation of of Israel.” His last title is a work of reportage: “There was a book From Beirut to Jerusalem that was quite popular in the 1980s. It’s still out there. Take a look at that book as well.”[4]
The two Saudi Arabias
The geography Kiriakou draws out of the first book is the division of the kingdom into two regions. “There are two parts of Saudi Arabia, the Nejd and the Hejaz. The Hejaz used to be a part of Transjordan. It goes all the way down the Red Sea coast down to the border of Yemen. The Nejd was just that desert wasteland in the center of the peninsula.”[3]
The point of the distinction is what changed it: the Nejd “was a wasteland until oil was discovered there. Now, it’s the sort of the heart of the Saudi economy.” The reading list is, in this sense, an argument about how young the modern Middle East is — a set of states assembled inside a single lifetime out of agreements, discoveries and lines on maps.[3][4]