Review of Barry Rubin's "Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East"

The following, by Lionel Gossman, is reposted with permission of The Middle East Forum:

Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 340 pp. $35

Reviewed by Lionel GossmanPrinceton University

Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2014

With Islamist groups taking advantage of uprisings across the Middle East, notably in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded for a time in gaining power and is still widely viewed as the democratically elected government of Egypt, the publication of this richly researched book, a joint production of two leading Middle East scholars, could not be timelier. While many analysts ascribe the so-called "Arab Spring" to a yearning for democracy, Rubin and Schwanitz remind us of a deep and abiding connection between radical Islamism and imperial, then later, Nazi Germany.

It was Kaiser Wilhelm II who first set the template in his cynical World War I strategy of fomenting jihad among Muslim subjects in British, French, and Russian territories in the Near East and North Africa. One side-effect of this strategy was German complicity in the Armenian massacres, which could well have served as a model for Hitler's treatment of the Jews.