Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East Audiobook

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president—Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood—and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift in Egypt and the Middle East: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. In Making the Arab World, Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region from the 1920s to the present.

Gerges tells this story through an unprecedented dual biography of Nasser and another of the twentieth-century Arab world's most influential figures—Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the father of many branches of radical political Islam. Their deeply intertwined lives embody and dramatize the divide between Arabism and Islamism. Yet, as Gerges shows, beyond the ideological and existential rhetoric, this is a struggle over the state, its role, and its power.

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"This is a serious work, empirically detailed and theoretically informed, that will appeal to people with a deep interest in Egypt and the politics of Islamism and/or Nasserism.It isn't unnecessarily dry or heavy going, but neither is it for casual readers who don't want to know the twists and turns of, for example, Qutb's career as a public intellectual.The reading is mostly fine, if unexceptional, but marred by unnecessary mispronunciations of Arabic names and terms. Most unnecessarily, Qutb is pronounced throughout as "Kutba". I wouldn't expect the narrator to hit perfecf Arabic pronunciation, but some are so far off it's jarring."

— TGOTJ (5 out of 5 stars)