William Dalryample:

Lawrence of Arabia is one of those figures, like Mahatma Gandhi, who tends to generate biographies more or less every year. With the centenary of the First World War already upon us – and with the anniversary of Lawrence’s Arab Revolt in 2016 – Scott Anderson’s gripping new study, subtitled War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, is only the forerunner of what is likely to be a very long caravan of new Lawrence books to come lolloping over the desert horizon over the next couple of years. Anderson’s version of the story is a brilliantly pulled-off piece of narrative history that demonstrates both why Lawrence continues to grip our imagination and why he can be a deeply problematic lens through which to examine the tensions of the Middle East.
 
 At the time, Lawrence’s dashingly cinematic raids on the Hejaz railway and his camel-borne attacks on Wejd and Aqaba during the First World War were regarded, as Lawrence wrote, as “the sideshow of a sideshow”. All eyes were on Ypres and the trenches of the Somme, where half the youth of Europe were being slaughtered on the Western Front. But the desert campaigns have become as iconic as they are because Lawrence provides a familiar face with which historians and biographers can tell one of the most complex and important stories of the war: the tale of the break-up of the Ottoman empire and the creation of the ongoing political train crash that is the modern Middle East.
 
 For it is Lawrence’s eastern theatre that has left by far the more important and messy legacy of that war. It is a legacy that we are still trying to contain today as Egypt undergoes its multiple revolutions and counter-revolutions, as Syria burns, as Israel remorselessly settles Palestinian land and as the Palestinians displaced in 1948 continue to rot in refugee camps.

Aboud Dandachi:

As a Syrian in Istanbul, watching the campaigning for the recently concluded 2014 Turkish local elections made me feel like a kid looking into a sumptuous candy store. For the first time in my life, I experienced first-hand the end-result and ideals the Syrian revolution was supposed to have bought to my own country; the democratic process in all its glory.
 
 Multiple political parties and candidates with banners and posters filling every area. The campaign offices with tables overflowing with electioneering pamphlets, staffed by volunteers sporting their respective party’s distinct colors. And roving vans blaring out campaign music. I loved hearing those vans in my neighborhood. They exemplified the very essence of a civilized society, one that resolves its differences not through guns, but at the ballot box. To a refugee who had left his own country in the midst of a devastating war, those campaign vans represented a veritable miracle; a functioning pluralistic, democratic society in the Middle East.
 
 Having lived my adult life in no less than fourteen cities in the Gulf and Levant, I moved to Istanbul in September 2013. After six months, I can unequivocally say that this metropolis is the standard by which Arab countries should be measuring themselves. Without a doubt, Istanbul is the city all Arab cities should have aspired to be.