The Struggle for Arab Independence

This book is about the making of the modern Middle East. The region as we know it today was shaped in the violent and tumultuous years of the first half of the twentieth century, when Britain and France seized and dismembered the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the First World War. That is when the successor states of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Israel were created and Arab Palestine was destroyed. The roots of many of the conflicts and crises which afflict the region today can be traced back to this period of wars, high drama and the cavalier redrawing of maps.

Patrick Seale, a leading historian of the region, tells the story of this region during that period through the life of Riad el-Solh, a Lebanese politician who became one of the most outstanding Arab statesmen of his time. Until his assassination in 1951, he was at the forefront of the events and struggles that laid the foundation of the region today. He wrested Lebanon’s independence from France and became the first prime minister of the post-independence era, with its many challenges and tragedies.