Current Research

After two dense scholarly books—each nearly a decade in the making—I am now completing a crossover work that bridges academic rigor with a broader trade audience. The First Arabs: An Intimate History of Their Struggle for Dignity and the June Defeat revisits the dramatic story of the first Arab generation who, in the wake of World War II, laid the foundations for a free and modern Arab world. The book opens in September 1970, as five million people—the largest crowd in Cairo’s history—gathered for the funeral of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a modern-day prophet who had promised redemption in the form of a dignified life. From there, we go back in time, following a wide cast of revolutionaries, novelists, philosophers, poets, pedagogues, journalists, bureaucrats, military officers, radical feminists, and born-again Islamists—individuals whose personal lives were intimately bound to the collective fate of that enterprise. The First Arabs reconstructs the odyssey of a generation that dreamed boldly, fought for dignity and liberation, and ultimately had to reckon with the legacy of defeat.