Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World

By Kanan Makiya

Book Overview

Makiya first gives us the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour--the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. Their testimony, revealing the true extent of occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence, is a compelling example of the literature of witness. He then links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, comparing the flood of condemnation of the West with the trickle of protest over Saddam's mass murder campaign against the Kurds In his exploration of these "landscapes of cruelty and silence," Kanan Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underlie them. He calls for a new politics in the Arab world--a politics that puts absolute respect for human life above all else.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393311414
• ISBN13: 9780393311419
• Release Date: April 1994
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Frightening, prescient study of Iraq under Saddam

Makiya achieves two goals in this 1993 book: he details the "rising curve of cruetly" in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Husein and more broadly throughout the Arab world, and he castigates Arab intellectuals for their silence on this topic. Even though it is 13 years old, this book is highly relevant today for people trying to understand the middle east. Makiya warns that "Sunni-Shi'i hatred is today [in 1993] the most...

A witness to horror and courage

This is one of the best books I have read all year. Ten years old, it is still agonisingly relevant. In its bearing witness to human cruelty, human indifference but also human courage, it is as unflinching, as passionate and as magnificent as the works of Primo Levi. Beautifully written, meticulously observed, focussed on people, not abstractions, it is a book that haunts me and will continue to do so for a long time to come...

A timely read...

As an arab-american familiar with the brutal insanity of Saddam Hussein's regime, I've always been puzzled by the Arab talking heads who routinely criticize the U.S. for it's targetting of Iraq. Makiya's writing was instrumental in helping me understand this in somewhat deeper terms than simple anti-americanism, though his insightful and revealing writing has only heightened my frustration.Regarding the current political climate:...

Iraq and the Mideast Conflict Today: Essential Reading

Kanan Makiya--an Iraqi-French dissident and intellectual--uses the personal experiences of those suffering under Saddam Hussein's brutality to explore what he calls the "cruelty and silence" that contemporary Arab intellectual and political culture has come to exhibit toward its own citizens in the Mideast. He criticizes the widespread misuse of Edward Said's "Orientalism" to justify a sense of unreflecting victimhood and...

A realistic perspective on Iraq

The book describe in gruesome detail what life is like in Iraq and much of the Arab world, for instance a woman whose husband was suspected of being anti-goverment who was tortured until it was determined she could no longer feel pain, and the killed. Or the day to day life in an Iraq prison, where beatings, starvation and living in squaler are not "torture." When they want to torture someone, it is far worse that that.The...