RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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The north African struggle
JOE GILL welcomes a helpful, if incomplete, guide to the the native and Islamic struggles against imperial and colonial powers in north Africa
UNDESERVEDLY OVERLOOKED: Abd el-Krim, Moroccan political and military leader and the president of the Republic of the Rif (1921-1926) during an interview with Luis de Oteyza for the "La Libertad" journal, January 1925
[Jose Maria Diaz Casariego/CC]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
The Maghreb Since 1800: A Short History
Knut S Vikor, Hurst, £19.99
AS AUTHOR Knut S Vikor says in his introduction, the term “Middle East” was a British colonial invention, covering the region controlled by the British empire from Egypt to Iraq and the Arab Gulf.
The Arabic names for the region that became united under the Islamic Caliphate are much older: it was divided into the Maghreb (where the sun sets) to the west, and the Mashriq (where the sun rises) to the east. The Maghreb extends from the Western Sahara and Morocco in the west to Libya’s eastern border with Egypt in the east.
The present-day division between the southern Mediterranean and its northern shores — the fortress Europe where thousands die each year trying to reach Spain or Italy — came about half a millennium ago when the Spanish crown expelled Muslims and Jews in 1492, and the Ottomans gradually extended their hold on north Africa westward to Tunis and Algiers.
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