Sublime

The Scholar of Moab

Bin Laden wasn’t the only one thinking along such lines. In 1990 Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. It was a bold and sudden attack. Within four hours of crossing the border, the Iraqi army had reached Kuwait’s capital, attacked the emir’s palace, and set it aflame. Days later, Hussein annexed Kuwait. This gave him control of two

A week after al-Kassam’s death, he does not see what David Ben Gurion sees: that al-Kassam is only the beginning. That the myth of the dead al-Kassam would be far more dangerous than the deeds of the living rebel.

Shopkeepers who tried to stay open found themselves subjected to arbitrary and occasionally bizarre regulations. In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male and female body parts and should not be permitted to m

The real conflict in the oasis was not between the Jews and Arabs, but among the Arabs themselves, and more specifically between its two largest Arab tribes: the Aws and the Khazraj, the tribe that had originally invited Muhammad and his followers to Yathrib.