First Things RSS Feed - Daniel Pipes https://www.firstthings.com/author/daniel-pipes en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:55:40 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/daniel-pipes 60 The Middle East Without Tears https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/12/the-middle-east-without-tears https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/12/the-middle-east-without-tears Wed, 01 Dec 1999 00:00:00 -0500 Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age.
By R. Stephen Humphreys.
University of California Press. 297 pp. $29.95.

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]]> The Western Mind of Radical Islam https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/12/the-western-mind-of-radical-islam https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/12/the-western-mind-of-radical-islam Fri, 01 Dec 1995 00:00:00 -0500 Fat’hi ash-Shiqaqi, a well-educated young Palestinian living in Damascus, recently boasted of his familiarity with European literature. He told an interviewer how he had read and enjoyed Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Sartre, and Eliot. He spoke of his particular passion for Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex , a work he read ten times in English translation “and each time wept bitterly.” Such acquaintance with world literature and such exquisite sensibility would not be of note except for two points—that Shiqaqi was, until his assassination in Malta a few weeks ago, an Islamist (or what is frequently called a “fundamentalist” Muslim) and that he headed Islamic Jihad, the arch-terrorist organization that has murdered dozens of Israelis over the last two years.

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