The latest book by Georges Corm is another landmark in the critique of Western analyses of the crises that plague the Middle East and the Arab homeland. Thirty-four years after his seminal book on the Middle East (Corm 1983), the present book looks to be the close of the loop. The Western narrative since the nineteenth century about the Arab Levant and North Africa was encapsulated in the “Oriental Question” and its subsidiary the “Sick Man,” namely, the Ottoman Empire. Corm has deconstructed the narrative over the last four decades and may be coining a new phrase by stating that the “Oriental Question” is in fact the “Western Question” (15). We will add that the “Sick Man” nowadays is the West, the United States of America and the European Union, but this is another story.

The book is 320 pages long, divided into eight chapters plus an introduction...

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