ISLAM, REGIONS, AND POLITICS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: PAST & PRESENT

The structure of the volume is composed of three main sections, which are distinctly different in character. The first section is made up of five extensive essays written by historians of considerable stature. The first study in the block examines the Hungarian political position on the unification of the two Yemenis; the second reviews Muslim sources on the Hungarian population before the occupation of the Carpathian Basin; the third looks at the restructuring and staffing of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry between 1945 and 1950, the fourth analyses the career of one of Hungary’s most influential diplomats after the Second World War, while the fifth examines Hungarian-Czechoslovak relations from a Hungarian perspective in the period 1990–1992. In the second block, book reviews presenting the results of historical research on the Middle East with evaluative remarks are presented. Most of the twenty reviews were written by doctoral students of ELTE. The third block included translations of four newspaper articles on Hungarian-Arab relations that appeared in the Egyptian Al-Ahram in the early 1990s. In addition to Hungarian historians, historians from Egypt, India, Indonesia, Croatia and Turkey participated in the preparation of the volume. The book’s commendable feature is its multilingualism. Arabic, English and Hungarian texts and sources allow a wider readership to gain insight into the publication. Accept the volume for what its editors intended it to be: a valuable mosaic collection enriched with new colors, which they wanted to contribute to the shaping of our historical perspective, to a deeper understanding of the past of the Middle East, of the multifaceted relations between Europe and the Middle East, and to a nuanced interpretation of the crisis phenomena. This is a noteworthy work that may pave the way for further research.