This book provides in five essays background information on some of the most current problems affecting the modern Middle East.

William Harris describes the absence of democracy in Lebanon and Syria in the 1990s. He reflects on whether the confessional democracy and civil society of Lebanon has been pulverized by Syria in the 1990s, and whether the Syrian population considers democracy an irrelevant concept after living under dictatorship for more than a quarter of a century. Amatzia Baram offers an account of the development and metamorphosis of regime-sponsored national ideology in Iraq under the Ba'th Party.

Ahmad Ashraf analyzes the appeal of modern conspiracy theories to Iranians, including the social, cultural, political and psychological factors contributing to their attraction to Persians. Heath W. Lowry outlines a series of elite-imposed ideological taboos on history, religion, ethnicity, pan-Turkism and the legacy of Ataturk, which have hampered the development of democratic institutions in Turkey, and analyzes the effects that the removal of these taboos have had on Turkish politics and society in the 1990s.

Thereafter, Yesim Arat describes two kinds of feminist movements in Turkey in the 1980s.