24 October 2026 About al-bab Contact RSS

How to be good at Arabic

By Brian Whitaker

No two ways about it: learning Arabic is hard work, but the Arabic Media Shack has some useful tips.

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Books by Brian Whitaker

Arabs Without God
Atheism and Freedom of Belief in the Middle East.
What's Really Wrong with the Middle East
Denying the Obvious
Chemical weapons and the information war over Syria.
Unspeakable Love
Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East.
The Birth of Modern Yemen
The unification of north and south Yemen in 1990.

Selected topics

Gaza the other war

A running series of blog posts on how the war in Gaza is being fought through language, law and public relations.

Denying the Obvious

An e-book on the organised effort to cast doubt on chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Transgender rights in the Middle East

A four-part investigation into how questions of gender identity are treated across the region.

Degrees of deception

An ongoing inquiry into the trade in fraudulent academic qualifications across the Middle East and beyond.

Qatar's Christian crusaders

An investigation into the network of American evangelicals who took an unlikely interest in Qatar.