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Kanan Makiya
Kanan Makiya (born 1949) is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention with Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-selling book after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with Cruelty and Silence (1991), a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. In 2003, Makiya lobbied the U.S. government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.
Makiya was born in Baghdad and left Iraq to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later working for his father's architectural firm, Makiya & Associates which had branch offices in London and across the Middle East. As a former exile, he was a prominent member of the Iraqi opposition, a "close friend" of Ahmed Chalabi, and an influential proponent of the Iraq War (2003–2011) effort. He subsequently admitted that effort "went wrong".
Makiya was born in Baghdad in 1949, the son of Iraqi architect Mohamed Makiya and his English-born wife, Margaret Crawford, a school-teacher. Like his father, he studied architecture and worked for a time in the architectural and planning consultancy, Makiya & Associates, established by his father in the late 1940s.
Makiya began his political career as a Trotskyist and became closely identified with Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Schwartz. In 1967, Makiya left Iraq for the United States to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was unable to return to Iraq until the 2000s due to the subsequent rise of the Ba'athist regime there.
In 1981, Makiya left the practice of architecture to become an academic and author. He wrote under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil to avoid endangering his family. In Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he argues that Iraq had become a full-fledged totalitarian state, worse than despotic states such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia. His next book, The Monument (1991), is an essay on the aesthetics of power and kitsch.
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993) was published under Makiya's own name. It was awarded the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations published in English in 1993. According to a 2007 profile of Makiya in The New York Times Magazine, the 1993 book "posed a devastating critique of the Arab world's intelligentsia, whose anti-Americanism, Makiya argued, had prompted it to conspire in a massive, collective silence over Hussein's dungeons."
In 2001 Makiya published The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale about Jerusalem, a work of historical fiction that tells the story of Muslim-Jewish relations in the formative first century of Islam, culminating in the building of the Dome of the Rock. Makiya also writes occasional columns and they have been published in The Independent and The New York Times.
Makiya has collaborated on many films for television, the most recent of which exposed for the first time the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. The film was broadcast in the U.S. on the PBS program Frontline under the title Saddam's Killing Fields and received the Overseas Press Club's Edward Murrow Award in 1992. In 2002, Makiya also offered significant insights concerning the events of 9/11 in the PBS/Frontline documentary, "Faith & Doubt at Ground Zero."
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Kanan Makiya
Kanan Makiya (born 1949) is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention with Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-selling book after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with Cruelty and Silence (1991), a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. In 2003, Makiya lobbied the U.S. government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.
Makiya was born in Baghdad and left Iraq to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later working for his father's architectural firm, Makiya & Associates which had branch offices in London and across the Middle East. As a former exile, he was a prominent member of the Iraqi opposition, a "close friend" of Ahmed Chalabi, and an influential proponent of the Iraq War (2003–2011) effort. He subsequently admitted that effort "went wrong".
Makiya was born in Baghdad in 1949, the son of Iraqi architect Mohamed Makiya and his English-born wife, Margaret Crawford, a school-teacher. Like his father, he studied architecture and worked for a time in the architectural and planning consultancy, Makiya & Associates, established by his father in the late 1940s.
Makiya began his political career as a Trotskyist and became closely identified with Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Schwartz. In 1967, Makiya left Iraq for the United States to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was unable to return to Iraq until the 2000s due to the subsequent rise of the Ba'athist regime there.
In 1981, Makiya left the practice of architecture to become an academic and author. He wrote under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil to avoid endangering his family. In Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he argues that Iraq had become a full-fledged totalitarian state, worse than despotic states such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia. His next book, The Monument (1991), is an essay on the aesthetics of power and kitsch.
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993) was published under Makiya's own name. It was awarded the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations published in English in 1993. According to a 2007 profile of Makiya in The New York Times Magazine, the 1993 book "posed a devastating critique of the Arab world's intelligentsia, whose anti-Americanism, Makiya argued, had prompted it to conspire in a massive, collective silence over Hussein's dungeons."
In 2001 Makiya published The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale about Jerusalem, a work of historical fiction that tells the story of Muslim-Jewish relations in the formative first century of Islam, culminating in the building of the Dome of the Rock. Makiya also writes occasional columns and they have been published in The Independent and The New York Times.
Makiya has collaborated on many films for television, the most recent of which exposed for the first time the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. The film was broadcast in the U.S. on the PBS program Frontline under the title Saddam's Killing Fields and received the Overseas Press Club's Edward Murrow Award in 1992. In 2002, Makiya also offered significant insights concerning the events of 9/11 in the PBS/Frontline documentary, "Faith & Doubt at Ground Zero."