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Robin B. Wright
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Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World Hardcover – July 19, 2011

by Robin Wright (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 76 ratings
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An up-close portrait of the ongoing internal struggle by secular and religious moderates to rescue Islam from the small, violent, and virulent minority that threatens it.

A decade after the 9/11 attacks, this groundbreaking book by a preeminent reporter takes readers deep into the struggle within the Muslim world where a growing movement defies and challenges extremism and repudiates Osama bin Laden, his deviant doctrine, and his violent disciples.

Robin Wright, an acclaimed foreign correspondent and television commentator, has witnessed the angry birth, violent rise, and globalization of Islamic militancy for almost four decades. In her recent reporting, she discovers a stunning new trend spreading within the Muslim world—the rejection of Islamic extremists. This is a historic evolution, slow to take off but now reaching critical mass. This trend is increasingly visible as clerics publicly repudiate Osama bin Laden, Muslim comedians ridicule militancy altogether, young Muslims rap against guns and bombs, women scholars launch liberation movements using the Koran, Pakistani villagers resist Taliban intrusions, and former Egyptian jihadis debate and then denounce violence.

This new jihad, which Wright describes in its many manifestations, has various goals. For some Muslims, it’s about reforming the faith. For others, it’s about reforming political systems. For all, it is about achieving basic rights—on their own terms, not Western ones. What is at its heart is the rejection of venomous ideologies, suicide bombs, plane hijackings, hostage-takings, and mass violence.

Muslims, Wright demonstrates, are doing what the West cannot—confronting extremism on its own terms and rescuing the faith from a virulent minority and changing history.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster
  4. Publication date
    July 19, 2011
  5. Dimensions
    6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    143910316X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1439103166
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Rock the Casbah

“[Wright] provides invaluable context for what she rightly terms ‘the epic convulsion across the Islamic world’ by listening to voices we don't usually hear....Anyone seeking deeper understanding of the Arab Spring needs to read Wright's formidably well-informed book ….Wright's richly textured portrait of ancient cultures in the throes of wrenching but liberating transformation makes it quite clear that Muslims themselves will decide their future.”
— Los Angeles Times

“…Wright is an expert on the subject and this book is an accessible and riveting account for readers looking to learn more about the post-9/11 Islamic world.”
—Publishers Weekly

“…Wright is one of the most capable observers of the Middle East….her chronicles of counter-jihad, anti-militancy, and women's mobilization are a timely contribution.”
—Huffington Post

Praise for Robin Wright’s

Dreams and Shadows


“Wright has long been one of the best-informed American journalists covering the Middle East, and her reputation is born out here. . . . Her book will be essential reading for anybody who wants to know where it is heading.”
--The New York Times Book Review

“Only Wright could have written Dreams and Shadows because only Wright has traveled so widely, interviewed such diverse leaders, and brought so much wisdom to analyzing the region’s many-sided puzzles. This volume, full of mesmerizing detail and large truths, sets a new standard for scholarship on the modern Middle East.”

--Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State

“If there is such a thing as a pinnacle in the landscape of international journalism, Robin Wright surely stands atop it.”

--The New York Review of Books

“Robin Wright is well aware of the complexities, paradoxes and the seemingly insurmountable dilemmas facing the Middle East today. She reminds us that in facing these challenges we need not resort to military force and violence or resign ourselves to compromise with extremism and tyranny.”
 -- Azar Nafisi, author Reading Lolita in Tehran

“The best of all possible worlds: An old hand guides us through the changes in the post-9/11 Middle East, and is able to sort out in a sober, smart way what is really going on.”

 --Thomas Ricks, author Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (July 19, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 143910316X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439103166
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.14 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 76 ratings

About the author

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Robin B. Wright

Robin B. Wright

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Robin Wright has reported from more than 140 countries on six continents for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, TIME magazine, The Atlantic, The Sunday Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, CBS News and many others.

Wright has also been a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Yale, Duke, Stanford, the Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

She is the recipient of the United Nations Correspondents’ Association Gold Medal for coverage of international affairs. The American Academy of Diplomacy selected Wright as the journalist of the year for her “distinguished reporting and analysis of international affairs.” She also won the National Press Club award for diplomatic reporting, the National Magazine Award for her reportage from Iran in The New Yorker, and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initia¬tive" for coverage of African wars. She was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant.

She has been a television commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN and MSNBC programs, including "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "This Week," “Nightline," the PBS Newshour, "Frontline," “Charlie Rose,” "Larry King Live," "Washington Week in Review," “The Colbert Report,” and HBO’s “Real Time.”

Wright is the author of “Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East” (2008), which The New York Times and The Washington Post both selected as one of the most notable books of the year. She was the editor of “The Iran Primer: Power, Politics and U.S. Policy” (2010), which brought together 50 of the world's top Iran experts. Her other books include “The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran” (2000), which was selected as one of the 25 most memorable books of the year by the New York Library Association, "Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam" (2001), "Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World" (1991), and "In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade" (1989).

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
76 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Bruce E. McLeod Jr.
5.0 out of 5 stars Challenges for the Middle East
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2015
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Robin Wright is experienced and knowledgeable of the Middle East and of Islam in general. Her exemplary historical reviews and the complexities of Islam are truly noteworthy. Her book, "Rock the Casbah" was written in 2011 however, the nascent ISIS has surfaced as a threat to the region. The information contained in her book is still relevant and influential.

Robin Wright is a gem, a widely acclaimed author with a worldwide appeal as a professional journalist. She visited over 20 countries in the region and interviewed key clerics and other notables. Her writing style made for interesting reading. She explains her idea of a "soft revolution" where "Hip-Hop" music, and other protest models, as new challenges, are used by young people to rant against the regimes of oppression and treachery. These ideas have not been revealed before as a tactic of dissent. Accordingly, change is slowly coming to the Middle East by way of the transplanted American genre of "rap".

This is an excellent book, filled with stories from native folks about their culture and how they are coping with the demands of their leaders, living in a "bubble" often without "free will".

Bruce E. McLeod, Jr.
Las Vegas, Nevada
6 September 2015
4 people found this helpful
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James L. Bowditch
4.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading for background
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2013
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Stepping back from the stories and background data, this book was very useful in tracking the recent history of the Arab world, and the forces for change. Robin Wright is at her best as a journalist, with stories and examples to make her case. In the background chapters without the stories, her writing is less interesting. Much of it was an interesting read, some of it was tough to plow through.
2 people found this helpful
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Glenn D. Robinson
5.0 out of 5 stars Timely. Impressed with the research.
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2012
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Impressed. Robin does just a wonderful job of connecting with the average men and women of the Middle East to get insights into their thoughts, their desires, hopes and dreams. The theme is the counter-Jihad movement to counteract the violence of the Jihadists and Al-Qaeda. This book covers, Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and other countries during the tumultuous times of 2006-2011. She covers a shift in the leadership thoughts of going from preaching violence and death to America to peace and projecting Islam as peaceful. While Al Queda is still active and hard at work in Mali, Libya, Yemen and other places, there is hope that peace will reign.

Excellent book. Still timely
One person found this helpful
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M. A. Seifter
3.0 out of 5 stars Whistling past the graveyard
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2021
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Robin Wright has long distinguished herself as one of the most readable, insightful and predictive journalistic writers on the modern Middle East. Her remarkable series of books penetrate to the innernost hallways of political power and intellectual renown amongst Middle Eastern politicians and intellectuals, as she, ever since the mid-1970s, has recorded the roller coaster of popular ferment, governmental repression, terrorism and intellectual diversity inside this still-roiling and misunderstood region of the world. Her works are all the more remarkable since to my mind Wright has no reading or speaking capacity in the native languages of the region-neither Turkish, Persian/Farsi, Hebrew nor Arabic. Yet, recognizably an outsider, she has once again, in "Rock the Casbah" delivered to the popular reader an optimistic take on the critical year of 2011, the year of the "Arab Spring', when, beginning with popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt the entire Middle East appeared to be casting off both tyrannies that had held it captive for many decades: repressive authoritarian regimes and intolerant Islamic terrorism. The problem I found with Wright's book is that her prose appears to be locked into a "whistling past the graveyard" optimism regarding the eventual success of all the uprisings that followed Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" in January 2011. And, despite her cheery, cheerleader-like enthusiasm for liberation from authoritarian regimes and terrorism as defining, determinative features in the Middle East, with the possible exception of Tunisia, everything went wrong in the following years, with the regimes rebounding to re-cement their authority across the region, with the Taliban continuing to wreak havoc and bloodshed in Afghanistan, and with the Palestinians continuing to be persecuted by Israel in the Territories and oppressed by the fundamentalism and terrorism death cult of Hamas in Gaza. Likewise, in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Bahrain, authoritarian regimes survived, beating back "the will of the people" with extreme brutality. Wright's perspective as an objective, authoritative source for long-term insights about the Middle East suffer exceedingly in this respect. Also hurting her book is her end-of-text footnotes, reduced to a string of at the moment websites and blogs, meant to capture the moment by moment flow of events throughout the region that she regarded as determining its eventual, hoped for liberation from the twin tyrannies of authoritarian, ossified regimes and unstoppable Islamic terrorism. She offers no analytic conclusions, arguments or non-blog texts in these footnotes, that might, if included, might have elevated her arguments above the level of an enthusiastic, glassy eyed amateur. Best part of this book, I feel, is Wright's discussion and interviews illustrating discordant, anti-fundamentalistic culture among, esp, young Muslims across the region. But her political naivete, amateur, outsider-status authority, and the overall failure of the very forces of popular revolution in the Middle East reduce the quality of this book, while its readability and quick pace make it an attractive read for Americans seeking some explanation of the events in that chaotic year 2011, the year of the attempted liberation of the Middle East.
2 people found this helpful
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M. F. Crowl
5.0 out of 5 stars Positive look at the Arab world
Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2012
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Rock the Casbah has been a great help in re-adjusting my view of things Arabian. Wright's book is perhaps overly positive, if anything, but that's probably needed in the light of all the negative reports we hear about the Arab world, and our sense that every person of Arab descent that we meet is out to do us harm. But more than that, Wright obviously has her finger on the pulse of the Arab world, and brings to light in her book a wealth of material that doesn't get reported in the Western press. I've highlighted my copy in dozens of places.
One person found this helpful
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Darryl from Michigan
5.0 out of 5 stars The Middle East Striking Out on a New Course
Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2011
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A new view of what is behind the Arab Spring and Summer. I thought the described loss of influence of the hard line Islamists might be too good to be true until I saw a similar opinion expressed in the July 25, 2011 Time magazine. Not that I give special credence to Time, but it's always nice to have a second source saying substantially the same thing! A must read for anyone trying to get a handle on the meaning of the revolutionary events in the Middle East.
7 people found this helpful
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Dr. Pete
4.0 out of 5 stars The Spark that Ignited the Arab Spring
Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2011
Verified Purchase
I heard Robin Wright interviewed on PBS NewsHour. That interview led me to purchase this book which is essentially a series of events that occurred in Arabic/Muslim countries over the past 12-15 months. The book provided to me an understanding of what ignited the recent protests in the Arab/Muslim world. I now have considerably more hope for democratic style freedoms in those areas of the world. This is a very readable book, one that the reader will enjoy while being informed.
15 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Brian Griffith
5.0 out of 5 stars More than a journalist
Reviewed in Canada on December 22, 2011
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Wright has the far-flung contacts, the long-term friendships, the historical memory, and the global perspective to really celebrate the Arab Spring right. Her account is gripping, immediate, sometimes horrifying, and generally celebratory. She pays tribute to a host of heroes who richly deserve our admiration. She is helping Westerners see Middle Easterners the way they see neighbors. Some aspects of this cultural renaissance, such as "Hip-Hop Islam," are hard to convey in a book chapter format. Others, like "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" come across quite powerfully, even hilariously. All told, Wright makes it as more than a journalist. This is journalism that empowers friendship and respect.
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jdavidg
4.0 out of 5 stars ignore CNN read this book
Reviewed in Canada on February 10, 2013
Verified Purchase
In a world contaminated by Americanized news, this book is a breath of fresh air.
One wonders where the authors journalism was published or aired. Certainly not
on US mainstream media. This book sheds light on the burgeoning social revolution
within a multitude of countries ruled by "extractive elitist governance" (see
Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoglu). That these countries are Islamic simply
reminds us that Muslims are people who want what all want: personal security,
education, unbiased rule of law.
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