A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. The…

- Elliott Colla

I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I…

- Elliott Colla

The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a …

- Elliott Colla

Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

- Elliott Colla

You always have regime-friendly poets like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whose career basically spans the twentieth century. He's an anti-imperialist, …

- Elliott Colla

English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one w…

- Elliott Colla

Just as certain Cold War binaries were collapsing, new binaries of Sunni versus Shia or Arab versus Kurd were being created by the new occupation for…

- Elliott Colla

Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, ho…

- Elliott Colla

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

- Elliott Colla