In the ten years since Anchor first published Elizabeth and Robert Fernea's award-winning The Arab World: Personal Encounters, vast political and economic shifts have taken place: the end of the Iran/Iraq War and the Lebanese civil war; the outbreak of the Gulf War; the historic 1993 peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, to name just a few. Which is why the Ferneas, leading scholars in Middle Eastern studies, felt a need to return to the same towns and cities they had written about previously-to see how these changes had affected the region and the people who live in it.

The authors reveal the human face of the Arab World as they revisit and talk with newsmakers and colleagues, old friends and new. Their forty years of experience in the region help illuminate the human consequences of changes all too often discussed in abstractions and generalizations: the military conflicts, new urbanization, labor migration, religious revival, as well as radical changes in the roles of men, women, and the family. With new chapters on Baghdad, Beirut, Amman, Jerusalem, Marrakech, and Cairo, this new edition of The Arab World will strengthen its reputation as a book "which should be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the Middle East" (The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs).