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Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. Born in Baghdad, he left Iraq to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later joining Makiya Associates to design and build projects in the Middle East. In 1981, he left architecture and began to write a book about Iraq. "Republic of Fear" (1989), became a bestseller after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Makiya's next book, "The Monument" (1991), is an essay on the aesthetics of power and kitsch. "Republic of Fear" and 'The Monument" were written under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil. "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. His latest book, "The Rock: A Seventh-Century Story of Jerusalem," is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Makiya has written for The Independent, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The Times. In October 1992, he acted as the convener of the Human Rights Committee of the Iraqi National Congress, a transitional parliament based in northern Iraq.

He has collaborated on two 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 shown in the United States under the title Saddam's Killing Fields, and received the Edward R. Morrow Award for Best Television Documentary on Foreign Affairs in 1992.

Makiya recently published an updated edition of "The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein's Iraq." He is the head and founder of the Iraq Memory Foundation, a NGO based in Baghdad and the United States that has been supported by the Iraqi and U.S. governments and well as many foundations.

Selected Publications