An Al-Qaeda double agent explains what’s really going on in Middle East

When will the definitive history of the modern Middle East be written? For 20 years and more, a continent has been torn apart by invasion, upheaval and civil war. It took hundreds of years for balanced histories to be written of the Reformation, European history’s most obviously comparable period. If you want the whole story of the modern Muslim world, written from a dispassionate, God’s-eye view, you may be waiting a long time.

For the moment, more personal accounts will have to suffice, and Conflicted, a series of amiable hour-long conversations between the Middle East expert Thomas Small and former jihadist Aimen Dean, makes a strong case for just this kind of opinionated, idiosyncratic history.

‘There is no one on planet Earth like Aimen Dean,’ says Small. I admit he has a point. As a young man in the 1990s Dean joined Al-Qaeda, swearing loyalty to Osama Bin Laden. After he became disillusioned with the group, he defected to the West, returning to Afghanistan to spend eight years inside the terrorist group as an MI6 double agent.