The Gate of Tears: Bab al-Mandab and the Key to the Red Sea (Hidden Histories of the Islamic World) - Softcover

Khalil, Asmahan Mostafa Tawfik

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798165168765

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

In the autumn of 2026, war turned the Strait of Hormuz into a battle zone, and the oil of the Gulf was sent across Arabia to the Red Sea. From there it had only one road south to Asia: through a strait barely twenty miles wide. Then, on September 10, Houthi forces entered Mocha, the old coffee port of Yemen, some fifty miles north of that strait. Before evening, only twelve ships had crossed it, instead of the usual thirty.

That strait has a name older than any empire: Bab al-Mandab, the Gate of Tears.

For three thousand years the trade of the world has passed through it. Frankincense went through it on its way to Rome, and pepper on its way to Venice. A Chinese Muslim sailed through it on his way to Mecca. Coffee left through it and carried the name of Mocha into every language of Europe.

Arab pilots knew every reef of the Gate by the stars. A Portuguese commander broke his ladders on the walls of Aden trying to lock it. An Ottoman sultan declared that he held all of Yemen only to guard it for the holy cities. Two English ships once caught the whole trade of India between its headlands. In 1973, the war reached its waters. In 2026, the world’s tankers turned away from it, and then came back.

The Gate of Tears follows this strait from the ships of the ancient Periplus to the steamers that came for its coal, and from the dhows of the monsoon to the submarines that closed it in 1973. It is told through the pilots, chroniclers, and travelers who saw the strait with their own eyes, and through Ottoman documents that few readers have ever seen.

This is the story of the narrowest door on earth, a door barely twenty miles wide that opens onto half the world, and of why no one, in three thousand years, has ever been able to keep it shut.

About the author
Professor Asmahan Mostafa Tawfik Khalil teaches modern and contemporary history at Beni Suef University, Egypt. She taught for ten years at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, and her research centers on Ottoman archival documents on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, and on the history of the Muslim peoples. This book was built and prepared on the original contemporary sources and on documents from the Ottoman archives.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798165168765
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176