Michael Andreas Lüders (born 8 May 1959) is a German political scientist and academic of Islamic studies who works as a publicist and political and economic consultant. He is also known as a journalist and a writer of novels.
From 2015 to 2022, Lüders was president of the German-Arab Association. He was also an advisory board member of the (NuMOV) and deputy chairman of the . He has been a member of the extended party executive of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) since January 2024.
Lüders was a candidate in the 2024 European elections and the 2025 German federal election.
Life Michael Lüders studied Arabic literature for two semesters at the University of Damascus and journalism, Islamic studies and political science at the Free University of Berlin. He received his doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on Egyptian cinema.
Lüders then worked as a documentary filmmaker and radio play author for SWR and WDR and was Middle East editor at ZEIT from 1993 to 2002. From 2002 to 2003 he worked as a consultant for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), which is politically close to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
Since January 2004, Lüders has been a freelance political and economic consultant, publicist and author as co-owner of the Middle East Consulting Group in Berlin. He says he gives lectures on "the tension between the West and the Arab-Islamic world" and "investment opportunities in the Arab world" and publishes "expert reports on the causes of Islamist violence". He advises the Federal Foreign Office (AA), among others, and prepares expert reports for the (giz) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). In addition, he taught at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps University in Marburg in 2008/09 and was a guest lecturer at the Middle East Centre at Sakarya University in Turkey in 2015/16. In 2017, the University of Trier appointed him as a visiting professor for a total of three individual lectures. Protests against this included those by, among others, the German Foreign Office (AA), the local AStA and the Trier German-Israeli Society.
Lüders lives in Berlin.
Party political engagement Lüders has been a member of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) party since January 2024. At the first party conference of the BSW, he was elected to the extended party executive with 97.6%. In addition, he was placed 9th on the BSW party list for the 2024 European elections by the voting members. Lüders belongs to the Saxony-Anhalt regional association of the BSW, for which he is running as the top candidate for the 2025 German federal election.
Positions Lüders blames the United States for the escalation of conflicts in the Middle East: "... a policy of military intervention, such as that which the USA has implemented since 2001, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Yemen, [has] only brought about state collapse in all the countries mentioned ..., led to anarchy and chaos ... And the rise of terrorist movements such as the Islamic State can be traced back to this policy of intervention".
To resolve the Syrian Civil War and reduce the number of refugees, Lüders called for cooperation with Bashar al-Assad, Russia and Iran. He told the Berliner Zeitung: "There is already a protection zone for refugees in Syria. In the coastal strip on the Mediterranean that Assad's army still controls, there are four million people who have fled from ISIS."
In an interview about his book He who sows the wind..., Lüders explained his thesis that "Western politics" only "supposedly" stands for democracy and justice.
Lüders does not rule out a Kurdish background to the January 2016 Istanbul bombing. Turkish government agencies assumed that ISIS was responsible.
Regarding the airstrike on the 2017 Shayrat missile strike, which the US government carried out in response to the chemical attack, Lüders said that the US was opening Pandora's box. In Syria, there is a danger of a serious confrontation between the two nuclear powers, the US and Russia, in the near future. When Lüders put forward this thesis shortly afterwards on Anne Will's talk show, historian Michael Wolffsohn contradicted him and stated that the Russian side had been warned by the US, but had not shot down the US cruise missiles, although it could have done so.
In connection with the war in Afghanistan, he criticized a lack of willingness in Western politics to subject itself to critical self-examination regarding the role of the West in Afghanistan; the Russian invasion of Ukraine had instead directed attention in a different direction. The US government had "ensured behind the scenes that all pending proceedings against the USA for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan before the International Criminal Court in The Hague were discontinued".
Publications and reception
We hunger for death (2001) The journalist described Lüders' second non-fiction book in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as a mixture of "analysis, basic information and personal experience". In the book the author accuses the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, with his theory of the clash of civilizations, of being close to the Taliban. Lüders outlines the Western view of the Arab–Israeli conflict as "on the one hand the peace-loving Israel, on the other the Palestinian terror" and points out that this is not shared by a third of the world's population. Lüders makes no secret of his criticism of the Middle East policy of the US and Europe, so that she wonders whether this is why Die Zeit parted ways with him as Middle East editor.
Tea in Timur's Garden (2003) Senfft, this time for the Frankfurter Rundschau, described Lüders' next book as a "political travel guide", which offers the advantage of quick orientation, but has the disadvantage that the individual chapters of such a book are inevitably stronger or weaker, depending on the author's specialization. Central Asia seems to be less familiar to Lüders linguistically and culturally. He shows the interlinking of the conditions in the region with the geostrategic interests of the US and puts forward the thesis that without a solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict, the rest of the region cannot be pacified. She found it regrettable that Lüders did not rely on his own sources, but on second-hand information. The reviewer found the analyses of the complicated social structures in Iraq and Afghanistan all the more gripping.
The German investigative journalist Lutz Kleveman attested to Lüders' "political tour de force" through the Near and Middle East in terms of the part about the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, a "cool, calm style", but criticised the lack of "more vivid descriptions and reports of experiences that convey analytical content from such unknown countries much more impressively". He considered the parts about Iraq and Afghanistan, which is based "on profound knowledge of the region", to be the strongest.
In the Heart of Arabia (2004) For Hartmut Wagner (), Lüders tried not to demonise the role of the US in the Middle East in his "pleasantly readable book". He believes Lüders gives the reader a colourful insight into everyday Arab life beyond the big world politics. The particularly personal book wins sympathy "particularly through the author's honesty". Lüders sees his long-term involvement with the foreign world of Arabia, which began as a child with the adventures of Kara Ben Nemsi from the Oriental novels of Karl May, as a process of self-exploration that is always accompanied by deep self-doubt. As a "combative analyst", he also represents less popular viewpoints: Lüders sees the causes of Islamism in the "unconditional support of the West for Israel" and holds its "policy, which violates international law and is geared towards hegemony" responsible for the rise of militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
However Edith Kresta pointed out in Die Tageszeitung that for Lüders, even without Israel, "the misery of the Arab world, its stagnation and lack of creativity, its repression and violence would be the same". Lüders' book, according to the reviewer, is a "knowledgeable description of a politically and socially desolate world" that distracts from "its own inability" by blaming Israel. Only Lüders' blanket judgment "We are rich in material values, but poor in humanity. In the Orient it is exactly the other way around" does not fit with the otherwise differentiated portrayal.
Aminas Restaurant (2006)
Lüders' third novel tells the story of a family that immigrated to Bremen from Morocco and opened a restaurant in the Hanseatic city. Lüders processed his new experiences from the Orient by transferring them to his hometown of Bremen and linking the two together. The novel received mostly positive reviews from national and international reviewers.
Days of Wrath (2011) Lüders' book on the "Arab Spring" was shortlisted for "the best science book of 2011" in Austria. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Beat Staufer praised the author for doing an excellent job of explaining everything necessary to understand the political and social conditions that prevailed in the individual countries before the uprisings broke out, in just a few pages. He was too critical of critics of Islam and saw the greatest potential for democracy with a ripple effect in Tunisia and Egypt. He was pessimistic about Libya and Iraq.
Iran: The Wrong War (2012) The work was on the SZ / NDR best-seller list " June 2012".
The journalist reviewed the book in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Lüders describes in his excellent book why the attitude of carrying out a preventive military strike against Iran without international legal legitimacy is deluded. He makes it plausible why the Iranian government at the time, despite its irresponsible rhetoric, was trying to reach a compromise. Lüders explains that US policy is not particularly interested in reaching an understanding with Iran. Lüders supports the horror scenario of a regime change by force of arms and the chaos that follows, as in Iraq in 2003, with a clever, careful description.
Sociologist , on the other hand, found the book suggested that Lüders was an "Ahmadinejad sympathizer" with clear enemy images ("Israeli government, the Israel lobby or Washington's neo-conservatives") He wrote, "Lüders attested that the then Iranian president's denial of the Holocaust only served to convey his own inflexibility to his domestic clientele". According to Lüders, the Iranian government does not dispute Israel's right to exist either, although it has been talking about "Greater Palestine" for decades and has called for the end and destruction of Israel in various ways. Lüders trivializes the violence and terror against Israel and therefore describes it as "quite logical" that the Iranian government supports Hamas and Hezbollah. Lüders sees the blame for the Middle East conflict fundamentally with Israel, his prejudices are deeply rooted and he is not prepared to recognize the causes of a potential war.
The journalist on Deutschlandfunk criticized the only "apparent inevitability of the development described by [Lüders]", but praised his "expertise" and saw in the "absolutely worth reading" book a "pleasant effort at objectivity".