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| Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area. Dear Reader: There is a text circulating called "The Iranian Crises" from alanshuster1@gmail.com or natshuster@yahoo.com that is fraudulently presented as written by me and coming from my mailing list. Please ignore it. I explain my choice of topics this week in a brief blog post before the column itself. Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes Why I Am Not Writing About Iranby Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/03/why-i-am-not-writing-about-iran
The president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel each gave major speeches on the Iranian nuclear threat and then they met for a two-hour meeting yesterday, with attendant statements – and yet my column today is on a book that appeared in 1962. Usually, I use my column to address major news of the moment, but obviously not in this case. Here's why:
I presume that (1) the Iranian regime, not we the public, is the chief intended audience of the president and prime minister's public remarks and (2) neither leader is being fully candid with the other. Therefore, I am cautious about believing what I hear or drawing conclusions from it. The perception may be, in the words of a Washington Post headline, "Obama assures Netanyahu on efforts to stop Iran's nuclear program" but I am not convinced that is the real story. For example, it might in fact be the possible Israeli use of nuclear weapons to attack the Iranian infrastructure. In this spirit, I shall observe rather than comment. (March 6, 2012) The Arabs as Seen Fifty Years Agoby Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/10781/arab-world-life-magazine
"Once mellowed and moldering, the far-flung civilization of the Arabs is being swept today by invigorating winds of change. A fruitful kind of disorder is replacing the old fixed patterns of life." Those contemporary-sounding words were published in 1962, in a glossy, picture-laden, 160-page book titled The Arab World.
The volume boasts three virtues that make it worth a review a precise half-century later. First, the editors of Life magazine, then the outstanding American weekly, produced it, implying cultural centrality. Second, a retired senior State Department official, George V. Allen, wrote the introduction, pointing to the book's establishment credentials. Third, Desmond Stewart (1924-1981), an acclaimed British journalist, historian, and novelist, wrote the text. The Arab World emphatically represents an artifact from another era; while not entirely sugar-coating his subject matter, Stewart offers a benign, gauzy, patronizing approach that would gag even the most euphemistic writers today. For example, he suggests that a Western visitor to the Arabic-speaking countries enters "the realm of Aladdin and Ali Baba. The people remind him of his illustrated Bible." One encounters little of this sentimentality in the age of Al-Qaeda. More interestingly, the book demonstrates how easily a prominent analyst can misread the big picture. As suggested by its title, one theme concerns the existence of a single Arab people from Morocco to Iraq, a people so tradition bound that Stewart resorts to an animal analogy: "the Arabs possess a distinctive common culture which they can no more throw off than a hummingbird can change its nesting habits to those of a thrush." Ignoring the Arabs' failed record to unify their countries, Stewart predicted that "whatever happens, the forces for [Arab] union will remain." Hardly: that urge died not long after 1962 and has long remained defunct, as has its shallow premise that the Arabic language alone defines a people, ignoring history and geography. His second theme concerns Islam. Stewart writes that this "simple" faith has raised humanity "to a new height" and that it is "not pacifist, but its key word was salaam, or peace." He calls Islam a "tolerant faith" and describes the Arabs historically as "tolerant conquerors" and "tolerant overlords." Muslims dealt with Jews and Christians in a "tolerant" way. Indeed, "The Arabs' tolerance extended to culture." All this tolerance prompts Stewart blithely but unwisely to dismiss manifestations of Islamism, which he says "have an old-fashioned air to them and have little appeal for the young." In brief, Stewart is clueless about Islamic supremacism from its origins to modern times.
A third theme involves Arab determination to modernize: "One of the surprises of the 20th Century has been the way the Arab Moslems have accepted change and the modern world." Excepting Saudi Arabia and Yemen, he finds everywhere that "Arab modernism is a tangible, visible, audible force." (Thus the "invigorating winds of change" in my first sentence.) His myopia concerning females makes for stunning reading: "The harem and its psychological pillars have been dynamited by the 20th Century." "In economic affairs, … women are almost men's equals." He sees what he wants to, undisturbed by reality.
Continuing this theme of wild-eyed optimism, Stewart discerns Arabic-speakers breaking free of an ancient mold, determined "to destroy the old stereotypes." He writes about the seventh century as no one today would dare do, especially not after the failure of George W. Bush's Iraqi ambitions and Barack Obama's Libyan escapade: "The first four caliphs had been as democratic as Britain's William Gladstone, if not America's Thomas Jefferson." Stewart even claims that "Arab civilization is part of western, not eastern, culture," whatever that might mean.
As an aside, so arcane was Islam fifty years ago, the two dozen high-priced Life employees listed as the book's editorial staff captioned one picture with the misinformation that the Islamic pilgrimage "takes place every year in the spring." (The hajj marches around the calendar, 10 or 11 days earlier each year.) The mistakes of one's predecessors has a humbling effect. An analyst like me hopes not to be so obtuse as Desmond Stewart and Life, and not to be shown up so badly with the passage of time. Indeed, I study history with the hope of gaining a larger vision and thereby not being limited by current assumptions. In 2062, tell me how I am doing. Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved. Related Topics: History, Middle East patterns This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL. | |||||||||||||
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