Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Faber and Faber, 1991).
This is a rich and profoundly satisfying book, the high-water mark of Albert Hourani’s long and influential career as a writer and teacher. Hourani’s gifts as a teacher, and the care and affection he has devoted to his students, are legendary. He has shaped the perceptions and interpretations of the history of the modern Middle East of several generations of students from a wide variety of backgrounds, both in Britain and in the United States.
Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (California, 1990).
The era of the nation-state has increasingly put into question pastoral nomadism as a way of life and as a distinctive cultural identity. In Saudi Arabia, Bedouin pastoralists have become ranchers who transport their herds to pasture in Toyota pickups. Jordanian Bedouin preserve their identity by soldiering for the Hashemite monarchy. The Bedouin may be central to the nationalist ideologies of states like Libya, but the free herders and warriors of the desert, always something of an idealization, belong to an ever more remote mythical past.
We may come to recall 1992 as the year of the peace activist in the burgeoning literary and cinematographic record of the Palestinian intifada. By rupturing the structure of the occupation, Palestinian popular collective action and the decisions of the nineteenth Palestine National Council expanded the possibilities for political initiatives by Palestinian and Israeli supporters of a “two-state solution,” including new forms of Palestinian-Israeli collaboration. As this perspective gained credibility as a realizable historical project, its proponents received increasing attention.
One of the events planned for 1992 is to “marry” the Statue of Liberty in New York to the statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona. Although they do share a similar aesthetic kitsch style, it will be a difficult union. Consider only the 300-year span between the ages of the groom and the bride, aside from all the ideological baggage that each one of them carries.
“Your Highness completed the war against the Moors,” Columbus wrote in a letter addressed to the Spanish throne, “after having chased all the Jews…and sent me to the said regions of India in order to convert the people there to our Holy Faith.” [1] In 1492 the defeat of the Muslims and the expulsion of Jews from Spain converged with the conquest of the so-called New World. The separate quincentenary commemorations in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, however, have seldom acknowledged the linkage between these events. Although intellectually challenging and politically inspiring, “goodbye Columbus” counter-quincentenary debates have, for the most part, followed the same easy path of separating these issues.
In southern Spain’s province of Andalusia 1992 is a year of controversy, not because it is the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, but because it commemorates the conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada by “foreign invaders from the North.” In other parts of Spain, and even more so in other parts of Europe and America, 1492 is also remembered as the year Spain’s Jews were expelled from that land. In Andalusia, people know it as part of a time when large numbers of Muslims were made to leave the country.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was joyfully welcomed not only by the German people but by the other peoples of the continent: With the abrupt end to the joke about Real Socialism, Europe seemed to be moving forward toward a period of freedom, directed by principles of greater tolerance, compassion and justice.
Two and a half years later, we know this was an illusion generated by the euphoria of the moment. Exclusivist nationalisms, ethnic conflicts and old religious disputes are unleashing civil wars, blind terrorism, persecution of minorities, militant racism and xenophobia. A new protective wall — without barbed wire, minefields, watchtowers and trenches, but equally effective and much more lethal — is arising around the fortress of the Twelve.
From the perspective of Sultan Bayazid II, the Ottoman ruler in Istanbul, Columbus’ expeditions may have been a distant diversion. In fact, they belonged to a set of profound changes in relations between Islamic and Christian territories on a world scale. For the 500 years before 1492, the fortunes of Europe depended heavily on Muslims — Arabs, Turks and others — who in various guises linked Europeans to the rest of the Eurasian system of trade and empire.
Michael M.J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (Wisconsin, 1990).
In the older literature on the Middle East and the Muslim world, Islam almost invariably appeared as a religion of fanaticism: austere in its outlook, menacing in its proselytizing tendencies, intellectually impoverished, antagonistic toward reason and monolithic in its structure. Above all it was described as essentially different from Western rationalism, capitalism and democracy.
Yahya Sadowski, Political Vegetables? Businessman and Bureaucrat in the Development of Egyptian Agriculture (Brookings, 1991).
Over the past few months, a couple of stories have crossed our desk that merit more attention than they got. These stories tell us some important things about how the US news industry operates, especially its willingness to follow the administration’s cues on major issues.
