Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).  551 pp., $24.95.

David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991 [hardback edition published in 1989]).  464 pp., $12.95

"What is an Arab?"  The difficulty in answering this characteristically concise question posed by Bernard Lewis at the very beginning of his now classic 1958 book, The Arabs in History, has bedeviled most of the writing about the Arab world in modern times.  The problem boils down to this: while there is an adequate linguistic definition of what an Arab is, there is also a metaphysical dimension to the term that constantly intrudes upon this more basic criterion.  Thus, at the simplest level, as Lewis and others have noted, an Arab is one who speaks Arabic as his or her mother tongue. 

So far so good.  While Jews, Copts, or other minorities living in the heart of Araby, and for whom Arabic is their mother language, would obviously constitute exceptions, the definition is broadly workable.

Now a fact that has confounded the neat theories of sociologists of nationalism is that some nations--the United States, for example--lack virtually all the traditional criteria of nationhood.  They exist because their inhabitants believe that they constitute a nation and have then taken collective action to formalize that conviction institutionally.  In the case of Arabness, however, the subjective elements go well beyond a widely held Arab belief that a definition of membership in their nation cannot be reduced to merely linguistic qualifications.  Lewis himself cites an unnamed Arab leader who, several decades ago, put the definition of an Arab this way: "Someone who lives in our country, speaks our language, is brought up in our culture and takes pride in our glory, is one of us."  Yet this definition is itself a philosophical mine field.  Who defines whether a person takes pride in his or her culture?  And what, moreover, does "culture" include? 

For most Westerners, there could be a dozen answers to that question.  Yet for most Arabs, any answer invariably includes adherence to the religion of Islam.  If that understanding of Arabness is accepted, then Arabs who don't happen to be Muslims are automatically excluded from the full benefits of membership in the Arab nation.  Given Islam's history of condescending discrimination against non-Islamic groups and the ever-growing role of Islamic militancy within the Arab world, that renders an Islam-linked definition of Arabness alarming to non-Muslim minorities. 

Nor is this all.  The Baath Party, which still rules Syria and, pace Desert Storm, Iraq too, has made it explicit that, in pursuit of its pan-Arabist goals, the political authorities alone will decide who does and who doesn't belong to "the people."  Here, neither speaking Arabic nor even being a Muslim is enough.  In exactly the same way as Red Guard zealots during the early years of China's 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution defined with cruel and subjective arbitrariness who was or was not part of "the people"--invariably persecuting the rejects--Iraq's Baath leaders have arrogated to themselves all of the keys to national belonging.  On the Baath Party's definition, Arab nationality is a product above all of political correctness.  This is a frightening thought indeed--and was intended to be--when the murderous violence meted out to politically "incorrect" people in Iraq is borne in mind.

The inseparability of Islam from the concept of Arabness--not to mention such nebulous ideas as "faith in the Arab nation"--has been a thorn in the flesh of Western students of the Arab world, and not just because Arabic-speaking Copts and Lebanese Christians are obviously not Muslim.  The real problem is that, since most Arabs do not in their minds separate their religious faith in Islam from their national identity, it is impossible for an outsider to determine how much of their behavior is "Arabic" and how much is "Islamic."  This is doubly so since Arabs vary enormously among themselves in physical characteristics, temperament, and habits.  It is often a surprise for outsiders to discover how much Gulf Arabs differ from their cousins in the Maghreb, or how alienated an Egyptian fellah tends to feel from, say, an Iraqi bureaucrat.  Yet it is no less surprising when that same Egyptian peasant hurls out on a Cairo street the slogans of Nasserite pan-Arabism with a zeal equal to that of the Iraqi follower of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad.

Certain things about the Arab world meanwhile stare you in the face or, as David Pryce-Jones might put it in The Closed Circle, practically jump down your throat.  One is that not a single Arab state belonging to the twenty-one member Arab League (of which one member is the PLO) can honestly be called democratic.  Another is that in most Arab states violence has seemed to be almost endemic to the process of political change.  Worse--and this is now Albert Hourani speaking in his vastly different book, A History of the Arab Peoples--there is "the apparent paradox of stable and enduring regimes in deeply disturbed [read "violent"] societies." 

The violence of Arab political life, particularly in the decades since the PLO initiated its activities in international terrorism, has become such a truism that a cynic might be tempted to observe that the most striking contribution of recent Arab culture to modern global civilization is the airport body search.  Pryce-Jones actually goes further, arguing with some bitterness that, precisely because of international terrorism, "`Palestinian' has become synonymous with criminal."  Other harsh generalizations by him include: "The more the Arabs modernize, the less Arab they become"; "absolute power has always been the central feature of the Arab political order, and violence is the determining factor of it"; and "at present, an Arab democrat is not even an idealization, but a contradiction in terms."

The stridency of such comments, as well as occasional ill-considered generalizations on a variety of Arab-world topics, to some extent undermines the effectiveness of what in many ways is a remarkable book.  Pryce-Jones disarmingly confesses that he is neither Arabist, nor social scientist, nor political scientist.  Like the little boy who embarrassingly shouts out that the emperor is indeed naked, however, he brings into the open exactly those facts of Arab life that are so frightening to outsiders and yet so central to the polity of the Arab world.  What is it, he asks, that causes Arab political life to be so crudely and repetitively despotic, whether it is among the steel-and-glass high rises of Riyadh or the fetid alleyways of Damascus?  Why is gross exaggeration and outright lying such a common feature of Arab political discourse?  What explains the apparent inability of democratic institutions and checks and balances on power to take root in any Arab society?

The answer he provides boils down to this: All social and political relations within the Arab world have to be understood in a shame-honor matrix, a ruthless world of permanent combat for power and status where winners take, and losers lose, everything.  As the author puts it: "Acquisition of honor, pride, dignity, respect and the converse avoidance of shame, disgrace and humiliation are keys to Arab motivation, clarifying and illuminating behavior in the past as well as in the present."  Pryce-Jones finds the roots of such conduct in the tribal society out of which the Arab imperium grew in the first four centuries after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 AD.  In essence, he argues that Arab societies have never escaped the relentless cycle of dog-eat-dog competition--hence the "closed circle" of the book's title--and that outsiders have always suffered "Eurocentric" delusions by expecting the Arabs to behave differently than they do.

This is a provocative thesis.  Leaving aside for the moment some of the weaknesses in argumentation, if this thesis is even mainly correct, then it must lead to the conclusion that the application of Western-style constitutions, conferences, international legal treaties, and other well-intentioned paraphernalia to Arab reality is at best naive, and at worst quite dangerous.  Pryce-Jones does seem to come to this conclusion, which is gloomy indeed.  It implies that the Arab world will never enter the world of "normal" international conduct until such a time as the vicious cycle of tribal survivalist politics is broken.  And it offers no real hope that there will be an end to this cycle because, so far, no external philosophical or sociological element capable of bringing change has taken root in any Arab society. 

There is an interesting corollary to this line of thinking.  It is that even Israel, the one country in the Middle East with a domestic polity not locked within the shame-honor circle, has become dangerously enmeshed in the dog-eat-dog political culture of its neighbors.  "Israel," says Pryce-Jones, "has the strange fate of being the first and only indigenous society in the Middle East to test whether democratic constitutionalism can take root within the all-embracing and ever-flourishing Arab sociopolitical order; and if so, then further testing what the consequences will be for that Arab order."  But Pryce-Jones seems already to have answered his own question.  According to him, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was itself "a glaring example of power challenging as practiced in the Arab system."

Essay Types: Book Review