The Pryce-Jones thesis is not for the timid.  Nor for the unwary.  Part of the problem is the very lack of Arabist or sociological training to which the author has already confessed at the beginning of the book.  If the book is an interpretation of the Arabs, why an entire sub-section on Khomeini, who is not Arab at all?  Of course, as we have suggested earlier, Islam is so intricately interwoven with the Arab condition that it could be argued that Khomeinism at least deserves attention.  Fair enough.  One of Pryce-Jones' greatest weaknesses, however, seems to be his unwillingness to face Islam head on as an obstacle to social, political, and ethical progress in the Arab world that is possibly far greater than shame-honor tribalism. 

Here we are on very dangerous ground.  In civilized societies, after all, it is not acceptable to speak derogatorily about the personal faith of millions of decent men and women in the world.  Nevertheless it seems that a stronger case could be made that the belief system of Islam plays a greater role than inherent tribalism in the preservation of totalitarian elites in the Arab world.  As an ideological system, after all, it is Islam that continually suppresses ways of thought skeptical of religious (i.e. Muslim) authority, that is used to justify treatment of women now considered quite unacceptable in most of the world, that will not accept church-state separation, and that eschews a civic, as opposed to a religious, solution to the issue of religious pluralism.  Even in Egypt in 1991, it took concerted pressure from the U.S. Congress to secure the release from an Interior Ministry jail (no trial needed to put someone in there) of three Egyptian Christians whose sole offense--Egyptian courts confirmed that this was not legally a crime--was to have converted from Islam.  The moral "climate" of Islam made it acceptable for these men to be beaten and tortured for months on end without a single segment of Egyptian Islamic society raising a voice in protest.

Despite episodes like this, which are so commonplace that they are virtually taken for granted by foreigners residing in Arab countries, Pryce-Jones states: "No reason exists why Islam should not adapt to the scientific and rational outlook as Christianity and Judaism have done; and its supposedly peculiar and total intractability in this respect remains to be proven." 

On the contrary, it is precisely because Islam has such enormous difficulty adapting to the rational outlook that such an outstanding Arab historian and scholar of Islam as Mohammed Arkoun, currently at the Sorbonne, is unable to teach and publish anywhere in the Arab or Islamic world.  In Saudi Arabia, a Western-educated Saudi despairingly told a visiting journalist: "Imagine!  There is not a single Saudi university where it is possible to teach Plato."  The rest of the thought hardly needed to be expressed aloud--namely, how bitterly ironic, since it was the Arabs who largely kept classical Greek thought and literature alive during the European dark ages.

This point, of course, brings us to another dilemma in coming to terms with the Arab world: how to explain the astonishing achievement of classical Arab civilization at its height, through, say, the fourteenth century, and its almost relentless decline under the Ottoman Empire and later?  The Arabs developed to a very high degree of efficiency the astrolabe, an astronomically based navigational instrument, without which the great Portuguese voyages of discovery across the Indian Ocean to the Far East would have been incomparably harder.  Arabs contributed enormously to the world's knowledge of mathematics, medicine, geography, chemistry, and astronomy at a time when these sciences were either non-existent or in their infancy in Europe.  The great Arab historiographer Ibn Khaldun, who served the ruler of Tunis in the late fourteenth century, produced in the Muqaddima one of the most illuminating introductions to the study of history anywhere in the pre-modern world.  Arabic architecture, calligraphy, and geometric design belong among the greatest achievements of the human race.  How did this come about, and why did it all go away?

To his credit, Pryce-Jones does mention Ibn Khaldun, in fact citing a rather interesting observation by the historian:

"The practice of the arts is in general very limited in countries where the Arabs are indigenous and in the areas which they have conquered since the promulgation of Islam.  Consider, on the other hand, how the arts are flourishing in the countries inhabited by the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks and the Christians, and how the other nations derive goods and foodstuffs from them."

Ibn Khaldun, appropriately, is featured at the very beginning of Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples.  A masterly, detailed, yet elegantly written account of societies and thinkers--Hourani is especially good on the important different Arab schools of thought under Islam--this work is likely to stand for a long time as the standard major account of the subject.

The virtues of the book are considerable.  Without being either triumphalist toward the Arab achievements or self-flagellatory about the civilization's failures, Hourani is at his most insightful in accounting for the Arab achievement at its height.  He does not shy away from the unpleasant topics, the subjugation of women, for example, and the blatant discrimination against conquered religious minorities beneath Arab rule.  He has an easy grasp of the variety of operation of Islamic religious law, the sharia, at different epochs and in different societies in Arab history.  There is a magisterial, almost leisurely pace to the book that explains wonderfully just how delicately constructed the social and economic base of the Arab Empire at its height really was.  This is a helpful antidote to the crude picture of Arab conquest that Western history books sometimes project backward, on the basis of the indeed crude nature of much of Arab political rule today.  Hourani's grasp of his Arabic material is confident and convincing. 

Yet it is precisely the book's assets that render its liabilities so surprising.  As soon as the author moves into that decisive phase of Arab history, the jarring encounters with European imperial expansion from the late eighteenth century onward, the sense of mastery apparent in the first chapters of the book weakens.  A bare 33 pages in 458 pages of text are devoted to the determining nature of the clash of European and Arab cultures during 1800-1860, and the rise of global European dominance.  The last few chapters, covering the dramatic rise of Arab nationalism after World War II, are generally well paced and informative, yet they seem almost bloodless.  Above all, there is almost no indication of the sense of humiliation and rage at Western regional political hegemony that has been the hallmark of Arab nationalist rhetoric for half a century.  Nor is there more than a hint of the continuing tectonic struggle in the Arab world between the usually hereditary leadership elites in the conservative, pro-Western regimes of the Gulf and the careerist, often military-based elites that have dominated the politics of the Levant, Iraq, and much of the Maghreb.  As for the totally unexpected and very bloody seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic fundamentalists in November 1979, it is quaintly referred to as "an episode in Saudi Arabia in 1979."  Episode indeed: it was the most serious threat to the House of Saud since the regime came to power in the 1920s.  Had the coup attempt succeeded, there is no telling what the political landscape of the Arabian peninsula might be like today.  Hourani, in short, is almost otherworldly, a historian who becomes increasingly wearied and wary as he approaches the raucous clamor of the present.

Both books are entirely worth reading.  Pryce-Jones has assembled a formidable array of quotations, many of them highly unflattering to the Arab leaders who originally made them, in illustration of his shame-honor thesis.  Hourani has recaptured the elegance of civilized historiography.  But the shortcomings of each work are less of a discredit to the authors than they are an illustration of the dismal state of Arabic studies in the West.  Some seventeen years after the first "oil shock" of 1974, the breadth and depth of research and analysis of the Arab world at the best American universities is still embarrassingly modest. 

There are some powerful statistical illustrations of this.  According to the Survey of Earned Degrees, a study issued by the Department of Education, there were exactly 4 undergraduate degrees in Arabic in the entire country in 1988-1989.  By contrast, there were 140 undergraduate degrees in Chinese--arguably a harder language than Arabic--and 256 in Russian.

Now Russian and Chinese, of course, are the languages of powerful world nations that not so long ago were considered dangerous potential adversaries of the United States.  Some of the very best brains at American universities were drawn into Chinese studies in particular during the early 1960s not only by the perennial fascination that China has exerted on the outside world but by the fat federal grants made available to students under the National Defense Education Act.  To put it crudely, when Congress considered knowledge of adversary societies an issue of national security, money was made available to study them.  The result: American universities are easily the best in the world in Russian and Chinese studies.  Unfortunately, as far as federal allocations go, Arabic studies in America seem destined to trail along at minimal functioning levels until the wise heads of Congress begin to ask if the United States can afford to make any further serious miscalculations about the Arab world.

Essay Types: Book Review