But money is not the only problem in raising American comprehension of Arab realities.  To study any foreign culture or language effectively, there must be the projection toward it of a reasonable degree of sympathetic sensitivity.  A person who finds all Scandinavians cold and unfriendly is unlikely very quickly to master the Swedish language; but few Americans really harbor ill-will toward Swedes.  In the case of the Arabs, on the other hand, there are powerful emotional barriers in American culture, especially at the popular level, to a truly sympathetic understanding of their culture and societies.

Much of the antipathy can certainly be attributed to the behavior of Palestinian terrorist groups over the past two decades: you do not inspire global admiration, after all, by machine-gunning twelve-year-olds in international airports.  But there is also suspicion at a far profounder level.  For one thing, American Jews, who populate American higher education in impressive numbers, are unlikely as a general rule to be zealous about promoting Arab studies.  But even many non-Jewish Americans feel that there is something in the Arab psyche that is alien and hostile toward fundamental American values.

In part, it is something at the level of religious conviction: Arabs (i.e. Muslims), completely reject both the Jewish view of divine revelation in the Old Testament and the Christian narrative of a dying and rising Jesus Christ in the New Testament.  Even secular Americans who spend no time in church or synagogue are uncomfortably aware of this antipathy toward their own religious traditions.  In part, the persistent absence of strong democratic institutions in the Arab world, or of loud voices calling for them, has persuaded many Americans, even unconsciously, that Arabs somehow don't really share the same basic aspirations about peace and freedom, justice and truth toward which the rest of the world, however incoherently, seems to be aspiring.

Pryce-Jones, in one of his most insightful moments, articulates this feeling pithily.  "An Arab Solzhenitsyn is needed," he explains late in the book, "to restore to the millions of innocent victims the humanity of which they are robbed."  The obvious point, of course, is that this Solzhenitsyn must be Arab: he must credibly convey the morally neutral Arabness of his cultural and social roots while repudiating the deeply cruel political habits that have characterized much of the Arab condition in modern times. 

Western students of and writers about the Arab world, meanwhile, must somehow overcome their misgivings about Islamic hostility toward the West as they attempt to convey with true fairness the reality of Arab life.  In an earlier age, it might have been enough to say that common human decency alone required that the Arab world be studied with care and sympathy, notwithstanding the aberrant behavior of many Arab governments.  Today, mere self-interest may need to be invoked: to misparaphrase Santayana, "those who fail to learn about the Arabs are condemned to suffer at their hands."  As for the Arab Solzhenitsyn, at least one has appeared, Samir al-Khalil.  His Republic of Fear: Saddam's Iraq must rank as one of the most devastating moral indictments of political wickedness in modern times.  But of course, Pryce-Jones may have the last sardonic smile.  The name Samir al-Khalil is itself a pseudonym, protection against the murderous revenge of Saddam Hussein's agents.  Not even Solzhenitsyn ever had to face that response from the regime that he denounced in his writings.

David Aikman is a senior correspondent for Time.

Essay Types: Book Review