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."

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.

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