Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies.
by Elie Kedourie.
Frank Cass. 327 pp. $18.50.
Elie Kedourie is a political scientist who believes that one must first get to know the Middle East and its history before writing about it—a species rarer than one might suppose, and a precious resource amid the large company of instant experts on the Middle East whose views now fill our news magazines and foreign-policy journals. Kedourie has taught politics at the London School of Economics since 1953, and has edited the journal Middle Eastern Studies since 1964. He is the author of England and the Middle East as well as of one study of nationalism and another of the two great Muslim thinkers, Afghani and Abduh. Some of his many articles in the British press and elsewhere have been collected in The Chatham House Version, to which is now added the volume under review. Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies assembles seventeen previously published essays and two new ones in an apparent hodgepodge of themes from which a certain order can be distilled.
Several essays included here offer an outline of Arab governmental systems and politics. What Westernization has wrought in the Arab world is not a duplication of the West’s political pattern so much as a transition from one form of despotism to another, more modern one. Constitutionalism—a Western invention—has proved an almost total failure. Political “parties” are vastly different from what they represent in the West, where a natural context has existed for them since the Middle Ages in parliaments and estates. But, Kedourie writes:
Such representative institutions were absent in the Muslim world, and it is therefore not surprising that only contact with Europe made organization into parties for political action familiar and attractive. Familiar and attractive, that is, to the small minority that was open to European influences, and which was therefore critical of native and traditional institutions. Parties were therefore at first usually organized or inspired by radicals who were intent on drastic reforms; and, because such parties had, in the absence of representative institutions, little scope to maneuver, their radicalism became intensified; this very radicalism alienated the authorities who, often trying to suppress these parties, forced them underground. . . .
Subsequent experience with government-manipulated parliaments in the Arab world further inhibited the rise of coherent parliamentary and electoral organizations dedicated to the acquisition of popular support and the exercise of political power within legislatures. With the continued erosion of traditional society and the rise of literacy and of communications, the trend instead has been toward movements centering on charismatic leaders as repositories of unfettered power.
A captivating introduction to the Arab political style is provided in the title essay, “Arabic Political Memoirs.” Kedourie finds the key to Arab nationalism in the disintegration of the last large Muslim empire, that of the Ottomans (most political scientists concerned with the area mistakenly regard Arab nationalism as a brand-new phenomenon). Arab-speaking Muslims “discovered” their own nationalism, he argues, in reaction less to Ottoman despotic power itself than to the overthrow of that power by the Young Turks, whose promise of reforms and democracy posed a threat to the dominance of Islam. As one of many contemporary observers writes: “Far from being enthusiastic over the prospects of liberty, fraternity, and a parliament to redress their grievances, the great majority [of Muslim Arabs] are strongly opposed to a change in which they think they foresee a very real danger to Muslim supremacy.” And another: “There were many people who feared that the Young Turks thought more of their political ideas than of the injunctions of the Muhammedan religion, and that the Jews [in the Ottoman empire] showed a tendency to think that they need no longer show any respect for the ruling race and the dominant religion.” Kedourie notes: “This feeling of Muslim superiority, which a century of reverses at the hands of Europe had shaken but also exacerbated, goes far to make intelligible the uncompromising opposition which from the very begining the Palestinians offered to Zionism.”
A number of essays here deal with the attitudes toward Arabs and Jews in the Middle East held by leading Anglo-American personages both diplomatic and military. They make for a thoroughly disturbing picture. In an essay on British diplomacy on the eve of World War I, Kedourie uncovers “fustian fantasies” and “extremes of credulity” in men to whom the British Foreign Secretary looked for reliable information on the Middle East. In “The Apprentice Sorcerers,” he limns the mind of those Americans charged with formulating policy toward the Arab world in the Nasser period; their utter ignorance of the real Middle East, fueled by boundless enthusiasm for engineered solutions, was responsible for the installation of a number of military cliques which turned out to be injurious to American interests. Something of the flavor of their mentality may be conveyed in the fact that the view held of Gamal Abdel Nasser by prominent American officials, as well as by all our various ambassadors to Egypt, was precisely opposite to what the Egyptian President soon proved himself to be.
The great relevance of Kedourie’s historical studies hardly needs to be demonstrated at a time when the process of self-induced Western capitulation to the utterly vulnerable Arab oil producers has come to seem irreversible. Yet it is only from a scholar and writer like Kedourie—deeply informed, sane, and unfailingly fair in his judgments—that we can hope to learn how to unlearn all the false ideas about the Arab mind with which we have become encumbered, not to mention the dangerous policies that flow from those ideas.
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