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| Volume X, Spring 2003, Number 1 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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A History of Saudi Arabia, Madawi Al-Rasheed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 255 pages, including illustrations, maps, tables, chronology, glossary, bibliography and index. $55.00, hardback.
Brooks Wrampelmeier
U.S. foreign service officer (ret.); former consul-general, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
The rise and consolidation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been recounted by numerous historians, both Saudi and Western. Key episodes in this historical narrative include the mid-eighteenth century alliance in Najd between the Islamic religious reformer, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and the emir (prince) of al-Diriyyah, Muhammad bin Saud; the rise and fall of the first two Saudi/Wahhabi states; the dramatic revival of Saudi power with the recapture of Riyadh in 1902 by Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saud (Ibn Saud), culminating in his 1932 unification of the regions of Najd, Hasa, Jabal Shammar (Hayil), Hijaz and Asir as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; and the material transformation of the kingdom under Abd al-Aziz and his sons and successors into an affluent and modernizing state made possible by the discovery in 1938 of enormous reserves of oil. In the official historiography of Saudi Arabia, the dominant narrative is the glorification of Abd al-Aziz's success in restoring his family's traditional position as the hegemonic force that unified and binds together the disparate regions of the kingdom and preserves and upholds the values and traditions of an orthodox Islamic society.
It is this official historiography that Mahdawi al-Rasheed challenges in her revisionist interpretation of Saudi history. In her introduction, Al-Rasheed states that she did not set out to write a chronological history of Saudi Arabia but rather "to present an interpretation of Saudi history that does not endorse the dominant official wisdom" (p. 12). The author, a native of Saudi Arabia who now teaches social anthropology at the University of London and in 1991 published a well-received history of her Rashidi family, contends that this official narrative perpetuates a presentation of Arabian history that plays down its tribal past and ignores regional history and culture. Tribal and regional histories and cultural traditions that do not conform with the picture of the inevitable rise of the Wahhabi movement and of Al Saud ascendancy have been suppressed.
In her eyes, what the official narrative calls the "unification" of Arabia by Abd al-Aziz was really "the emergence of a state imposed on people without a historical memory of unity or national heritage that would justify their inclusion in a single entity" (p. 3). A population divided by tribal, regional and sectarian (i.e., Shia) differences was conquered by an indigenous Najdi leadership allied with Wahhabi religious proselytizers and sanctioned by a colonial power (i.e., Great Britain). Therefore, the official story -- that in unifying Arabia Abd al-Aziz was merely restoring Al Saud authority over territory that had belonged to his ancestors -- has little real justification. Unification required that Abd al-Aziz first overcome the resistance of tribal confederations and regional leaders whose claims to legitimacy were often as valid as his own.
Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East, Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002. 228 pages, including notes, sources and references and index. $24.00, hardcover.
Lawrence Davidson
Professor of history, West Chester University
All of us live in controlled informational environments. The most basic element of control, which impacts everyone, everywhere is culture -- the customs and traditions that constitute the social atmosphere of our societies. These inevitably shape the flow and interpretation of information in order to preserve and rationalize the prevailing cultural paradigm. Paralleling culture are more overt forms of control that serve particular interests: government, class, interest-group domination of the specific disseminators of information such as schools, publishing houses, various forms of media and, of course, the press. These overt sources of control are more or less direct and heavy-handed to the extent allowed by, again, custom and tradition. In the United States the culture supports mostly indirect and economically based avenues of overt control. The government is forbidden by constitutional guarantees of free speech and press to directly dominate the informational environment. Private groups (corporations) and individuals of wealth, however, can dominate the press, media and publishing industries (as well as private educational institutions) and shape the flow of information to fit their biases. In the Middle East, on the other hand, control of the informational environment is, following custom and tradition, more direct. In most Arab countries the government controls the flow of information.
This latter scenario is now, however, eroding. It is becoming much easier for cultures to rapidly evolve and affect one another in a world filled with internet servers and satellite dishes. In these circumstances, Western press and media norms are creating new expectations and standards for non-Western areas. As the borders of informational environments become more and more porous, heavy-handed governmental control of information becomes less successful. This can be seen most dramatically in areas where autocracies attempt direct management of the news only to be frustrated by information coming from beyond their sphere of control. In the Middle East this breakdown of the controlled informational environment has been quickened by the creation of the satellite television network appropriately named Al-Jazeera (the island).
Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar have written a book describing the rise of Al-Jazeera. Though written in a rather dry style and sometimes repetitious, the book gives an inside look at the coming together of coincidence and cross-cultural influences that have made Al-Jazeera possible. In 1996, a partnership deal between a Saudi-owned radio and television service and the BBC (which sought to create an Arabic TV network) fell through because of a disagreement over control of programming for the new enterprise. Following from the different cultural norms of the two partners, the Saudis wanted to censor broadcast of information about the behavior of their home government, while the BBC refused to go along with such a policy. The subsequent collapse of the project led to unemployment for a number of Western-trained Arab journalists employed by the joint venture.
The Dynamics of Middle East Nuclear Proliferation, edited by Steven Spiegel, et. al. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. 374 pages. $119.95, hardcover.
Scott Lasensky
Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
Of the principal foreign-policy challenges facing the Bush administration, namely terrorism, promoting democracy, expanding free markets and controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), only in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) do all mix dangerously together. Policy professionals, whether in government, the academy or the private sector, have a responsibility to delve into these issues with renewed vigor and develop insights and policy-relevant proposals -- for the simple reason that policy makers are listening. Washington needs advice as never before. In this light, The Dynamics of Middle East Nuclear Proliferation is indeed timely.
The Dynamics of Middle East Nuclear Proliferation is a collection of essays that shed light on how the genie got out of the bottle and offer ideas for putting it back in. Edited by Steven Spiegel, Jennifer Kibbe and Elizabeth Mathews, in cooperation with UCLA's Center for International Relations, the volume grew out of Track-Two discussions among Americans, Europeans, Israelis, Arabs and Iranians beginning in 1995.
Nuclear proliferation is "inevitable," writes Spiegel in the book's introductory essay. He argues that "overlapping power balances," rather than neat and tidy dyads, will continue to fuel proliferation. Furthermore, he predicts it will accelerate in the next decade and warns not to expect a Cold War-style structure of increased stability through assured second-strike capabilities. As Spiegel argues, it is more than just the security dilemma that drives proliferation. Adventurist regimes (like Iraq's) are part of the problem. In the book, Spiegel and others explain how proliferation is as much a product of external factors as internal dynamics.
Dying in the Land of Promise: Palestine and Palestinian Christianity from Pentecost to 2000, by Donald Wagner. London: Melisende, 2001. 277 pages, plus appendices (pp. 278-284), bibliography (pp. 285-288) and index (pp. 289-299).
The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium, A Reporter's Journey, by Charles M. Sennott. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. xxiv and 449 pages, plus acknowledgements (pp. 451-452), notes (pp. 453-466) and index (pp. 467-479). $30.00, hardcover.
Robert Brenton Betts
Visiting professor of history, University of Balamand, al-Kura, Lebanon
The two books complement each other in excellent fashion. Donald Wagner is a Presbyterian minister whose previous books on the subject have been aimed at the large number (his estimate is 20 percent) of the 50 million Evangelical American Protestant Christians who blindly support the secular state of Israel for misguided religious reasons -- that the return of Jews to Palestine will hasten the Second Coming. This work is aimed at a wider audience and is essentially a history of Christianity in Palestine since the death and resurrection of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples in Jerusalem 50 days later. The Zionists have made a special effort to downplay the presence of Christians in the Holy Land in the first three centuries of the Christian era, implying, as did former West Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, that "Christianity . . . developed far from the scene of Jesus' last ministry, notably in Antioch and other parts of the Middle East" and that "Jerusalem itself . . . remained comparatively untouched by the views expounded by the latest victim of Rome" (p. 27). This is a deliberate calumny intended to imply that Jews, not Christians, have lived uninterrupted in Jerusalem since the death of Christ, when in fact they were expelled by the Romans in 70 A.D. and only allowed to return in any number under Islamic rule. The Christian Byzantines despised them for their collaboration with the emperor Julian the Apostate, who promised to rebuild their temple in return for support against the Christians, and later their collaboration with the Persians, when they invaded and conquered the Holy City in 610. As an example of the view of those who clung to their Hebrew heritage, they used the so-called "Temple Mount", i.e., the site of the second Jewish Temple, as a rubbish heap. It was the greatly revered father of Orthodoxy, St. John Chrysostom, (347-407), patriarch of Constantinople, who first coined the phrase "Christ-killers," referring to the Jews of Antioch, and likened synagogues to "dens of iniquity." Under Islamic rule the Jews prospered at the expense of the Orthodox Christians, who were always suspected by the Muslims of having ultimate allegiance to the emperor in Constantinople rather than the caliph in Damascus and later Baghdad.
Sennett makes a more moderate estimate, reckoning that "by the year 2000 [the population] should have reached about 420,000." The only bright spot in this otherwise discouraging picture is that some 60,000 of the so-called Jewish immigrants to Israel from Russia are actually Christians (with one supposed Jewish grandparent), including functioning Orthodox priests (pp. 215-16). But the fact that a Russian Orthodox clergyman, claiming a probably fictitious Jewish ancestor, can happily settle in Nazareth, while a Christian Palestinian from Bethlehem who emigrated to the United States cannot return to his homeland, "even though I have a birth certificate from the Church of the Nativity . . . , even though my parents' house sits vacant, even though we can trace our lineage back hundreds and hundreds of years," points out the vicious hypocrisy of the Israeli so-called "Law of Return" (p. 17).
Sennett's book is a journalist's account of the state of Christianity in the Holy Land at the close of the second millennium. As the Middle East correspondent for the Boston Globe 1997-2001, the author, a self-described lapsed Catholic with a Jewish wife, takes as unbiased a view as one could hope for in portraying the sad state of the local Palestinian Christian communities, beset by hatred and mistrust from both Muslim fundamentalists and Zionist extremists, aided and abetted by the Israeli state. It is quite a lengthy book, but eminently readable and with a surprising depth of understanding of local history and Israeli-Palestinian political intricacies. As the outbreak of the second intifada and Sharon's ruthless response raises the level of violence, he fears for the safety of his wife and three young sons and reluctantly abandons Jerusalem for London, but not before recording an excellent account of what Christians in the Holy Land are up against and why their numbers continue to decline. He is particularly good in dealing with the Israeli targeting of Christians in the three major West Bank centers of Bethlehem, Bayt Jala and Bayt Sahour (pp. 119-121 and 442-445), long before the most recent onslaught over the Greek Orthodox Easter 2002 and the shameful siege of the Church of the Nativity.
China's Relations with Arabia and the Gulf 1949-1999, by Mohamed Bin Huwaidin. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. 352 pages. $80.00, hardcover.
Bill S. Mikhail
Adjunct professor, University of Maryland
An examination of the evolution of China's foreign policy in the decades that followed the Communist revolution in 1949 shows how the PRC came to look for a diplomatic opening in the Middle East in general and the Gulf area in particular. The resulting international order in the post-Cold War years motivated Arab scholars like Bin Huwaidin to study Beijing's global behavior and how China reacted to tumultuous events such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iran-Iraq War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. China first attempted to approach the Middle East through the support it gave to some governments trying to build socialist economies in the 1960s and 1970s, and by providing military help to revolutionary and guerrilla movements in the Arab world. China's growing relationship with the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) represents the recognition of non-communist conservative governments on the part of China's new ruling elite.
This book surveys the literature on China and its international political role. The author has also compiled statistics about China's trade and arms sales to Iraq, Iran and the GCC states. The author studies the theoretical framework of China's foreign policy and how Marxism-Leninism equipped its leaders with a world-order concept that favored revolutionary change. Later, Maoism became a state ideology that precipitated a number of revisions in China's world role, such as resistance to Soviet hegemony, intensification of social change inside China during the Cultural Revolution, and eventually the détente relationship with the United States to ease tensions in world politics. Then, China's modernization program according to the post-Mao leadership and its foreign-policy orientation and goals initiated China's search for an activist diplomacy in many areas of international relations. Huwaidin refers to many Chinese documents that defined Beijing's world role in different periods.
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