 |
| Volume X, Winter 2003, Number 4 |
| |
| Book Review Excerpts |
| |
The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Central Asian Heartland, Karl E. Meyer. New York: Century Foundation, 2003. Notes, bibliography and index. 252 pages. $18.20, paperback.
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Notes, bibliography and index. 258 pages. $17.47, paperback.
David Nalle
Editor (ret.), Central Asian Monitor
For an unusually broad range of Americans, this is surely a time of heightened awareness of what is going on in the rest of the world. There is concern at all levels of society for what is happening abroad to Americans and to American interests -- as well as to America's image. Regular reports of casualities, with names and hometowns specified, intensify that concern. Graphic media coverage provokes a desire for explanations: How did things get this way? These two books by seasoned observers of America's role in the world offer some thoughtful answers to that question.
Karl Meyer sets the theme for his Dust of Empire in the opening chapter, "Patterns of Mastery, British and American." Citing Cuban-U.S. relations as an illustrative case history, he remarks that, in a relatively prosperous Cuba, what "made the system unendurable even to its beneficiaries was the rise of Fulgencio Batista's despotic military dictatorship with the perceived complicity of the United States." He proposes that a uniquely American form of imperialism has emerged on the world scene and that, significantly, it is indirect in nature. He goes on to draw this conclusion: "In the end, the most hurtful wound inflicted by indirect rule is psychic. Direct foreign control tends to unite a subject people, their resistance forging a sense of nationhood, while indirect rule delegitimizes indigenous leaders and creates a despised class of collaborators" (pp. 26-27).
Stephen Kinzer, author of "All the Shah's Men," is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has written on and from many parts of the world, including Guatemala, Nicaragua and Turkey. His book is a straightforward, well-written account of "An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror" -- that is, of the notorious Operation Ajax and what we may now recognize as its epiphenomena. For Meyer's incurious Americans, this book can serve as a kind of template for evaluating how America now carries out its role in the world.
There are two stories being told in the book. In a sense, the most important is Kinzer's careful treatment of Iranian history in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the story of a people trying to organize themselves out from under a feckless medieval monarchy and ruthless exploitation by foreign powers in order to join the modern world with all its appurtenances of constitutions, parliaments, a free press and inviolable political and economic sovereignty. Iran is not, he is saying, just another recently named territory but rather a serious country with a long history and a questing political class.
Arbitrating Armed Conflict: Decisions of the Israel-Lebanon Monitoring Group, by Adir Waldman. Huntington, NY: Juris Publishing Inc., 2003. Index. viii plus 320 pages. $60.00, cloth.
Yossi Beilen
Minister of Justice in Ehud Barak's government, 1999-2001.
The concluding sentence of Adir Waldman's book may be perceived as presenting his entire theory in a nutshell: "Soldiers, statesmen and lawyers must all heed this lesson: law and the lawyer may play a critical role in managing conflict and improving civilian welfare."
This is a very special book that sheds light on a minor episode in the history of the Middle East conflict in recent years. In effect, a non-issue, from the period during which Israel and Lebanon were managing a controlled conflict between 1996 and 2000, becomes an issue described in a fascinating way and analyzed in a manner that is, in part at least, unexpected.
During the years following the Lebanon war in 1982, the border between Israel and Lebanon remained an ongoing source of tension. Over time, a fixed cycle of violence evolved: the fighters of the Hezbollah organization would attack the soldiers of the Israeli army, who were operating in the "security zone" in Southern Lebanon; the response of the Israeli army would, on many an occasion, produce casualties among Lebanese civilians situated in the same places as Hezbollah members were hiding out; in response to the attack on civilians, the Hezbollah would fire Katyusha rockets at the northern settlements of Israel; in response to the firing of the Katyusha rockets, Israel would bomb various infrastructures in Lebanon. At this stage, in most cases, the retaliatory attacks had come full circle. If not, then the chances were that a larger-scale operation would be initiated.
Overlooking Nazareth: The Ethnography of Exclusion in Galilee, Dan Rabinowitz. Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiv + 222 pages. $26.88.
Jay Murphy
Editor, For Palestine(Writers and Readers Publishing, 1993)
The Israeli sociology professor and author Baruch Kimmerling allies himself with these activists (see their opinions in The Other Israel, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin, 2002) and dedicates his new monograph on Ariel Sharon's checkered past and present to those who carry out such acts: "All of them express the genuine nature of Judaism and the true spirit and soul of Israel." Kimmerling writes as a Zionist deeply committed to the state of Israel and to a reconciling two-state solution. From this perspective, he lays out a frightening vista of what Ariel Sharon's accession to power really means, for Israel and for all its neighbors. Often the mainstream U.S. media (as well as many on the liberal "left"of the political spectrum) parrot the view that Sharon has moderated his positions, has become a "statesman" capable of compromise with the Palestinians, a de Gaulle or a de Klerk, the better to assure his favorable mention in posterity. Kimmerling delivers a powerful wake-up call for those taken in by the prime minister's fits of peaceful rhetoric. For all its defects and systematic discrimination against its Arab minority, Israel for Kimmerling truly was a liberal democracy, especially in comparison with the other regimes in the region. Yet each of the features that distinguish Israel from its neighbors "are deteriorating as Israel becomes a Thatcherist and semi-fascist regime" (p. 5). Even while Israeli military officers gloat about having grossly defeated the Palestinians in this unequally matched contest (negative growth, high poverty and unemployment, costing Israel $7 billion, 2000-02), Kimmerling notes Israel's staggering economic situation and lack of new immigrants. Kimmerling writes: "As the economic situation continues to deteriorate, Israeli citizens demand more activities against the ‘other' -- the Arabs. The interactions among these processes create the main manifestations and local flavor of Israeli fascism" (p. 8).
Looking into HAMAS and Other Constituents of the Palestinian-Israeli Confrontation, Wolfgang Freund. Volume 2 of Controversies from the Promised Land, a series of Social Sciences Publications, edited by Wolfgang Freund. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publisher, 2002. 200 pages, numerous figures and documents. $30.95, paperback.
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Associate, German Orient Institute, Hamburg
The German-French academic Wolfgang Freund conducted field studies in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank during the years before the millennial turn. Originally he had in mind a comprehensive study on "social-welfare institutions" connected to Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip, which is administered by the Palestinian Authority (PA). Freund, known as the founder and editor-in-chief of the trilingual quarterly The Third World during the seventies and eighties, used typical methods of field investigation, such as visits to the relevant institutions on the ground and interviews with the heads and staff of Hamas. He worked then at the Institut de Recherche et d'Études sur la Communication of the Université Panthéon-Assas de Paris II. Additionally, he promoted an empirical project with students from the Islamic University in Gaza about life perceptions of Palestinian students. But the authorities of the Islamic University finally refused cooperation, obviously fearing the involvement of a foreign academic institution. In the end, as Wolfgang Freund puts it, there was a rapidly declining atmosphere with regard to daily life in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. So it became impossible for him in early 2000 to finish his project. The outbreak of the so-called al-Aqsa intifada during the second half of that year did the rest.
Nevertheless, his Hamas-related findings of three years in the Palestinian territories are worthwhile and provoke some questions. Disparate as they may seem to the reader at first glance, one can come to three major conclusions. First, Wolfgang Freund has created with his interviews new sources catching the spirit of the time within the Hamas leadership. He started with the late Ismail Abu Shanab, an engineer in civilian life, and the physician Mahmud al-Zahar as interview partners. Their topic was the history and philosophy of Hamas. The outcome underlines patterns of common arguments, summarized by Freund.
The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Saud from Tradition to Terror, by Stephen Schwartz. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 2002. 336 pages. $25.00, hardcover.
Abdelkader Zerougui
American University
The Two Faces of Islam is a mixture of history and polemics in which the latter far outweighs the former. Thus, the author refers to the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences (IIASA), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIR) as "fronts for terrorists" and calls the late Edward Said "an apologist for terrorists." He also does not hesitate to equate Wahhabism with Nazism (p. 176), and to call Ibn Taymiyyah, Al Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb and Abdallah Azzam the "four horsemen of Islamic fundamentalism" (p. 182). The reader gets the impression that Schwartz wants to demonize, not to understand.
Schwartz's book is also open to challenge on historical and methodological grounds. For one thing, it is simply wrong to call all extremists "Wahhabists"; Schwartz refers to Hezbollah and the Taliban as "Wahhabized fringe groups" even though Hezbollah are Shiites and the Taliban belong to the Deobandi sect, which has nothing to do with Wahhabism. For another, Wahhabism is less a coherent body of thought, a theological doctrine, a school of jurisprudence or even an ideology, than it is a derogatory political label. Early Wahhabis were more interested in creating agricultural communities, much like the Shakers and the Amish in the United States, than in inventing a new Islamic doctrine. The original Wahhabi movement failed because of obstinate tribal traditions and because, by the 1920s, Saudi Arabia had already become a state with a strong central government.
Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, by Adeed Dawisha. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. vi plus 340 pages. $29.95, hardcover.
Bill S. Mikhail
Adjunct professor, University of Maryland
Adeed Dawisha has enhanced his distinguished academic career as a professor of political science by writing this comprehensive study on how Arab nationalism has shaped Arab politics and societies in the modern age. Dawisha chronicles the various stages that made Arab nationalism a mass political movement transcending boundaries and state sovereignties. Memoirs of Arab statesmen, historical studies by Israeli revisionist historians and a rich mix of journal articles have been synthesized by the author into a very good book.
Dawisha defines the intellectual dilemma that influenced Arab nationalism. There were two broad understandings of Arab nationalism: cultural and political. That dichotomy manifested itself in the debate over the existence of the Arabs as a nation and a race, and the relationship between Arabism and Islam. The book adopts a strong comparative-politics methodology, drawing a parallel between the ideas of Arab nationalism and the different philosophies of European nationalism. Dawisha states that Arab nationalism resembles the premises of German nationalism, with its emphasis on culture, the community (folk), and the common national traits of language and history. Yet Dawisha does not ignore the fact that Arab nationalism from its inception was a political project. Here he highlights the unionist aspect of Arab nationalism as an ideology aiming to bring all the Arabs under a single state.
Human Rights and the Middle East, by Mehdi Zakerian. Tehran: Center for Scientific Research and Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, Fall 2003. Index. 206 pages.
Mahmood Monshipouri
Quinnipiac University; visiting fellow, Yale Center for International and Area Studies
At a time when state sovereignty is being transformed by human-rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational advocacy networks, one nagging question persists: why are historical preconditions for the protection and promotion of human rights conspicuously lacking in the Middle East? The successful experiences of other developing countries since the advent of the Third Wave of democracy have led to rethinking and a moral reconstruction in the rest of the world. Surely those experiences could provide valuable resources from which Middle Eastern people and regimes can benefit. The state of progress toward human rights in the Middle East has always been overshadowed by geopolitics, geoeconomics, tenacious authoritarian cultural traditions and religious barriers.
Human Rights and the Middle East begins with familiar lines from the twelfth-century Persian poet Saadi: "The Children of Adam are limbs of one another, created from a single substance. When one limb suffers misfortune, the others cannot be at rest. You who do not suffer the pain of others do not deserve to be called human" (p. 14). This tends to indicate that value concepts such as human rights are not alien to local cultures and traditions. The sources of human-rights violations must be sought somewhere else, namely, among the ruling elites who seek power in geopolitics (p. 16). There is no sustainable and reliable definition of the power of the people in the Middle East. By controlling rationality, critical analysis and planning as the necessary tools for governing, the ruling elites have contained society and its people. In the last half-century, Middle Eastern citizens have become so preoccupied with security and subsistence that they view war, chaos and looting as mundane (p. 16).
|
| |
|
