In 1919 the Emir Faisal, leader of the Arab Revolt and key wartime ally of T.E. Lawrence, went to Paris to claim the great Arab state he believed was due to his family according to British pledges. He came back empty-handed, and explained to his people, ‘I soon realized that the Westerners were profoundly ignorant about the Arabs and that their information was derived entirely from the tales of the Arabian Nights.’ The condescension and prejudice that faced Faisal at the peace conferences persist in the Western world today, and Eugene Rogan’s new book is intended to restore intellectual parity between East and West.
With such aims, it would be easy for a history of the Arabs to go too far in the opposite direction and become a work of grovelling apology. Critics have been quick to level this charge at Rogan, but in fact his account of relations between the Arabs and the heavyweight ‘Powers’ of the last five hundred years is remarkably even-handed for such an emotive subject. He sets forth his thesis clearly in the introduction: the Arab world has gone through four phases of subjection to foreign nations; the Ottoman Empire up to 1918, the colonial powers from the early nineteenth century to the end of WW2, America and Russia in the Cold War, and America alone since 1989. All this time, he believes, the Arabs have manipulated and been manipulated by foreign powers, usually to their disadvantage. This is the chief source of Arab problems and grievances today.
“Time in the Arab world seems to have fractured and to be caught in weird loops and distortions, as the same mistakes are made over and over again.”
The arguments get better as the book progresses, but he is often caught up in webs of intrigue and curious little stories. The great selling-point of his book is that, where possible, Rogan allows the Arabs to speak for themselves, quoting diverse eye-witness accounts and anecdotes. These are often great fun; we read of Fakhr al-Din, the Machiavellian Druze prince who schemed in Medici Florence, of the beautiful Palestinian air pirate Leila Khaled, who joyrode a plane from Fiumicino to Damascus, and of the Mamluk warlord Ali Bey, who ‘was so awe-inspiring that some people died in awe of him’.
This colourful content makes the book readable, even if it does often get in the way of Rogan’s argument. It feels at times as though the historian is struggling to impose an artificial order on a raw, chaotic, writhing mass of narrative. Nevertheless, as we progress through the ages of oil and Islamism the point begins to sink in. It is a cliche that history repeats itself, but in the Middle East these cycles are peculiarly local and vicious. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is a mirror to the British suppression of Iraqi insurgency in 1920; the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967 were carbon copies of one another; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 presented mocking parallels with their occupation of the country in 1982. Time in the Arab world seems to have fractured and to be caught in weird loops and distortions, as the same mistakes are made over and over again.
“It would be easy for a history of the Arabs to become a work of grovelling apology, yet Rogan’s effort remains remarkably even-handed”
In the excellent epilogue to this book, Rogan makes it clear that any lasting change must come from the Arab world as much as from abroad. He is too disinterested to draw explicit conclusions, but one clear and consistent failing emerges from the entire book. This is a failure of community. Let me put this bluntly: if you were to trap four Arab leaders in a mine with one shovel, two of them would fight for the shovel while the other two formed an arbitration committee and decreed that the shovel be broken into four to satisfy all parties concerned. Thus far no shared tie – not ethnicity, language, nor even shared religion – has bound the Arab states together for long enough to achieve anything of permanence.
A succinct example from The Arabs will illustrate this. At the start of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War of 1967, a Jordanian early-warning station detected a sortie of Israeli jets heading towards Egypt. Their radio operative frantically relayed a signal to his Egyptian counterpart. The Egyptians, however, had their radio tuned out, and heard nothing; their entire air force was wiped out in a matter of hours. The Arab countries were literally on different frequencies to one another, and a whole string of such basic errors led to a comprehensive defeat against the odds.
If the Arab world is going to get its act together and act effectively, the states must find common ground. Rogan’s history is an excellent place to start looking. To specialist and non-specialist alike, it offers the clarity of vision that has so often been lacking. This book is clear, reasoned and thought-provoking. Dig in.
