Edward Said: Hourani forever explodes the stupid caricature of Islam as a monolithic and unaging block, giving us instead an enormously varied tapestry of religious as well as socio-political configurations, changing, recasting, revising themselves as circumstances around them also change. Yet while life went on, and the West penetrated more and more of the Arab universe, the world balance of power shifted more and more undeniably to Eastern and Southern disadvantage. The Arabs economy seems to have played the central role in the transformation that Hourani notes, especially that economys inability to keep us with the Wests greater entrepreneurial and military skill. This in turn gave rise to various waves of reform, nationalism and reaction, from Muhammad Abdul and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, to Gamal Abdel Nasser and the struggle over Palestine, and most recently to the appearance of several brands of Islamic revivalism. What Hourani does with particular effectiveness, is, I think, to tell the story in most of its aspects without alarmism or sensationalism. To an Arab or Western reader there is thus the opportunity to see the almost hopelessly exacerbated circumstances of today in a calmer, more reasonably adumbrated setting, one in which the excitements and passions of the moment give way inevitably to an encouraging pattern of mutuality through which Arabs and Westerners can understand themselves, and each other. It is difficult to overestimate the signal importance of this book for this time. Here at last is a genuinely readable, genuinely responsive history of the Arabs as, I believe, many of them would want to be known to non-Arabs. Although much in it is perforce either summary or suggestive, that (given Houranis bibliography) is at least an incentive to further reading and exploration. More important, however, is that there isnt a trace in the book of what has been called Orientalism, that ludicrously inept academic and jargon-ridden school for which such ideological fictions as Islamic (or Arab) rage or the Arab mind are regular stock in trade. Indeed, Hourani dissolves most of the Orientalist edifice, with its polemical defenses, its bristling hostility toward the Arabs and, when they are deployed by modern Arabs, its grotesque sallies in self-laceration.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 07:34:39 +0000
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