The Gertrude Bell Jar

The Arab Predicament/Fouad Ajami

The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 by Fouad Ajami.

This book deals with the dilemma posed by the perceived failure of Arab nationalism in the wake of the 1967 defeat of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria by Israel in the Six Day War, and explains how political Islam evolved out of the ashes of the statist nationalist ideologies embraced by Nasserite Egypt and the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq by constructing and objectifying an idealized Islamic past. Includes a detailed analysis of 20th Century Egyptian political history and a survey of the thought of leading intellectuals in the nationalist and Islamist movements, including many figures whose works are still not available in English. A valuable resource, but not friendly to the general reader without a basic grounding in Middle Eastern history.

In the Shadow of the Prophet/Milton Viorst

In the Shadow of the Prophet: the Struggle for the Soul of Islam by Milton Viorst.

Viorst is a journalist who has managed to gain access to many important figures in Middle Eastern and Islamic politics over the years, and perhaps therein lies the rub. Shortly after beginning this book I read apostablog taking Viorst to task for a laudatory profile of Muammar Qaddafi, and it's easy to see how a journalist might be dazzled by such a colorful and charismatic figure ("A James Bond villain trapped in our world," as Mr. Bell Jar likes to describe him). I found this bit of transcript from an interview with the late King Hussein of Jordan interesting in this respect:

MV: Leaving aside insults to the Prophet, do you feel there is a line that can be drawn in politicalspeech?
KH: No, as witnessed by what you hear and see in Jordan.
MV: Well, a Jordanian went to prison recently for what he said, though you pardoned him soon afterward. There is also a press law which, I am told, is designed to limit free speech.
KH: I don't know that it's designed to limit free speech but it is certainly designed for the judiciary to address distortions of truth and morality. I believe this would happen anywhere in the world. We opened up here in Jordan without having the time to develop codes for preserving our coherence and our unity and our dialogue as they should be. So we had to look at certain--not restraints, people can write whatever they feel like writing--but if they infringe on certain areas in a blatant way …
MV: What areas?
KH: For example, attacking people in a manner that is incompatible with the truth, false accusations. There is no restraint. But undermining the very roots of society is not what freedom is about. Freedom is your freedom to do whatever you like without infringing on the freedoms of others. That is precisely the line we are trying to draw. Are people in Jordan telling you there is no freedom? There is freedom. Too much at times.
MV: Shifting the subject ….

One is left to wonder whether there isn't always a little shifting of the subject in Viorst's interviews with political figures (no other interviews are presented in transcript form), and if being willing to do so when the interviewee becomes uncomfortable isn't a condition of being allowed to talk to them at all, and whether adoption of the view, which permeates this book, that Arabs--alone, of all the peoples of the earth--need to be ruled with a firm hand, isn't a consequence of making such accommodations over and over again. The most reprehensible example of this tendency is his acceptance of the Saudi self-characterization as the "most Islamic" Arab nation (which is a lot like calling Pat Robertson the "most Christian" religious leader in the West). However, this bias tends to be a matter of spin rather than actual accuracy with Viorst, and in any event his viewpoint is common enough in the West to be worth understanding on its own terms. Moreover, the book contains some interesting chapters on often-neglected subjects, like the Islamist (but Sufi!) government of the Sudan, the civil war over Islamism in Algeria, the surprising story of what actually happened to the Mu'tazilites, and a welcome history of the methodology of Islamic interpretation during the Abbasid period. Overall, well worth the read.

Price of Honor/Jan Goodwin

Price of Honor : Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World by Jan Goodwin.

A journalistic account of the status of women in a number of Islamic countries, highlighting changes that have occurred as Islamization advances, along with an interesting chapter on Wahhabist recruitment in the U.S. The opening chapters, giving an overview of Islam as a religion and the history of the Islamic world, are a disaster, apparently cobbled together from clip files and never checked for basic coherence or context, so that the story contradicts itself from one page to the next. Skip directly ahead to the country chapters, which contain many first-person and uncensored accounts by ordinary Muslim women which are more precious than gold in their rarity, interviews with various notables like Queen Noor, and female Islamist propagandists like Laili Zikria Helms, the late, unlamented Taliban regime's female publicist in America. This book makes things seem much worse for women in Islamic countries than some other accounts I've read, the chapter on Pakistan being particularly hair-raising.