THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIV, Issue # 41, March 6, 2012
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE ARABS AS SEEN FIFTY YEARS AGO
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
AN ANALYSIS OF ARAB SOCIETIES & ARAB CULTURE MADE A HALF CENTURY AGO: WHAT MAKES THE ARAB WORLD WORTH A REVIEW FIFTY
YEARS AFTER THE BOOK WAS PUBLISHED -- CONCEPTUAL & FACTUAL ERRORS IN THE BOOK: THE DRIVE TOWARD ARAB UNION -- ISLAMIC TOLERANCE --
ARAB DETERMINATION TO MODERNIZE -- THE DEMOCRATIC CALIPHS OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY
FULL STORY:
"Once mellowed and moldering, the far-flung civilization of the Arabs is being swept today by invigorating winds of change. A fruitful kind of disorder is replacing
the old fixed patterns of life." Those contemporary-sounding words were published in 1962, in a glossy, picture-laden, 160-page book titled The Arab World.
The Editors of Life magazine produced The Arab World.
The volume boasts three virtues that make it worth a review a precise half-century later. First, the Editors of Life magazine, then the outstanding American
weekly, produced it, implying cultural centrality. Second, a retired senior U.S. State Department official, George V. Allen, wrote the introduction, pointing to the
book's establishment credentials. Third, Desmond Stewart (1924-1981), an acclaimed British journalist, historian, and novelist, wrote the text.
The Arab World emphatically represents an artifact from another era; while not entirely sugar-coating his subject matter, Stewart offers a benign, gauzy,
patronizing approach that would gag even the most euphemistic writers today. For example, he suggests that a Western visitor to the Arabic-speaking countries
enters "the realm of Aladdin and Ali Baba. The people remind him of his illustrated Bible." One encounters little of this sentimentality in the age of Al-Qa'ida.
More interestingly, the book demonstrates how easily a prominent analyst can misread the big picture.
As suggested by its title, one theme concerns the existence of a single Arab people from Morocco to Iraq, a people so tradition bound that Stewart resorts to an
animal analogy: "the Arabs possess a distinctive common culture which they can no more throw off than a hummingbird can change its nesting habits to those of
a thrush." Ignoring the Arabs' failed record to unify their countries, Stewart predicted that "whatever happens, the forces for [Arab] union will remain." Hardly:
that urge died not long after 1962 and has long remained defunct, as has its shallow premise that the Arabic language alone defines a people, ignoring history and
geography.
His second theme concerns Islam. Stewart writes that this "simple" faith has raised humanity "to a new height" and that it is "not pacifist, but its key word was
salaam, or peace." He calls Islam a "tolerant faith" and describes the Arabs historically as "tolerant conquerors" and "tolerant overlords." Muslims dealt with Jews
and Christians in a "tolerant" way. Indeed, "The Arabs' tolerance extended to culture." All this tolerance prompts Stewart blithely, but unwisely, to dismiss
manifestations of Islamism, which he says "have an old-fashioned air to them and have little appeal for the young." In brief, Stewart is clueless about Islamic
supremacism from its origins to modern times.
A third theme involves Arab determination to modernize: "One of the surprises of the 20th. Century has been the way the Arab Moslems have accepted change
and the modern world." Excepting Saudi Arabia and Yemen, he finds everywhere that "Arab modernism is a tangible, visible, audible force." (Thus the
"invigorating winds of change" in my first sentence.) His myopia concerning females makes for stunning reading: "The harem and its psychological pillars have
been dynamited by the 20th Century." "In economic affairs, … women are almost men's equals." He sees what he wants to, undisturbed by reality.
Continuing this theme of wild-eyed optimism, Stewart discerns Arabic-speakers breaking free of an ancient mold, determined "to destroy the old stereotypes." He
writes about the Seventh Century as no one today would dare do, especially not after the failure of George W. Bush's Iraqi ambitions and Barack Obama's Libyan
escapade: "The first four Caliphs had been as democratic as Britain's William Gladstone, if not America's Thomas Jefferson." Stewart even claims that "Arab
civilization is part of Western, not Eastern, culture," whatever that might mean.
As an aside, so arcane was Islam fifty years ago, the two dozen high-priced Life employees listed as the book's editorial staff captioned one picture with
the misinformation that the Islamic pilgrimage "takes place every year in the Spring." (The hajj marches around the calendar, 10 or 11 days earlier each year.)
The mistakes of one's predecessors has a humbling effect. An analyst like me hopes not to be so obtuse as Desmond Stewart and Life, and not to be
shown up so badly with the passage of time. Indeed, I study history with the hope of gaining a larger vision and thereby not being limited by current
assumptions. In 2062, tell me how I am doing.
© Daniel Pipes 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Originally Published in The Washington Times, March 6, 2012
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the DanielPipes.org, March 6, 2012
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/10781/arab-world-life-magazine
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and President of the Middle East Forum,
Publisher of Middle East Quarterly,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for National Review Online, Front Page
Magazine, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and
developments in the Middle East have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network
television, as well as at universities and think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the
U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately
twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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