Book Reviews: Middle East and Related
February 20, 2007, 8:40 am |
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by Middle East Quarterly*
De 4th Wereld Oorlog—Het Pad van Marx na Allah [The 4th World War—The Path from Marx to Allah]. By Pieter Siebelt. Soesterberg, Netherlands: Aspekt, 2005. 464 pp. €22.50.
Siebelt, a Dutch investigative journalist, ends his book De 4th Wereld Oorlog with a question: “Who will be next?” The reference is to the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh.
Volkert van de Graaf, a leftist animal rights activist, murdered prime ministerial candidate Pim Fortuyn while radical Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Though coming from different backgrounds, their actions point to the commingling of leftist and Islamist ideologies in Holland and how the two in their separate ways struck at the core of liberal Western beliefs. Although both young men were educated in Holland, a country renowned for openness and social tolerance, they both relied on murder to silence the opponents of their totalitarian beliefs.
Siebelt, the Dutch-born son of an American serviceman who refers to himself as a “war baby,” is a specialist on the subject of left-wing and Islamist terrorism. His book documents how leftists have exploited civil rights and free speech legislation to undermine the legal system and intimidate security agencies, forging a path now being trod by radical Islamists who operate with near impunity. This “unholy alliance”—as David Horowitz calls it in the title of his book on this subject in the United States—directs its energies at undermining Dutch democracy. The breakdown of the rule of law under a barrage of legal challenges has enabled Islamist threats to society—such as Mohammed Bouyeri—to remain on the streets despite having been on the security services’ radar for years. It was this judicially enforced Dutch tolerance that allowed the taps on Bouyeri’s telephone to be removed just days before he butchered Theo Van Gogh.
De 4th Wereld Oorlog is of great value in tracing the radical Left’s role as a facilitator of the Islamist movement, a topic with echoes far beyond the Netherlands. Many of the groups documented by Siebelt (such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Amnesty International, and the Trans National Institute) are based both in Europe and the United States and are major players in the “fourth World War” effort to undermine the West.
Beila Rabinowitz
www.MilitantIslamMonitor.org
The Kurds And the State
In The Kurds and the State, derived from her University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation, political scientist Natali explores how Kurdish nationalism developed in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. She does this with the opacity and jargon of an academic: “This book explains why Kudayetî, or Kurdish national identity, becomes ethnicized and the similarities and variations in its manifestation across space and time.”
Beyond style, her comparative approach has value. The Kurds are not monolithic, linguistically or politically, though too many works treat them as such; to this, The Kurds and the State is an important exception. Natali avoids contemporary Kurdish narratives of victimization. Kurdish complaints that European powers divided Kurdistan do not hold up to historical fact: the border between what is now Turkey and Iran, for example, dates from the sixteenth century. Nor does she make the mistake of many contemporary authors and instant experts, retroactively extending Kurdish nationalism. She explains how Kurdish nationalism grew in early twentieth century Anatolia with the coming of European consuls and intra-communal tensions. In contrast, Kurdish nationalism took longer to develop in polyglot Iran, perhaps because there Sunni versus Shi‘ite sectarian practice rather than ethnicity determined the degree to which Kurds could integrate.
Natali’s overviews and comparisons are thought-provoking. She juxtaposes the growth of Kurdish participation in the political process in Turkey with an increasingly stilted process in Iraq and notes how Ankara’s embrace of the Kurds and their socioeconomic and political diversification undermined any unitary sense of Kurdish identity in Turkey. Her examination of Turkish strategies to undercut Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) terrorism in the 1980s is also useful even if she remains critical of Ankara’s refusal to “de-ethnicize the notion of Turkish citizenship.” In these ways, The Kurds and the State advances the staid and often simplified historiography that marks Kurdish studies.
But Natali’s work is weakened by several problems, starting with her unsure grasp of history. She amplifies, for example, the efficiency of Ottoman state control and discounts the efficiency of Iranian bureaucracy. While inefficient and weak by Western standards, nineteenth century Iran was organized enough to defeat incursions by Ottoman Kurdish tribal chiefs along its periphery. Natali appears unaware that published collections of Iranian diplomatic correspondence are replete with reports and discussions telegraphed from the front. She is also prone to exaggeration. If “early republican Turkey removed all opportunities for the Kurds,” how did Ýsmet Ýnönü, an ethnic Kurd, succeed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s founding father?
More serious is the incompleteness of Natali’s discussion of the Atatürk religious reforms. She fails to address head-on the impact of his abolishment of the caliphate, the source of a great deal of tension among Turkey’s Kurdish tribes for whom religious traditionalism trumped nationalism as the impetus for struggle with the nascent Turkish republic. Her bibliographical judgment is questionable, citing, for example, Armenian polemicist Vahakn Dadrian (whose name she misspells).
Discussion of the Kurds of modern Iran falls short and that of Syria is nonexistent. Natali parses secondary sources, many out-of-date, for mention of Kurds and appears unaware that some authors upon whose work she relies, including Afsaneh Najmabadi (whose name she also misspells), approach Iranian historiography through a political prism that ends up skewing her narrative. It is unfortunate that The Kurds and the State falls short, for a more careful and complete comparative examination of Kurdish society would contribute much.
Michael Rubin
Mirage: Power, Politics, And the Hidden History of Arabian Oil
For eons, oil oozed out of the ground in Iran and Iraq. But this fascinating account demonstrates just how unexpected was the early oil story in the Arabian Peninsula, specifically, in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. For one thing, leading geologists thought that the prospects of finding oil were slight. As late as 1932, the industry giant Anglo-Persian Oil (the predecessor of BP) concluded, “As a result of our investigations at Kuwait, we have decided to abandon operations in the area.” At the news, a British official in Kuwait wrote, “The only consolation is that if Anglo-Persian does not anticipate finding oil there, no one else is likely to do so.” By that time, Anglo-Persian had explored for oil in fourteen countries but had hardly bothered with the Arabian Peninsula. As a result of dogged research into many original sources, Keating uncovers the real hero of Arabian Peninsula oil, namely, Frank Holmes. Holmes was a New Zealander who disliked Britain’s empire, preferring to work for U.S. oil firms, earning him the determined enmity of British officials. He was also a lifelong friend of Herbert Hoover after the two worked together in their early twenties as mine engineers in Australia.
Keating brings to life the complex double-dealings in which each oil company, each sheikh, each major power, and indeed almost every colonial official was busily conspiring against each other. A major theme of her account is that the main influence in the Arabian Peninsula was not Britain but the British raj. The government of India was of course under British control, but it had its own bureaucracy eager to advance particular Indian interests. India paid the cost of all British Persian Gulf officers, who not surprisingly were as responsive to India as to London. When Gulf Oil got the State Department to complain to the Foreign Office in London about interference against it, the Foreign Office was bewildered since it had nothing to do with Persian Gulf affairs. The Indian criminal and civil codes were imposed on the sheikhs, and appeals from the sheikhs’ courts went to the High Court in Bombay. That did not apply to Saudi Arabia, which was independent, but even it depended on the raj. Keating details how it was British forces and arms that ended the 1920s Ikhwan rebellion that threatened the rule of Saudi Arabia’s founder King Abdul Aziz. Britain went to lengths to keep its role quiet, but Keating dug out the documents indicating it was the force pushing for the elimination of the Ikhwan.
If there is a fault in Keating’s account, it is that her picture of the local Arab actors is nowhere near as rich as that of the foreigners who were so key in shaping the Arabian Peninsula’s oil industry.
Patrick Clawson
Orientalism and the Jews
The editors of this fascinating volume of essays provide an introduction that opens with some deferential references to the achievements of Edward Said and the value of his analysis of Orientalism. However, as the introduction proceeds, one element after another of Edward Said’s argument in Orientalism[1] is courteously queried, or, in some cases, demolished. The value of the Saidian paradigm (or rather competing paradigms) is questionable and it certainly provides an awkward framework for essays dealing with widely contrasting themes in diverse ways. In particular, there is no consensus among the contributors to this volume as to whether Jews should be seen as the perpetrators of Orientalism in the pejorative sense given currency by Said, or as its victims, and, if its victims, all Jews or only Oriental Jews. Come to that, not all the contributors seem happy with that pejorative sense given to Orientalism.
Orientalism and the Jews contains twelve essays and an introduction. There is no space even to list their titles here, but some of the contributions deserve to be singled out for special mention. Ivan Davidson Kalmar’s “Jesus Did Not Wear a Turban” shows how fifteenth-century painters came to use the turban as a marker for the Biblical Jews. Only Jesus, as sort of honorary Aryan, was spared this headgear. Tudor Parfitt’s “The Jew in Colonial Discourse” is a bemusingly erudite and widely researched account of attempts in earlier centuries to find the ten lost tribes of Israel in remote parts of the world, including China, Tahiti, and Burma. The lost tribes were even identified with the Maoris of New Zealand and the Iroquois in America.
“Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze” by John M. Efron is a study of two important Jewish Orientalists and one Jewish historian in the nineteenth century. Efron locates the Orientalist studies of Abraham Geiger and Ignaz Goldziher within the context of their conflicts with their own Jewish communities. Goldziher, in particular, made such crucially important contributions to the development of mainstream academic Orientalism that he is the key figure in its development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The decision of Said not to discuss him is hard to explain.
Michael Berkowitz’s “Rejecting Zion, Embracing the Orient: The Life and Death of Jacob Israel de Haan” studies the career and eventual murder of a man whose life I would have judged to be too strange for fiction were it not for the fact that Stefan Zweig did indeed write a novel about him.
Robert Irwin
Times Literary Supplement
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Politics of Piety consists of two almost entirely disconnected texts. The first is an anthropological field study carried out by the author over a period of two years in three mosques in Cairo where female “preachers” address congregations of women. In Sunni Islam especially, the mosque has generally been an almost exclusively male domain where men congregated, socialized, and commanded all relevant roles: public religious practitioner, prayer leader, preacher, interpreter, and authority. The entry of women into that space within the context of a conservative, regional religious revival is an intriguing topic, and Mahmood seems off to a promising start. The three mosques in her study reflect different slices of Cairo’s socioeconomic spectrum, mirrored in the different styles adopted by their respective da’iyas or female preachers. Unfortunately, for a field study conducted by an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, the effort has regrettable weaknesses. One expects to learn about the personal circumstances of the preachers and some of their followers in some detail. Who are these women? What are their lives like? What impact do their attendance in the prayer group and their presence in the mosque have on their thinking and their lives? There is almost nothing on this. Mahmood quotes from the sermons and discusses some of the topics chosen by the preachers, but otherwise we are left asking ourselves what exactly Mahmood was doing in Cairo during those two years.
Worse, the author has felt obliged to embed this study in a strange political and epistemological construction that makes up the second part of Politics of Piety. She begins with a reasonable starting premise, addressing the wonder of most Western observers at the sight of women rushing in droves to join a movement that officially defines them as subordinate, a mindset that probably poses an obstacle to understanding Islam. Mahmood’s fashionable answer is to claim the women’s conduct offers an effective strategy by which they expand their space and acquire a modicum of status, influence, and authority. That might be correct, but it might also be a projection of a liberal’s view of men and women. An ethnographic study could have found a way out of this dilemma, providing context and recreating the subjective and objective perceptions and motives of Islamist women. But Mahmood fails to do this and instead embeds her slender field work in a bulky Ivy League ivory tower elaboration hard to read and harder to swallow: “the subject in her sexed and gendered materiality is constituted performatively through a reiterated enactment of heterosexual norms which retroactively produce … the putative facticity of sexual difference which serves to further consolidate the heterosexual imperative.” Suchlike may be impressive sentences but they advance understanding little.
Cheryl Benard
RAND Corporation
The Question of Zion
Rose, a Jewish British academic, seeks in this book to “plumb some of the deep components that make up the imaginative world of Zionism.” In so doing, she conflates Zionism with the movement of Shabtai Tzvi in seventeenth-century Europe. She sees Israeli society as trapped in an unreal, messianic fervor. She is critical of Zionism for forming an army to protect Jews in Israel, a project she dates back to the foundation of the first Jewish self-defense units in the early twentieth century. Her book concludes with an attempt to explain what she earlier calls the “collective insanity” of Zionism as a sort of suppressed shame deriving from the Holocaust.
The Question of Zion leaps from minimal evidence to grand assertion, perhaps in part because Rose does not know Hebrew and is reliant on translations and conversations with English-speaking immigrants to Israel. For instance, a single conversation with an American-Israeli couple in a West Bank community, in which they express their love of the landscape but also their fear of Palestinian attack, plus some quotes from a Gershom Scholem letter, lead her to conclude that Zionists are prone to “visionary terror,” or “horror religious.” This, it appears, is the particular mental illness to which Zionists have collectively succumbed.
The book also contains profuse errors. The author claims that Israel “did not talk about the Holocaust before 1967.” But the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann took place in Israel in 1961-62 and sparked enormous debate on the subject. She refers to Israel’s “oft denied dependency” on Palestinian labor when less than 10 percent of the Palestinian labor force of the territories is employed in Israel. She invents a quote by former prime minister Golda Meir, which is in fact an indirect paraphrasing by a British journalist of a remark he thought he remembered Meir making. In Rose’s book, it appears, in quotes, as a direct rendition.
A Question of Zion is, thus, an edifice of strange assertions built upon frequent factual error. The publication by Princeton University Press of such a shoddy and misconceived work is a cause for both regret and concern.
Jonathan Spyer
GLORIA Center
Syria, the United States, and the War on Terror in the Middle East
Despite U.S. military involvement in neighboring Iraq, a clear policy toward Syria has eluded the Bush administration. While Washington played a pivotal role (with Paris) in forcing the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, it remains uncertain about how to deal with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The administration’s mantra is, “We want behavior change, not regime change,” even though everything suggests the Assad regime is incapable of behaving differently than it has—buttressing its domestic despotism by exporting conflict to Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.
Rabil, an academic of Lebanese origins at Florida Atlantic University, explains the background to this situation in his commendable overview of the U.S.-Syrian relationship. His account covers the twenty-seven years after the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war when Syria’s Hafez al-Assad made himself an indispensable factor for a regional settlement. That era came to an end in March 2000 when, meeting with Bill Clinton in Geneva, Assad refused an Israeli offer to withdraw from the Golan Heights, ending Syrian usefulness for peace and so marginalizing the regime in the eyes of U.S. leaders that not even its post-9-11 cooperation versus terrorism could reverse.
Rabil argues that the Bush administration’s pro-democracy message has found an unsympathetic ear in Syria because even secular reformers there share with the regime “an alarming belief that Islamists may attempt to assume power under the banner of democracy.” Perhaps, but this rationale is very constricting since it only perpetuates the Baathist dictatorship. In Washington, too, Islamists are feared more than the weakened Baathists even if Syria’s renewed alliance with Iran could prove dangerous. This has bred a stalemated policy where no effort has been made to examine peaceful ways of removing the Assads, whose continued suffocation of Syrian political life will, anyway, almost certainly strengthen Islamists.
To Rabil’s credit, he analyzes the paradoxes in the U.S.-Syrian relationship the better to understand Syrian motivations. However, it is unfortunate that he did not use his knowledge of Arabic more to present Syrian perspectives on the relationship with the United States. Also, Praeger diminished his able account through poor editing. For example, Rabil’s analysis in several chapters is made redundant by events described in subsequent chapters, clearly written later, so that the whole reads less harmoniously than it should.
Michael Young
Beirut Daily Star
TURKEY’S POLICY TOWARDS NORTHERN IRAQ: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS
Turkish military and political officials watch Iraqi Kurdistan warily, concerned both that Iraqi federalism could set a precedent for similar demands among Turkey’s Kurdish population and that Iraqi Kurdistan could become a safe-haven for Kurdish terrorists to target Turkey.
Park, a senior lecturer in defense studies at King’s College, London, puts together a useful overview of Turkish policy in this short monograph, published for London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. He divides his study into three parts: an overview of “Turkey’s Kurdish complex,” an explanation of the Kurd’s post-Saddam political arrangements, and a charting of possible future scenarios.
Park’s writing style is straightforward, eschewing jargon, and precise with facts and figures. His history is dispassionate although he relies far too heavily on secondary sources. For example, he quotes an article by Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, about the political attitudes of Iraqi Kurds, seemingly unaware that Galbraith is a paid advisor to the Iraqi Kurdish government.[2] Still, his outline of competing Kurdish and Turkish claims to northern Iraq is useful as is his coverage in more recent years of the ever-shifting alliances between Kurdish groups and Turkey. Of less utility is his superficial coverage of U.S.-Turkish disputes in the run-up to the war. Absent here is mention, let alone discussion, of influential Turkish officials and their role in prewar diplomacy.
Looking at the postwar period, Park discusses Turkey’s relationship with the Iraqi Turkoman Front, Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) “fighters” and “militants”—he exhibits the same moral confusion of many of his compatriots by avoiding the term terrorists—and traces the growth of antagonism between Ankara and Washington over U.S. unwillingness to confront the PKK. A section on integration of Kurds within Turkey is weak in its overemphasis on the PKK and ignorance that, for those who abide by law, there is no limit to integration. Was not Ýsmet Ýnönü, the second president of Turkey, Kurdish? Many subsequent ministers, parliamentarians, and generals have been as well.
Park outlines various scenarios for Iraq’s future. Either Iraq will stay together or it won’t. Iraqi Kurdish parties will cement control over additional territory either peacefully or with ethnic cleansing. Should Iraq fracture, it will be the main course in a regional feeding frenzy. While Park does not believe, short of Iraq’s total collapse, that Turkish intervention is likely given international reaction to such a move, he urges Iraqi Kurds and Turkey to further their cooperation. Missing is an acknowledgment that such cooperation requires a decision by Iraqi Kurdish officials to stop providing terrorists safe-haven in their territory.
Park’s book might be a useful reference for the uninitiated but, based as it is on secondary sources available on-line, a quick Google search might be nearly as useful and quite a bit cheaper.
Michael Rubin
Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation
One should never overlook the horrors of peace. Between 1750 and 1815, according to the best modern historians, the “Barbary” states—actually the North African states of the Ottoman Empire—took as many as a million and a half Americans and Europeans into slavery. These monarchies—today’s Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia—also took part in a north-south version of the Atlantic African slave trade, but their attitude to their “white” or “Christian” captives was slightly different. For a price, these could be redeemed. For a higher tariff, the pirate states would agree to abstain from taking ships or hostages in the first place. This latter price had a tendency to increase the more often it was paid.
There was also a slave-market at Malta for North Africans, operated by Christian merchants, because this conflict had been going on intermittently, in the Mediterranean, ever since the battle of Lepanto. But when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams waited upon a Barbary ambassador in London, in the years after the revolution, they pointed out that the United States had no quarrel with the Muslim world. Oh, yes it did, replied the ambassador. The Qur’an gave permission, as of right, to plunder and enslave all unbelievers.
The Barbary states probably had an imperfect idea of the potential strength of the United States. At all events, they were surprised when, beginning with the Jefferson administration, naval squadrons began to appear off their coasts and to demand, at cannon-point, the liberation of the hostages as well as free trade and free passage from the Atlantic. This was America’s first war overseas and the first time that the Stars and Stripes were planted on foreign soil. I had known that the first line of the Marine Corps hymn, “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” derived from this episode. I had not known, until I read London’s book, that Francis Scott Key adapted The Star-Spangled Banner from a song he had written in celebration of William Eaton’s victory over the sultan of Tripoli in 1805.
There is much else to be learned from London’s impressive study, which not only describes the campaign itself in enthralling detail but also analyzes the war within the war: the many domestic disputes and political quarrels that delayed final victory. (Mr. Jefferson does not come off as well as I had previously thought.) Here is an essential piece of U.S. history that—like the name Stephen Decatur—is no longer taught in school. By the end of the conflict, not only did the Muslim world know that it had to reckon with the United States but so did the European powers who—having long paid the “tribute” to Barbary—had just exhausted themselves at Waterloo. Moreover, the new republic had acquired a battle-hardened navy and marine corps, which was to be of great service in the war of 1812 and beyond. Victory in Tripoli was in every sense a hinge event.
Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair columnist and author of Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
The View from the Fence: The Arab-Israeli Conflict from the Present to Its Roots
In this clearly written, provocative, and well-balanced study of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Lochery (as the title implies) sets as his starting point the Israeli security fence. After noting that the idea for the fence had been first suggested by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Lochery, while acknowledging that the fence does serve to stop terrorists, asserts that it will not serve as a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Throughout the book, he is equally critical of Arab and Israeli policies. He raises serious questions about Israeli intelligence services in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war, especially in the cases of Iraq and Libya , about the writings of the conflict’s revisionist historians, such as Avi Shlaim, which he calls “a little far-fetched,” and about the policies of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Given the brevity of the book and the enormity of the subject, Lochery presents a number of aspects of the conflict superficially, and occasionally, erroneously, and this is the main weakness of The View from the Fence. Thus, for example, he cites the Sinai agreement of 1975 as “the first such agreement between Egypt and Israel,” overlooking the fact that the Sinai I agreement of 1974 preceded the Sinai II agreement of 1975. Similarly, he lists the number of Israeli settlers in Gaza before the 2005 disengagement as 18,000 instead of 8,000.
Lochery is not afraid to state his opinions, some of which are outside the consensus of Middle East scholars. While this makes the book quite stimulating, sometimes his assertions may be a bit questionable. Thus, he asserts that Israel would not have invaded Lebanon in 1982 except for the “collective Israeli trauma caused by the 1973 war.” One could make another case, such as the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization had formed a state within a state in southern Lebanon that was threatening Israel and that the Arabs were divided over the Iran-Iraq war, thus providing Israel both cause and opportunity.
In sum, readers will find the book of more than passing interest due to Lochery’s strong opinions, but the book cannot be recommended for newcomers to the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Robert O. Freedman
Baltimore Hebrew University and Johns Hopkins University
[1] Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
[2] Brendan O’Leary, et al, The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 341.
*Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2007
http://www.meforum.org/article/1666
Cross-posted with permission
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