Book review: The Arabs: A History

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:44

BY EUGENE ROGAN Allen Lane, 513pp, £25

PIRATES take over North Africa, armies clash over the holiest of Islamic sites, the great western powers threaten to bomb each other in a squabble over the holiest sites of Christendom; a pigeon shoot in 1906 sets fire to nationalism in Egypt, three misdirected flicks of a flywhisk and the French have the excuse to default on their debts and seize Algeria for a century and more; great empires rise and fall and some are declared without ever quite happening. Cotton excites the West almost as much as oil would in the 20th century. The history Eugene Rogan has to tell is bloody, various and fascinating, and, very often and rather shamingly, unfamiliar.

He puts back the detail we're inclined to forget: the Iraqis rising against the British occupiers in 1920, a common memory for Iraqi schoolchildren, like 1776 for Americans (did Tony Blair know that?); the way the very idea of democracy was dishonoured again and again by colonial machinations (is Kabul listening? is Washington?); the fact that technology didn't just mean steamships and railways in the 19th century, it meant such enormous public debt that Arab territories answered to the cities where their bankers lived – London, Paris, Berlin. Debt and progress cost the Ottoman empire its taxes on fish, salt, tobacco and so the whole empire's independence. Modernity has not been kind to most of the Arab world.

It led to the rackety, patronising 19th-century sport between embassies: who could make local people pay most when things went wrong for Europeans? Some Austrian trader reckoned a late train spoiled his silk cocoons; the Austrians snatched 700,000 francs. A steamship company on the Nile went bust, but the European shareholders didn't feel the pain; the Egyptian taxpayer sent huge cheques. Anything that went wrong in the Middle East could only be the fault of the Middle East. Egypt's ruler insisted on closing windows when talking to a European; "If this gentleman catches cold," he said, "it will cost me 10,000."

Rogan understands the tension between faith and the principles based on someone else's faith, especially when you're a Muslim and the Christians seem to hold all the cards – and all the guns. There's a telling moment in the 1880s when the Ottoman sultan is told to abolish slavery, which he can't, because the Quran tells owners to treat slaves well, allow them to marry, sometimes free them; God permits what London wants to forbid. The sultan rather cleverly suppressed the trade in black slaves without saying a word about slavery itself.

And Rogan is perfectly level-headed when he tells how Israel was founded, a subject that's the literary equivalent of handling high-voltage cables with your bare hands. He points out that in 1947, Arabs comprised two-thirds of Palestine's population, owners of 94 per cent of the land and 80 per cent of the arable farmland; Palestine was not, as some propagandists like to say, empty. Partition took away the best land, but even then Ben-Gurion reckoned the land might not be enough, and blocked the first Arab peace initiatives. He points out that the Israeli forces always outnumbered the Arab armies, as later they would always outgun and outbomb the Arabs; Israel was not exactly David up against Goliath.

He also tells the story of the exodus, bringing Jews from the murder camps to a proper future in Israel, and he emphasises that one of the Arab military goals in 1948 was to prevent the formation of a workable Palestinian state, which nobody except Palestinians wanted. He tries to see the picture whole.

But what makes his book so valuable is the way he takes the story on, to the unfamiliar business of what the Palestine issue did to Arab nations – the coups and killings that, within months, broke out in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, the grievance that led in time to the Middle East's first known suicide bombing plot. The plotters belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, outraged by the loss of Muslim land, and they meant to send a man wearing a dynamite belt to get rid of their enemy: not any Israeli, but the Egyptian president, Nasser.

All this puts substance and spice in an incredibly ambitious book, to which there's only one serious objection: truth in advertising. The Arabs: A History, isn't about the farms, pots, families, music or culture of the Arabs, and when we hear Arab voices we hear them talking politics. This book is actually a political history of the Middle East since 1516, wonderfully inclusive and articulate and knowledgeable, pretty much indispensable, but not quite what it says on the cover.

True, it starts in gaudy CinemaScope – on a battlefield where 40 descendants of the prophet Muhammad join Sufis and a Mamluk army dressed in silks with gilded weapons, a medieval spectacle just waiting for defeat which duly comes – "a time to turn an infant's hair white and to melt iron in its fury". Unfortunately for the world where Arabs lived, the winning side, the modern side, is Ottoman, an imperial force out of faraway Istanbul.

Nobody seems to have minded much that Arabs were not being ruled by Arabs, or even from Arabia, as long as the rulers were proper Muslims: any empire was supposed to promote faith and the morals and institutions that go with it. But a pattern was being set: huge, unstable empires, Ottoman, British or French, invite outside interference, inside arrogance and weird defensive moves.

That interference, over time, becomes a history of lost opportunities, idiocies and insults, the history of the Arabs as we know it, a history seemingly written by the will of almost everybody else.

Rogan wants to let Arabs speak about all this, especially Arab women; he's no Middle East expert industriously recycling the half-truths of foreign offices and travellers. He understands very well the unmanageable bagginess of his subject, the wildly various groups who all write Arabic, a variety at least as great as – say – the populations of China, people who can read each other on the page but not always understand each other's talk.

The trouble is that the very notion of "a history" of "the Arabs" means imposing a western shape on the past. Eight centuries of Arab history are missing: half the book is devoted to what happened after the Second World War – when the founding of Israel, the break-up of empires, the boom in oil and the national challenges to cozy post-imperial arrangements like the Suez Canal defined Arabs as a western problem. After 9/11, they were perhaps the most pressing problem of all.

And yet: even when the modern kind of Arab nationalism took root, it was in Nasser's Egypt, a land where most people, as Rogan writes, "would not have identified themselves as Arabs" at all. Looking out from Cairo, the Arabs were desert Bedouin, or the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula; and Cairenes, like Parisians, don't have a lot of time for provincials.

Again and again, the local loyalties of Arab leaders were more important than their sense of being Arabs United. In North Africa even the notion of nations seems to start only when the Europeans came in shooting and burning and occupying; before that, you belonged to a town, a tribe, maybe a region or else to the whole wide community of Muslims, the umma. The tension between the great flagpole notions of an Arab nation and the loyalties that rulers and ruled actually felt is a constant issue through Rogan's story. It helps explain why belonging to Islam rather than your local nation comes to seem not just desirable, it's almost the most practical choice of identity – which may be hard for secular westerners to grasp.

For Rogan's subject is how the Arab world got to its present sad state (the kingdoms of the Gulf excepted, of course, at least until the recent interruption in their various booms). When post-colonial dreams of nationalism and independence meant voting for national boundaries drawn and imposed by the West, it's not surprising nationalism lost its gloss – or that nations fell to the only thuggish, dynastic rulers who could hold them together. The one constructive force left is the long and moral connection between Islam and power; and what the Islamic Republic of Iran teaches the Arab world is that Islam can beat off enemies and keep power like no other force. But this is the very force that the West views with horror.

Rogan wants us to understand, which means heaping up the detail; the book is deft, but also demanding. It does have, every so often, a dry flick of humour. Here, for example, is a ruler of Syria resignedly describing the people he rules in the 1950s: "Fifty per cent of the Syrians consider themselves national leaders," he says, "25 per cent think they are prophets. Ten per cent imagine they are gods."

For four long centuries, as Rogan shows, that certainty – or ambition, or megalomania, or self-deception or faith, according to how you see it – has been the victim of circumstances: one damned circumstance after another. What's sad is that, today, there are so many people still waiting for the circumstances to change.