Review: "The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage," by David Lamb

David Lamb spent 25 years roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times (and collecting eight Pulitzer-Prize nominations along the way). He spent three of those years — 1982-1985 — as the Times’ Middle East bureau chief, based in Cairo. The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage isn’t just a summation of those experiences. Two decades after it was originally published (by Random House in 1987, revised in 2002), the book remains a lucid introduction to the main themes of Middle Eastern politics, history and social issues that most westerners find intractable.

Soon after arriving in Cairo, Lamb’s toilet started gurgling, then overflowing. He’d been given the name of a fix-it man, Mr. Darwish, whom he reached by phone after eight or nine tries. Mr. Darwish promised to be there within 10 days. He was there on the 12th. He jiggered the toilet with some string and tape, watched it flush perfectly, and took the equivalent of $10 for his pains. Two weeks later the string broke. Mr. Darwish returned, fixed the toilet again, and took home another $10. And so on for the duration of Lamb’s stay. At first Lamb was none too pleased. But just as he eventually learned to set his internal clock to Arab practices — Friday off instead of Sunday, waking up each morning before sunrise to the muezzin’s call to prayer — Lamb learned that he could not hope to understand the Middle East through the prism of western modernism. He would have to understand it on Arab terms, in Arab time.

Mr. Darwish, he writes, “kept repairing my toilet and the toilet kept breaking, and that no longer bothered me. I realized it was never going to function properly.” He realized, too, that the Middle East itself was not about to “function properly.” It’s a world of different mentalities and dynamics that cannot be understood in translation alone. Understanding requires getting inside the Arab perspective the way, say, understanding deep space requires a quantum leap past Earth’s extremely limited naked-eye perspective. It’s possible, but it takes effort.

Fortunately for the reader, Lamb does most of the work, as in this passage that ably sums up the chasm between the West and the Middle East:

The prevailing Western perception of the Arab was captured nicely not long ago in a political cartoon in a Boston newspaper. It showed a robed and bearded figure kneeling in prayer, and over his head, in heavy black letters, was a single word: HATE! Once Jews, blacks and other minorities were subjected to similar degradation; today, only Arabs and homosexuals are still fair game for media bashing. The Arabs, I think, are singled out primarily because, unlike most other peoples if the developing world, they have resisted assimilating Western ways or capitulating to Western values. Thus they are seen as a threat and, armed with oil and the ability to make war or peace with Israel, are thought to be in a position to translate that threat into actions that affect the industrialized world. The West feels comfortable with Israel because Israelis are perceived to be Europeans; it accepts the African or Indian who dresses, thinks and acts like a Westerner; it considered Japan civilized only after Japanese businessmen put on a necktie and began speaking English. But the Arab remains always the Arab, a man held hostage by religion and culturally obsessed with identity.

No wonder Lamb titles his first chapter “A Collision of Cultures.” Nor is it surprising today that, in Europe as in the United States, xenophobia’s nastiest hisses are directed at Arabs. It’s far from a one-way street, however.

The reason “The Arabs” is still current more than 20 years after it was researched and written speaks as well of Lamb’s perceptive analyses as it speaks ill of the Middle East, if unintentionally so. If one thing can be said with dismaying authority about the region in the last third of the 20th century and the first shards of the 21st, it’s that too little is changing there, that the few keep holding on to too much power and wealth while investing too little on education and, with selective exceptions, inviting too little investment, at the expense of too many.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria and Algeria, and to a lesser extent Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, are the same authoritarian regimes they were when Lamb was reporting about them two decades ago. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same yo-yo of brutality and retribution that it was a quarter century ago. (“The real victims are the Palestinian people themselves,” Lamb writes. “Their leaders have failed them, their Arab brethren have deserted them.” Little has changed.)

Lebanon is the same grab-bag of foreign meddling from Syria, Iran, Israel, Palestinians and the United States, and of the Lebanese’s own incapacity for self-rule, that it was in the depths of its civil war, when Lamb saw Lebanon at its self-dismembering worst. “Lebanon was dead as a nation everywhere but in the history books,” Lamb writes. It hasn’t risen from the dead so much as made a perverse peace with them.

Iran has substituted one authoritarian regime, that of the Shah, for another, that of the Ayatollahs, although Iran’s Shiite revolution continues to be the single-most powerful force for change, much of it negative, some of it misunderstood by the West, in the Middle East. Iran doesn’t figure in the book except peripherally, Iran not being an Arab nation; but the exclusion is, I think, one of the book’s unfortunate blind spots, Iran being very much part of what defines the Arab world’s reactionary dynamics. Lamb doesn’t hesitate to devote pages of analysis to the enormous role the Soviets and the Americans were playing in the Middle East. Iran, then as now, has been no less of a player.

Some of Lamb’s focuses are inevitably outdated. The Soviet Union is gone, so is the immediate threat of a nuclear conflagration over a Middle Eastern crisis (notwithstanding President George W. Bush’s threat to Iran of “World War III,” if Iran doesn’t desist of its nuclear ambitions). Saddam Hussein’s police state, vividly portrayed in these pages in all its police-state absurdities (“Iraqis are not permitted to own a typewriter, a machine the government fears could be used to churn out propaganda”) is a useful reminders that Saddam Hussein’s really was a one-man axis of evil,