Review: "Storm from the East," by Milton Viorst

Originally published in 2006, Milton Viorst’s Storm from the East: The Struggle Between the Arab World and the Christian West (Modern Library) is an invaluable, brief survey of Middle Eastern history from the advent of Islam in the 7th century to the still-reverberating effects of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in the first part of the 21st. You’d be hard pressed to find a 178-page book that so accessibly summarizes the main currents of Arab history while intelligently analyzing those currents’ origins in their Arab context or, since the 19th century, as reactions to western designs on the region.

Viorst ambitiously aims to answer the basic questions of the Middle East’s various conflicts with the West and within itself. He’s authoritatively up to the task without oversimplifying it. A journalist by trade (his freelance by-line regularly appeared in the major American news and general interest magazines from the 1970s to the 1990s, and as a staff writer for The New Yorker), this is his sixth book on the Middle East and its religions, going back to Sands of Sorrow: Israel’s Journey from Independence (1987). Viorst likes to challenge conventional assumptions. In Sands of Sorrow, he argued that Israel lost its moral advantage over Arab aggression after the 1967 Six-Day War by turning Israel’s astounding victory into a license for aggression and occupation with American backing. In Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World (1994), he presents an equally searching analysis of the weaknesses in Arab nationalism and contradictions of Arab identity while drawing a portrait of the region’s layered politics that defy western stereotype.

Storm from the East is a synthesis of history and of Viorst’s own vast experience in the region, with this lesson as a starting point: “For the West to imagine it can impose its values on the East is a huge miscalculation. For the East to imagine the zealotry of its warriors can intimidate the West is naïve. Another lesson is that neither has the power to choose the other’s course.” That’s not so much another lesson as the same lesson differently stated—as it has been restated, to the West’s and East’s chagrin, over the centuries, with neither side yet learning the lesson.

The title Viorst gives his book, however, is a misnomer. Aside from the rise and rapid spread of Islam to the rim of Europe and the heart of South Asia in the 7th and 8th centuries, and the Mongol invasions of the 13th, the storms Viorst refers to have not been from the East, but almost exclusively from the West, or at least against the East: the Crusades in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries; the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, British and French colonialism and mandates in the 19th and first part of the 20th century, the Soviet and American proxy war over the Middle East during the Cold War (whether through a series of Arab-Israeli wars or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979), and finally, American hegemony over Iraq and the Arab Peninsula since the first Gulf War in 1991.

Arab humiliations along the way have been frequent, deep and never forgotten. Western designs have been unrelenting, and tone deaf to the humiliations inflicted. The resulting clash is less one of civilizations than of mutually disdained values. As Viorst reports, “A remarkably candid Pentagon analysis has recently argued that the ‘war on terror’—as [President Bush] named the conflict he has promoted since 9/11—was a cover: America, it says, is not responding to the threat of a rival power, as it did in the Cold War. It is ‘seeking to convert a broad movement within Islamic civilization to accept the value structure of Western modernity.’ This judgment, by the Pentagon’s own analysis, puts its finger on what some scholars have designated as a clash between Christian and Islamic civilizations.”

In other words, it’s not the West’s freedoms the East resents, but its policies. The resentment is seeped in what Viorst, somewhat too generally, lumps into his first chapter under the heading of “Memory”—a chapter that encompasses 13 centuries, from the rise of Islam during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime through 1900. Memory is a potent Arab elixir, not without reason. It didn’t take long for Islam to establish itself as the world’s preeminent civilization. By then the Roman Empire was an ash heap. The Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted each other through war. Islam’s expansion succeeded more by default than by design. By the 10th century, Islam was unrivaled.

“Baghdad in that era,” Viorst writes, “took pride in its astronomers and mathematicians, architects and poets, and the natural scientists who advanced the frontiers of medicine. This was the Arabs’ Golden Age, but it ended abruptly, leaving a nostalgia that is also embedded in the Arabs’ DNA. The loss has imbued them with feelings of self-reproach and a nationalism notable less for its pride than for its anger.”

Spending just 18 pages to describe the vertiginous rise and eventual sclerosis of Islamic civilization forcibly papers over the how and the why of both monumental developments. But Viorst is more concerned with setting up the scene of the storms to come, beginning with Napoleon Bonaparte’s snide, ironic declaration to the people of Egypt when he landed there in 1798: “You will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! I have come to restore your rights.”

Rights never materialized. What Arabs saw beginning in the late 19th century, however, is an influx of Christian missionaries, then, following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the carving up of the Middle East between France and Britain and the drawing of arbitrary boundaries that took no heed of ethnic, religious or tribal groups. Viorst ably describes one of the great modern foundations of Arab mistrust of the West: the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which the British and the French used to establish their hegemony over the region, promising Arab (and Palestinian) sovereignty only to renege on their promise.