Had this excellent little book been available to American policy makers in 2002, say, it might have provided a usefully sobering corrective to the exuberance of the neocons. They wanted to rebuild the Middle East in their own image. Mark Allen would have judged that mission hubristic, inappropriate and, one suspects, doomed to failure.
Ignorance of the Arab world, he laments, remains a striking feature in the West. ‘The number of outsiders who have a working knowledge of Arabic and a personal depth of experience of the region is tiny in comparison with its present significance to our own well-being.’ Five years after the Middle East crashed into our consciousness, that unfortunately remains the case.
The flood of books that followed 11 September has tended to focus on politics and terrorism. Arabs offers a much more personal view, gleaned from Allen having travelled the length and breadth of the Arab world, from metropolitan Cairo to the goat-haired tents of the Hijaz. He is out to capture what he calls the ‘jizz’ or spirit of the Arab, and in his thoughtful, sometimes whimsical, invariably elegant prose, succeeds remarkably well.
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