The last five hundred years

In the aftermath of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, an elderly Arab from the Gulf told me that he thought it was the work of American agents.

In the aftermath of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, an elderly Arab from the Gulf told me that he thought it was the work of American agents. The claim, however fantastic, seemed perfectly logical to him, for it gave the US an excuse to intervene in the Middle East and Asia’s oil-rich regions. Eugene Rogan’s book explains why that Arab, and Arabs generally, feel so suspicious of the West.

There has been a plethora of books about the Middle East and its people as we have struggled to understand why the towers came down: biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, histories of the Arab link between the ancient world and the European Renaissance and descriptions of periods of glorious cooperation and deadly conflict between Arabs and Europeans. Eugene Rogan’s book is none of these.

Nor is it a definitive history of the Arabs. Rogan’s mentor, the late Albert Hourani, fulfilled that function with A History of the Arab Peoples, which told the story from the rise of Islam to the 20th century. Rogan, director of Oxford University’s Middle East Centre, has a more modern focus and looks at the history of the Arabs from the rise of the Ottoman empire at the beginning of the 16th century to today.

The start date is significant. The Ottoman Turks were the first foreign power to rule the Arabs and their increasingly negligent occupation began a period of decline that resulted in one of the great 19th-century clichés: the lazy Arab nation, happy to abdicate responsibility for its welfare in return for a comfortable divan and a bubbling waterpipe. Rogan looks at this period of Arab eclipse to understand the frustration, humiliation and widespread disillusionment felt by many Arabs, reduced to throwing shoes where they once ruled a considerable part of the world.

The five centuries separating the Iraqi who threw his shoe at President Bush from the Arabs who were defeated by the Ottoman army in the early 1500s make for a sad and bloody story. The Turks, British and French were the main foreign players in the region for most of this time and, as Rogan makes clear, their interests were not in the Arabs. Trade, tax and strategic concerns shaped Ottoman rule, with sultans enjoying the added kudos of calling themselves the protectors of the Two Holy Places, Mecca and Medina. Strategic interests were behind the European encroachment, as the Ottomans became too weak to control their regions; so what started with Napoleon invading Egypt in 1798 led to the Anglo-French carve-up of the Middle East after the first world war. Rogan uses first-hand Arab sources to relate these events and their calamitous consequences: the division of the region into a score of states, one of them being Israel, none of them being Palestinian. The emergence of Israel and its immediate conflict with the Arabs has rarely been as succinctly, as level-headedly or as powerfully told.

By avoiding going back to the beginning of the Arab story, Rogan may have wished to sidestep the internal divisions that have dogged his subject, at least since the rift between Sunni and Shia erupted, following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. But those divisions cannot be kept out of the narrative for, as Rogan tells it, they are one of the main reasons for this people’s failure since the 16th century. Describing the common mistrust that dogged the Arab states as they went to war with Israel in 1948, he reveals the impossibility of the dream of Arab unity.

Neither a knee-jerk response to the calamity of post-9/11 events nor a definitive history of the Arabs, Rogan’s brilliant book is clear-eyed and balanced, and pulls no punches as it explains how the Arabs came to be where they are today, both socially and politically. It is a story from which neither they, nor we in the West, emerge with any credit. Mixing academic rigour with a lively narrative style, The Arabs: A History is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the background to the mess that the Arabs find themselves in and will, no doubt, stand as the definitive companion piece to Hourani’s account of Arab history.