Tom Tiddler’s ground

For many people in the West, the Middle East is a source of perplexity and foreboding. Home to morose despotisms, political violence and a thoroughly ruined natural environment, the Middle East now sends us its refugees, headscarves and, most notably since 11 September 2001, violence. The peoples of the Middle East reply that their lives and political arrangements have been mutilated beyond repair by Western exploitation and bullying.

This conversation, never very illuminating, has become even less so of late. Western reporters in the Middle East, restricted in their movements but relatively safe in their persons till the early 1980s, now find some stories simply too dangerous to report. In Western universities, the foolish and sinister squabble over ‘Orientalism’ has restricted discussion of the Middle East to platitudes or lies. Meanwhile, ordinary Arabs and Iranians have probably never so distrusted and feared the West and its governments.

Fred Halliday, Professor of International Relations, has studied the Middle East since the 1960s and was for years fascinated by the now defunct People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. A disciple of the brilliant French Marxian, Maxime Rodinson, Halliday made his name with a self-assured account of Saudi Arabia and Iran and their Western supporters, Arabia Without Sultans, in 1974.

His Marxism survives in a love of the grand generality and a devotion to history without, as it were, any of the old confidence that she will turn out for the best. The Middle East in International Relations is a good-humoured but pessimistic book.

It has two purposes. The first is to apply to the Middle East the theories of the academic social science known as International Rel- ations on the principle, which sounds sensible enough, that if theory can’t explain that unlucky region, then it ain’t much of a theory.