Martin Kramer
(1)（http://www.martinkramer.org）
Six greatest stories ever told about the Middle East
by Martin Kramer in Sandbox on 31 March 2014
1. Arabia of Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence (1926). I rather like Charles Hill’s depiction of Lawrence as someone “who wrote himself into history as a fictional character leading Arab tribes in revolt against the Ottoman Turks.” (Hill calls the book ” a novel traveling under the cover of autobiography.”) But the book lives, and is even said to have inspired U.S. counter-insurgency theorists in Iraq.
2. Arise, ye Arabs!
The Arab Awakening by George Antonius (1938). This purported exposé of British double-dealing provided all the pretext that Britain needed to retreat from its support for the Jewish National Home in Palestine, culminating in the 1939 White Paper. The British commander of forces in Palestine in 1946 said he kept the book “on my bedside table.” It also became the bible of American sympathizers of Arab nationalism. “We had our revered texts,” wrote the American Arabist Malcolm Kerr, “such as The Arab Awakening.” It has been refuted on many grounds, but while its influence doesn’t endure, it lingers.
3. God Gave This Land…
Exodus by Leon Uris (1958). Recently I asked a class of grad students in Mideast studies whether they’d heard of it, and I didn’t get a single nod. But this fictionalized account of Israel’s founding was said to have been the biggest seller since Gone with the Wind, propelled by a blockbuster motion picture starring Paul Newman. The novel, confessed journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, “set me, and many others, on a course for aliyah, and it made American Jews proud of Israel’s achievements. On the other hand, it created the impression that all Arabs are savages.” Arabs have been searching for their equivalent of Exodus ever since.
4. Snake Charmer
Orientalism by Edward Said (1978). Sigh… I suppose “baneful” is the best adjective. No book has done more to obscure the Middle East, and impart a sense of guilt to anyone who has had the audacity to represent it. The French scholar Jacques Berque (praised by Said) put it succinctly: Said had done “a disservice to his countrymen in allowing them to believe in a Western intelligence coalition against them.” But the book gave rise to a cottage industry in Western academe, and helped tilt the scales in academic appointments. Its influence may be waning, but it’s still on syllabi everywhere.
5. Fit to Print and Reprint
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman (1989). It spent nearly twelve months on the New York Times bestseller list and won the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction. Coming in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1987 intifada, it captured the “falling-out-of-love-with-Israel” mood, although it cut no slack for the Arabs either. Friedman has said he keeps threatening to bring out a new edition with this one-line introduction: “Nothing has changed.”
6. How the East Was Lost
What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis (2002). The book appeared in the aftermath of 9/11, and it rocketed to the New York Times bestseller list, where it spent 18 weeks. Lewis used his broad historical repertoire to explain “why they hate us.” (In a word: resentment, at failed modernization and an absence of freedom.) Lewis later summarized his view thus: “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.” Some in Washington took him literally.
(2)（http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/7T5D8XG7URQ5）
Ten Best Books on the Middle East
by Martin Kramer (Jerusalem)
1. The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Canto original series) by Fouad Ajami
2. Islam in European Thought by Albert Habib Hourani
3. Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani: A Political Biography by Nikki R. Keddie
4. The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies by Elie Kedourie
5. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh, With a New Preface for 2003 by Gilles Kepel
6. The Arab Cold War: Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-1970 by Malcolm H. Kerr
7. The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Studies in Middle Eastern History) by Bernard Lewis
8. Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World by Kanan Makiya
9. A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered by Kamal S. Salibi
10. Nasser and His Generation by P. J. Vatikiotis
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