Best of Times, Worst of Times by Laqueur Walter;

Author:Laqueur, Walter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

CHAPTER 5

A Middle East Education

or, Reflections on Arabia, Israel, Zionism, and Antisemitism

Having left Europe in late 1938, I received my political education during the next fifteen years in the Middle East. Middle Eastern politics seemed relatively uncomplicated at the time. Of the Arab countries, only Iraq and Saudi Arabia were quasi-independent; Palestine was a British Mandate under the League of Nations; France was running North Africa and Syria as well as Lebanon; Italy was in Libya; and Egypt was a monarchy but the British had the final say. Yemen was far away, and no one knew much about it except that it was a kingdom and that the British still maintained a base in Aden.

However, even before the outbreak of World War II, during the seemingly stable period, there was a multitude of ethnic groups and religions to be studied. Older and wiser men warned me against getting too deeply involved in the problems of the area for it was a maze, and a lifetime of study might not be sufficient to gain a solid knowledge. In addition to Hebrew and Arabic I would have to acquire a working knowledge of at least one other language, Turkish or Persian. I had bought an Arab grammar while still in Germany, but it did not take me very long to realize that the literary language was not of great help in conversations on even the least complicated topics.

There were a few learned books about Islam and Turkey, and more about explorers in Arabia, but little on Arab politics. The major European and American newspapers had correspondents or stringers in the region, but, except for the Italian Oriente Moderno, there were no journals covering the contemporary Middle East. I learned that Maronites and Druze had been fighting in the nineteenth century, but there was nothing on the families, clans, and tribes that were of great importance. As for Palestine, the media reported that there were two parties—one headed by the Husseinis and the other by the Nashashibis—but this again proved to be a great simplification. There were a very few novels with versions of Islamic fundamentalism as a background. A.E.W Mason’s wildly popular Four Feathers, which was also adapted for the cinema, dealt with the Mahdi revolt in the Sudan and the battle of Omdurman in 1898, but these events seemed very distant indeed. Howling dervishes were apparently part of the Oriental scene, but it was not a scene one knew.

During the years that followed I lived in the Arab quarters of Jerusalem, among Bedouins and Arab villagers. As a journalist I went to Cairo and Beirut, and I acquired some knowledge of the Arab way of life. I mixed with simple people; intellectuals I did not know, and members of the leading families I met, if at all, only at press conferences. It was therefore only natural that my perspective was somewhat different from that of upper-class Arabs, such as Edward Said, whose books I read in later years, who had grown up in very different circumstances and later gone to elite schools and universities.

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