Jizz, blood and power

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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He illustrates his handful of themes with some memorable scenes. Writing on Arab adjustment to modernity, he describes a group of women discussing how they now make yoghurt in a washing machine when before they used to have to swing it about in goatskins.

When I intervened to ask what this did for the next load of clothes, they looked at me as though I was mad. ‘That goes in the other machine, Mark…’

Blood, he emphasises early on, is absolutely critical to the Arab identity:

Lineage rises behind him in great genealogies of forebears with peaks, like mountains going up to Abraham, and, in front, the hopes of descendants running before him like a river branching out into a delta, spreading and diversifying until slipping into a wide and limitless sea.