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.
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