Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The Arabs: A History

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/31/arabs-eugene-rogan-robert-irwin
#  The Arabs: A History
# by Eugene Rogan
# 600pp,
# Allen Lane,
# £23.00
Early on in his book Eugene Rogan, who teaches the modern history of the
Middle East, confesses that in "any free and fair election in the Arab
world today, I believe the Islamists would win hands down". Again,
towards the end of this engrossing and capacious book, he reiterates
that the "inconvenient truth about the Arab world today is that, in any
free and fair election, those parties most hostile to the United States
are most likely to win".
Today, Arab fear of the west and resentment at the humiliating and
socially damaging effects of westernisation fuels Islamism and the
spread of terrorism. How have we come to this pass? Rogan answers this
question by tracing the history of Arab hopes and ultimate
disappointments from the early 16th century, when the Ottomans conquered
most of the Arab world, to the present day. This is primarily a modern
history, and the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries are briskly treated.
That was an age when the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire were ruled
by despotic local kleptocrats. In The Arab Awakening (1938), the
Palestinian historian George Antonius wrote of the period: "Sensational
figures stalk across the stage of these three centuries, now martial and
heroic like Fakhruddin and Daher al-Umar, now merely brutal and
sanguinary like Ahmad al-Jazzar and the Mamlukes of Cairo; but always
solitary and self-seeking. They appear and disappear in tedious
succession . . . never overthrowing or seriously threatening the hold
which Soliman the Magnificent had fastened on the Arab world."
Rogan's narrative slows as he details the growing familiarity of the
Arabs and their Turkish, Circassian or Albanian masters with European
manners and technology, and the expansion of commercial links with
Europe. He proceeds to the opening decades of the 20th century, when the
Ottoman grip over the Arab provinces actually strengthened, thanks in
part to the spread of railways and telegraphy. But Turkey's defeat in
the first world war, coupled with ambiguous promises by British
politicians and starry-eyed pronouncements by Woodrow Wilson, led early
pan-Arab nationalists to believe their moment had come.
Their disappointment was bitter when the victorious British and French
carved up the Arab lands as spoils of war. It was only in the 50s and
60s that the British and French moment in the Middle East came to an
end. However, the triumph of local Arab nationalism in Egypt, Lebanon,
Tunisia and elsewhere meant the abandonment of the pan-Arab dream. There
were other disappointments, of which the catastrophic defeat of the Arab
armies in Palestine in 1948 was the most obvious.
Algerian independence was achieved at the cost of a remarkably
hard-fought and bloody war. The attempt by Egypt and Syria to form a
United Arab Republic was a disaster. So was Nasser's intervention in the
Yemeni civil war. Above all, the socialist policies pursued by
nationalist regimes such as those of Nasser in Egypt and the FLN in
Algeria failed to deliver prosperity. That, and the increasingly brutal
methods of repression employed by secular nationalist regimes, has
inspired many to place their hopes in the Muslim Brotherhood and other
Islamist groups.
The vivid narrative of The Arabs is based on frequent recourse to
quotations from witnesses to the events they describe. Thus, Budayri, a
barber diarist, recorded the barbershop gossip in 18th-century Aleppo.
The historian Jabarti observed the arrival of Bonaparte's army in Cairo
in 1798 with admiration tempered by a heavy admixture of cynicism. He
gave an account of Bonaparte's savants conducting flashy scientific
experiments, hoping to awe the city's religious scholars. They were not
so easily impressed, and one of them told Bertholet: "This is all well
and good, but can they make it so that I would be here and in Morocco at
the same time?" When Bertholet shrugged his shoulders, the Egyptian
scholars concluded that French sorcery wasn't up to much.
Rifa'a al-Tahtawi's account (translated into English as An Imam in Paris
(1826-1831)) detailed an Egyptian's impression of the manners and
customs of the French in the early 19th century. His observations
mingled admiration with revulsion. For example, he was shocked to find
that in France the "men are slaves to the women here and under their
command irrespective of whether they are pretty or not".
Faisal, who was imposed by the British as king of an artificial nation –
Iraq, in 1921 – wrote of his unloved and unloving subjects: "There is
still – and I say this with a heart full of sorrow – no Iraqi people,
but unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic idea,
imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common
tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise
against any government whatsoever." It is as if he was writing to warn
the American and British troops occupying Iraq in the 21st century.
Then there is Sayyid Qutb, Egyptian litterateur and boulevardier turned
Islamic fundamentalist, inveighing against the immorality of the lyrics
of "Baby It's Cold Outside". Qutb's Qur'an-based opposition to
westernisation and the brutal regime of Nasser took him to the gallows
in 1966.
Britain and France do not come out well. For example, in 1906 a British
hunting party shot the pigeons belonging to the peasants of the village
of Dinshawy on the Nile Delta. In the riot that followed, a British
officer was injured and later died. Four Egyptians were hanged and
others were sentenced to long terms of hard labour or floggings. Such
high-handed justice provoked nationalist resistance in the decades that
followed, but Bimbashi McPherson, the British security chief who faced
down strikes and demonstrations in 1919, was contemptuous: "Howling
lunatics in the streets, women emancipated for the occasion making stump
orations, children and rapscallions of all sorts shouting ribald
doggerels in contempt of fallen tyrants."
In 1918, the British who took over from the defeated Ottomans in Iraq
promised a national government and self-determination, before imposing
by force of arms a British mandate on the hostile Arabs and Kurds. The
French behaved with even greater colonial arrogance and brutality in
Morocco, Algeria and Syria.
One of the depressing if instructive messages of this book is that
terrorism can work. In the early 1940s, while Britain was at war with
Nazi Germany, Menachem Begin, the leader of Irgun, and Yitzhak Shamir,
the leader of Lehi, waged terrorist campaigns against the British in
Palestine. In 1945, they were joined by the larger Haganah. Ninety-one
people were killed when Irgun operatives blew up the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem. Such atrocities played a leading role in persuading the
British they could not continue to exercise a mandate in Palestine. They
withdrew in 1948, leaving the Palestinian Arabs to face the much
better-armed and organised Jews.
In the war that followed, Rogan says the "image of a Jewish David
surrounded by a hostile Arab Goliath is not reflected in the relative
size of Arab and Jewish forces". In general, he has a taste for
revisionist and counter-intuitive history. For example, Israel's
occupation of the West Bank made it easier for Yasser Arafat's Fatah to
organise resistance. And Sadat's expulsion of Soviet military advisers
in 1972 led to Russia increasing its military supplies to Egypt.
Rogan was a student of Albert Hourani, the author of A History of the
Arab Peoples, an eloquent and predominantly upbeat account of Arab
achievements over the centuries. Rogan's version, hard-nosed and sadder,
is no less eloquent, and compulsively readable.

# £23.00
Odio, invidia e risentimento sembrano il tratto comune di questa
storia.

 world today, I believe the Islamists would win hands down".
Non un buon viatico per le elezioni negli OPT.
-- 
Baci,
Mony

 storia.
sembrano ai razzisti fracidi e servi, che hanno la faccia di culo di
parlare di invasione islamica mentre difendono le feste del cazzo
scopiazzate dai padroni come tradizione nostra...

scopiazzate dai padroni come tradizione nostra...
Sei contro Israele, ne vorresti la distruzione, e dai del razzista
agli altri. In quanto alle "feste scopiazzate dai padroni", dimostri
solo che di questa faccenda non hai capito un cazzo. Odio, invidia e
risentimento sembrano i "valori" che ti muovono.

 Sei contro Israele, ne vorresti la distruzione
ma non dire stronzate, idiota. Voglio la distruzione ovunque nel mondo
della feccia razzista come te.



Quindi sei un razzista!


sono antirazzista, coglione.



Se tu fossi un autentico antirazzista e un autentico uomo di pace, non
saresti aggressivo n� offensivo. Soprattutto non saresti neppure
fazioso come sei e anzich� combattere a modo tuo per una parte contro
l'altra, saresti dalla parte della pace. Ma parlare con te � tempo
sprecato.

 l'altra
la parte dei razzisti islamofobi è la parte dell'inciviltà, e deve
essere combattuta dagli antirazzisti


Vedi, sei un uomo violento e pretendi di dare lezioni di civilt� agli
altri. Faresti meglio andarti a nascondere.


e più violento chi insulta i razzisti o chi dice pacatamente che gli
arabi sono estranei alla nostra civiltà? IMHO il secondo, di gran
lunga.

lunga.

lunga.
Impara a discutere pacatamente rispettando il tuo interlocutore.
Questo � uno dei prerequisiti della democrazia, della convivenza
pacifica di persone che possiedono punti di vista differenti. 
E' il prerequisito della laicit�. Le guerre di religione sono finite
quando si � abbandonata la pretesa di possedere la Verit� Assoluta e
quando ci si � accordati sul rispetto delle opinioni degli altri.


lo sto facendo. E tu di fronte a un post pacato sbrocchi. Ne prendo
atto

Impara a discutere pacatamente rispettando il tuo interlocutore.
Sono violento se ti invito a quotare, barbone che non sei altro?