The Closed Circle
By David Pryce-Jones
Harper & Row, 464 pages, $25
The Ambassador of the Arab League to the United Nations, Dr. Clovis Maksoud, frequently tells American audiences that the Arabs ”want to become part of the 20th Century during the 20th Century.” Briefly and bluntly, the thesis of ”The Closed Circle,” a study by David Pryce-Jones (an English literateur and commentator), is that culturally, and in just about every other way, the Arabs are not going to make it-not by the year 2000 nor well beyond, if ever.
”The Closed Circle” is intended to be as complete a put-down of Arab culture as Evelyn Waugh`s put-down of African culture in his famous novel
”Black Mischief,” though it comes nowhere near Waugh`s book in quality and refined malice. Indeed, ”The Closed Circle” is noteworthy for its absence of polemic and bitterness.
Calm, though not clinical, it is a well-written book of observations-based, as the author freely admits, on no particular method and packed full with historical citations, personal experiences, references to other commentators on the Middle East and rather sweeping assertions, all of which support what can only be called an imperialist or colonial point of view. Without any qualification, the perspective Pryce-Jones adopts could have informed a book on the Middle East published by an Englishman in 1889 rather than one published in 1989.
His point is that, judged by the standards of the West, Arab culture is embarrassingly inferior and regressive-a closed circle from which the Arabs have not begun to, perhaps even cannot, break free. But if Pryce-Jones` case initially seems formidable, largely because of his erudition and writing skill, a close reading reveals major flaws, some of them surprisingly obvious, and leaves one suspicious that further study will reveal many more.
The author, for example, asserts that what he calls the ”power-challenge dialectic”-that is, a continuing struggle for supremacy on every level
(political, sectarian, tribal, familial, even individual)-lies at the very center of Arab interaction and explains the frequency of internecine strife among the Arabs. But he cannot posit that impulse as basic to Arab culture and, on the very same page, observe that ”the Arab masses come to accept and even to admire their oppressor.” On the contrary, for the power-challenge dialectic to continue, the conquered must deeply resent the conqueror and plan to overthrow him at the first opportunity. And if surrender and obsequiousness characterize the conquered Arab, then the power struggle comes to an end.
Pryce-Jones also overstates the importance of the ”shame-honor code” in Arab culture by claiming that Arabs are exclusively concerned with public shame and public honor. But people of integrity-that is, those who choose self-respect over public honor and thereby risk public shame-are rare in any culture or society. Having lived in the Arab world for several years, I venture to guess that there are proportionately as many people of integrity in the Arab world as there are in any other culture or society.
As for Arab political performance during the last half-century, the author passes over much too casually one of the central reasons for political disappointments and failures among the Arabs: the colonial legacy. He dwells upon the advantages conferred by the European colonialism, though it was a mixed blessing at best-the imposition of unfamiliar, quasi-Western legal systems and artificial political divisions being part of its legacy.
But the real damage of colonial occupation-which can be traced back for centuries, from the Turkish colonial period up through the European occupation-is that the Arabs` abiding distrust of any ultimate political authority alien to them also was carried over to ultimate Arab political authority. Trust in the parochial and/or the sub-ethnic authority became the ingrained habit.
Lebanon, of course, represents the ultimate, tragic triumph of parochial loyalties over loyalties that are civic or political. But, oddly enough, the most clannish of the sub-ethnic groups in Lebanon, the Maronite community, was the seedbed of the Arab renaissance and the source of the dream of pan-Arabism.
As for the political state of the Arab countries other than Lebanon, one can say that, with all their difficulties, nationalism is alive and well. Syria has been ruled by President Assad for almost two decades. Granted that Assad is from the Aleuite minority, which the Sunni majority cannot help but resent. Granted further, that there was a major insurrection aganst Assad, which was crushed with great loss of life.
But we also know that a majority of Syrian Sunnis have been more than willing to fight wars against Israel under Assad`s leadership. And however mistaken Iraqi President Hussein`s invasion of Iran was, a nation that is more than half Shia was willing to fight a protracted bloody war that caused casualties among virtually every family in Iraq without the Iraqi Shias preferring the country of their co-religionists over their own.
Given the colonial legacy, the manipulation of the Great Powers, the attempt to freeze the Middle East into the cold-war mold, the disparity in wealth and education among and within the Arab countries, the draining preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict and a host of other liabilities, one may look at the last 50 years of Arab history and agree with Pryce-Jones that it is a period of many blunders, disappointments and even of betrayals. But given all that the Arabs have been up against, they can be judged to have come a long way and to have the capacity to develop much more fully in the future.
In Algeria`s struggle for independence, a million Algerians, out a total of eight million, lost their lives. And the Palestinians have preserved their cultural and political identity and their national purpose and have propagated it throughout the world, despite more than 40 years of oppression, dispossession, slaughter and a protracted attempt to dehumanize and destroy them politically.
Pryce-Jones concedes, rather reluctantly, that the Arabs are a ”lively and imaginative” people. As the Algerians and Palestinians have demonstrated, they also can be courageous and indomitable and are capable of enormous sacrifice for a political ideal. For that reason, if no other, no one has a right to write them off as hopelessly inept and doomed to endless chaos, futility and inferiority.
