David Pryce-Jones
The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs
Harper & Row, 1989.
I had heard this was one of the best overviews of Arab culture, and I’ve been reading it off and on between other things. It’s enlightening and depressing. Pryce-Jones asserts that all Arab nations are mired in a power-challenging/money-favoring culture based largely on a shame-honor response. By his account (and he calls on an extensive array of sources to back up his arguments), Arab (and, to a lesser extent, Turkish, Berber and Persian) cultures have always been ruled by strong men succeeding in establishing themselves by force and ruling through violence and money-favoring to eliminate or control possible rivals. The powerful rule (not only for themselves, but for their clan and allied clans) and the weak obey. It reminds me of that line from Black Hawk Down: “In Somalia, killing is negotiation.” In his view, Islamofascism, socialism, communism, Baathism, Pan-Arabism and modernization have all had whatever ideas they originally espoused suborned to become just another avenue for power-challengers to intrigue against the current power-holder, and likewise an excuse for the power-holder to ruthlessly suppress and eliminate possible rivals. He says that all outsiders (Western as well was Soviet) have misread the intentions of various power-holders by taking them at their word rather than viewing their statements as mere excuses or pretexts for their actions, to be discarded as easily as an old shirt should the situation call for it. He also says that mercy, human rights, democracy, etc., are all viewed as signs of decadent weakness by those within power-challenging cultures. In some ways, his is a very compelling argument; in others, it’s such a totalizing worldview that just about any action can be explained in power-challenging terms, and a system that explains everything explains nothing. Still, it’s a fascinating book (including very interesting chapters on how Nazi propaganda took root in the middle east, and the Arab-Israeli conflicts), and an important part of the puzzle as to why the Middle East seems to remain stubbornly immune to “rational” solutions.
