HISTORY: MARY RUSSELLreviews The Arabs: A HistoryBy Eugene Rogan Allen Lane, 553pp, £25
'A BARBER," Eugene Rogan tells us in his book The Arabs,"comes to know everything that happens in his town. His day is taken up in conversations with people from all walks of life."
Luckily for us, Ahmad al-Budayri al Hallaq, barber of Damascus in the mid-18th century, kept an excellent diary, which Rogan dips into in order to find out what life was like under the Ottomans. Interestingly, al Hallaq was also a Sufi – that branch of Islamic mysticism whose members, when they could, brought peace and calm to a sometimes troubled world.
The Ottoman Empire, founded in 1516 and stretching from Algeria to beyond the Black Sea, was as powerful as it was enormous. Aleppo (in northern Syria) was a major trade centre, so well-known that when Shakespeare, in Macbeth, has one of his witches say of a sailor's wife "Her husband's to Aleppo gone . . .", his London audience knew where he meant.
The Ottomans ran a tight ship, the administration of the law dependent on a reliable military force. Bureaucrats were brought in from outside the Arab territories to run the empire, and here, slavery had its uses. Young Christian boys, taken from their homes in places such as the Balkans, were brought up in the Muslim faith and trained as administrators. If they were athletic, they were conscripted into the army. The boy-levy or devshirme, it was called.
Curiously, the rule of the Ottomans was often felt preferable to local rule. To impose the rule of the Sultan in Istanbul, a disciplined army was needed, which meant taxes. “To collect taxes,” Rogan writes, “the state had to promote the prosperity of its subjects. For the people to be prosperous, the state must uphold just laws.” Which brings us back to the army again and the “circle of equity”.
The history of the Arab world is a complex one, and Rogan has used all the writing tools at his disposal, including first-hand stories, a lively narrative and excellent research – he lectures in modern Arab history at Oxford – to present a detailed account of a disparate group of people whose glory days came during the first five centuries following the emergence of Islam and which is reflected in the mosques and hospitals built in a period when Arabs had a sense of their own worth.
The second period of Arab greatness – the nahda– began in the 19th century and carried on into the 20th century, when Arab poets, musicians and playwrights shaped a new world and when Arab women began to emerge from behind their veils.
But what happened to all this, asked journalist and writer Samir Kassir, later killed in a Beirut booby trap, in 2005. “How did we become so stagnant? How has a living culture become discredited and its members united in a cult of misery and death?”
One answer, suggests Rogan, is that while many in the West see the threat to their way of life coming from the Arab and Islamic world, what they don’t understand is that many in the Arab and Islamic worlds see the greatest threat to their way of life coming from the West.
The colonial powers – France, Spain and Britain – first invaded Arab territories, then shamelessly carved them up. When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798, he told the people he had come to liberate them and to preserve Islam, whereas, says Rogan, “he had come to advance French geostrategic interests over his British rivals”.
Later, during the first World War, when the Ottoman Turks defeated British troops at Gallipoli and forced them to surrender at Kut in April 1916, Britain stepped up its campaign in Mesopotamia and captured Baghdad the following year. In the negotiations that ensued, the country of Iraq was drawn up with an outsider – Faisel of the Saud family – placed on the throne. Greater Syria was whittled down to its present size while Palestine was simply signed away without any consultation with its incumbent Arab population.
Then, in the 1970s, along came oil and the possibility of Arab power. Except that the economic advantages that should have followed evaporated in the wake of arbitrary cuts in the price of oil by the two big companies – BP and Standard Oil – making the Arab producers finally realise that until they took control of their own oil, they would continue to be controlled by outside forces such as the multinationals.
Rogan sets out his stall well, showing that, alongside oil wealth came what some saw as decadence and a slide away from the guiding tenets of Islam. Families and governments now had the cash to send their young abroad to be educated, and their young did not always like what they encountered.
Sayyid Qutb, a prominent member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, returned from two years in the US unimpressed by what he saw as American materialism, moral laxity and unbridled competitiveness. So that while some Arab countries developed along secular lines, within them were Islamist activists intent on bringing them back to the straight and narrow. It is this conflict of social mores, often based on cultural misunderstanding, that has divided the West from the Arab world. That and the experience of betrayal which, as a Syrian poet told me, “is written on every page of our history books”.
Though Rogan has not shied away from addressing Arab atrocities committed against Islamists and other critics, he ends on a note of hope: “For the Arab world to break the cycle of subordination to other people’s rule,” he writes, “will require a balanced engagement from the dominant powers of the age”. Post-Lisbon, that could mean Europe.
Mary Russell is a writer who has travelled widely in the Middle East
