Though much discussed in the press, Arab state relations have received little serious analysis. Malcolm Kerr probed them in The Arab Cold War and Fouad Ajami has now brought this important topic up to date in The Arab Predicament.
Professor Ajami considers the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 to be the watershed of recent Arab politics, the event which in one stroke overturned the secular pan-Arabist doctrines of Nasser and the Ba'th party, stimulated "an intense wave of self-criticism" (p. 24), and began "the struggle for the shape of the Arab order" (p. 25) In his view, Arab politics are still coping with the consequences of that defeat.
Three rival groups emerged after 1967 with proposals for the future of Arab society: radicals seized on Israel's victory to argue that pan-Arabism "had merely mimicked the noise of revolutionary change" (p. 34) without truly transforming society. They called for a wholesale rejection of tradition along the lines of Cuba and China. Muslim fundamentalists also used the 1967 humiliation to indict secular pan-Arabism: they suggested not a break with the past but a return to traditions. Conservative leaders of such countries as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait came out of the 1967 war with new strength; "the secular pan-Arabists lost their self-confidence and the traditionalists recovered theirs. The latter no longer seemed as anachronistic as the former had said they were" (pp. 67-68).
Which of these groups would prevail? Two events determined the future: when Nasser reconciled himself to King Faisal. it meant that pan-Arabists had acceded to kings; when Jordan successfully suppressed the Palestinians, radicals lost. Ajami shows how all the major events of the following decade then confirmed the turn from radical nationalism to Islam and from thawra (revolution) to tharwa (wealth).
Ajami despairs of this transformation, for the shift from the Nasser era to the Saudi era created new illusions and pitfalls. Just as Nasserism fell when its visions proved to be hollow, so Saudi power (based on freakish wealth and an oxymoronic Islam) failed to deliver. "The era of commissions and the middlemen" which replaced "the era of nationalism and ideology" (p. 156) tried to but could not stifle Arab politics through "dreams of prosperity and visions of a static order" (p. 131). The Arabs fell back on their religious identity as a substitute for honest grappling with their problems; but this has proved no more satisfactory than Nasserism; thus, the Arab predicament.
My only serious criticism of an otherwise outstanding analysis concerns the treatment of Islam. Ajami views Islam as a flaccid, characterless "tradition." One guesses that if Arabs were Buddhist or Christian, he would see their predicament unchanged. But this is profoundly wrong; Islam creates the framework in which Arabs act. For example, the very fact that Arab peoples are so inextricably caught up in each others' fates (in contrast, say, to Spanish or English. speaking peoples) can only be explained with reference to Islam.
This objection aside, Ajami understands Arab politics and culture; though angry and impatient with its shortcomings, he empathizes with it; though passionate, he writes with insight and clarity. This book is a pleasure to read and important to contemplate.
Daniel Pipes is the author of Slave Soldiers and Islam (Yale University Press, 1981).
