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To my taste, the early chapters of this book, in which Ajami uses poets and intellectuals to represent the political currents of their as, seem a bit contrived. As the book goes along however, the argument becomes increasingly direct, and nowhere more so than in the remarkable final chapter, "The Orphaned Peace," where Ajami addresses what went wrong in the Arab-Israel negotiations.
"No sooner had the peace of Oslo" been announced in the Arab world, he writes in that chapter, "than the new battle began, the fear of Israeli military supremacy now yielding to the specter of Israel cultural hegemony." Although a few Arab intellectuals stood against the tide, the great majority of the educated elite saw in Oslo "not their peace but the rulers' peace." In fact, the peace process had the surprising effect of making Arab writers, journalists, and professors even more implacable in their enmity toward Israel, for that enmity remained the "one truth that could not be bartered or betrayed, the one sure way back to the old fidelities."
Ajami ascribes much importance to the fact that the Arab intellectual class rejected Oslo. For though this class might not govern, "it structured a moral universe that hemmed in the rulers and limited their options." Bereft of the support of "the most articulate sections of the society," the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and other countries found they could not sell the idea of peace at home. Although he pays homage to those leaders "who dared break with the culture's prohibitions," as well as to the few businessmen "eager for a new order of things," Ajami sees them losing out in the end to "the centurions of Arab political orthodoxy."
Ajami's attempt to explain the seeming perverse attraction of Arab intellectuals to failure is sobering:
In an Arab political history
littered with thwarted dreams,
little honor would be extended to
pragmatists who knew the limits
of what could and could not be
done. The political culture of
nationalism reserved its approval
for those who led ruinous campaigns
in pursuit of impossible quests.
Extremism and failure, in other words, beget more of the same. And so The Dream Palace of the Arabs doses on a forlorn note: "The day had not come for the Arab political imagination to steal away from Israel and in look at the Arab reality, to behold its own view of the kind of world the Arabs wanted for themselves." If Fouad Ajami is right, Arab intellectual life will continue to exalt irrationality and to honor aggression for some time to come. We may not like this, but, having read The Dream Palace of the Arabs, we can at least begin to understand it.
Daniel Pipes is editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author of the just-published Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes, and Where It Comes From (Free Press).
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