Most of the books on the modern Middle East have axes to grind, and this book, say professors Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, is the notable exception. Stephen Humphreys is one the HUGE names in Islamic history, and extremely well-respected academician at the University of California. His book is extremely readable and extremely unbiased. It portrays an intelligent picture of that part of the world that is still perceived very strangely by the many people outside it. (By the way, the previous reviewer, Daniel Pipes, is part of the same organization as Martin Kramer, who advocated removal of funding for Middle East Studies Programs. Pipes himself has just set up a McCarthyan website in which he keeps "dossiers" of any professors who might be sympathetic toward Islam and the Middle East and in which he urges students to report others. He's hardly objective.)

So much of the Middle East today is the result of recent history, and it's important to understand that history for any kind of modern understanding. This is one of the best books out there for gaining understanding of that history.

In a calm and essayish sort of way, unbeholden to footnotes or fellow scholars, unbound by strict organization, he takes up some of the most difficult and persistent issues of the modern Middle East - the demographic and economic base, authoritarianism, pan-Arabism, "crazy states," military dictatorship, the role of Islam in politics - and analyzes them with intelligence and insight. Musing on three decades plus of studying the Middle East, Humphreys dares to assert the truths that so many of his fellow academics neglect, though he does so in the gentlest and most constructive manner. He takes up many themes; here is one, the dominant role of military dictatorship. Autocracy, Humphreys establishes, is the region's deepest and perhaps oldest dilemma. Already the warlords who quite rapidly took over from the Prophet Muhammad's successors lacked a sense of lawfulness. In the era A.D. 850-1250, for example, the "crucial political problem" facing those warlords was legitimacy - "some convincing reason (beyond brute force) why his subjects should obey him and his rivals should respect his right to exist." Sound familiar? It should, for the Middle East, the world's least democratic region, still grapples with the same demons (and they have names like Qadhdhafi, Asad, and Saddam). Middle Eastern populations, whether centuries ago or today, respond to this unhappy reality by withdrawing their allegiance from the authorities and turning instead for solace in the realms of religion and family life. This leads to a peculiar but widespread situation in which "Arab societies seem to regard their governments as an alien entity; they endure them, and they wait for them to go away." Trouble is, that stability becomes an end itself and has a fiercesome price. The preoccupation with staying in power means other goals - economic development, civil society, cultural florescence - are sacrificed. Take economics, where warlordism turns out to be the single greatest obstacle to advancement: "Only governments that enjoy the confidence of their citizens," Humphreys rightly observes, "can really take the steps needed" to enable growth. The Arabic-speaking countries not enjoying civil society, the rule of law, or many of the basic freedoms, they are falling ever-further behind in the brutally efficient global marketplace: "not one Middle Eastern state (with the partial exception of Turkey and of course Israel) has followed the only economic growth strategy that has worked since World War II - namely the export-oriented production of high-value-added manufactures." As a result, "there is not one Middle Eastern manufactured item that can be sold competitively on world markets."

Middle East Quarterly, December 1999