in the March/April Foreign Affairs, by Bernard Lewis. The title is “Free at Last?” (You’ll have to pay/go to the library to read it … I’m sorry). Since it’s Bernard Lewis, a desire to avoid that awkward moment at a cocktail party with other politics nerds where this article is referenced and you look blank should be sufficient reason to take a look. It offers plenty of choice phrases to bring up at that moment, as well, such as “[After decolonization] Arab governments and, to a limited but growing extent, the Arab peoples were at last able to confront their own problems and compelled to accept responsibility for dealing with them.”
The subtitle, The Arab World in the Twenty-First Century, suggests a wildly ambitious agenda for eleven large-print pages, and that is exactly what we get: a summary of the end of the colonial period, the Cold War, and the rise of political Islam; a short treatment of sectarianism and its influence on the region; several paragraphs on rentierism in the Gulf; a list of the statistics suggesting a lack of economic and human development in the Arab world; and so on. I mention this not to criticize the article, as summarizing issues at this sort of broad-brush level is something Foreign Affairs does on purpose to remain relevant to the policy community. It helps to explain the bluntness of the thesis, which is, the Middle East is now suspended between the competing forces of tolerance/progress/democracy and traditionalism/rigidity/Islamism.
Of course, it still advances that thesis, which a. places religion in opposition to democracy b. divides thought processes in a region of over 20 countries and 300 million people into one sharp binary and c. is frankly not that productive. (See Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek article of last week for an argument in favor of disaggregating different strains of radical Islam). I don’t see the need to further contest these ideas, as there are plenty of sources to visit with more authority than a grad student blogger that have done so quite deftly. I am curious, though, why this argument continues to be reproduced as if it were new. If I were Bernard Lewis, I certainly would not while away my retirement from an illustrious and influential academic career reproducing a highly politicized and false-binary-dependent argument like this one. What is it about the American reading public that makes this type of narrative so appealing?
