A Tract for Our Times, I: Pryce-Jones's Autopsy of Arab Social Pathology
Written: May 04 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Alarming, compelling, forcible in demanding thought and attention
Cons: The reissued volume, though updated in spots, is spottily updated
The Bottom Line: This deeply-thought work is a gripping read – with implications that reflect the world's dire peril. It ought be read by all. It must be reckoned with, and soon
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| mshawpyle's Full Review: David Pryce-Jones - The Closed Circle: An Interpre... |
Difficult as it is to believe, within six months of the criminal atrocity of 11 September, the American mind had wandered until recalled to dire events in that cradle of conflict, the Middle East. Now, once again, a clash of cultures rivets our attention, and the results are dismaying. The radical chic of Araby has been embraced by a Left that no longer bothers to hide its hatred of the State of Israel, which is one thing, and in fact of the Jews as a people, which is a whole 'nother order of magnitude as evils go. General Western gullibility, coupled with the inherent viciousness of Leftist notions, has created a climate in which great evils are stirring, and the average citizen in the democracies turns a blandly stupid gaze upon them.
It is time and high time, it is all but past time, for some Tracts for Our Times. We may begin with the war correspondent David Pryce-Jones and his chilling analysis, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.
It is Pryce-Jones's thesis that, while it is at once condescending and futile to view the Arab world through Western prisms and judge them by Western standards (an issue we shall join hereafter), it is equally racist and unethical not to recognize that they are rational folk no different from the rest of us, making a reasoned calculus of their interests. It is further, however, Pryce-Jones's thesis that their choices are constrained by a systemic, cultural failure, for which they have no one save themselves to blame, that has resulted in their choices being limited to finding the least repugnant option within a myriad of evils. It is finally a corollary of Pryce-Jones's thesis that this systemic, cultural failure exists without reference to religion, Islamic or otherwise, and that its result has been not only to degrade the Arabs, but to deprive the world of their potential useful contributions, the ability to make which they amply demonstrated six and seven centuries ago.
Asking Arafat to give up terrorism would be like asking Tiger Woods to give up golf.
Prof. Bernard Lewis, on PBS, to Charlie Rose, 18 April 2002.
There is nothing altogether unheard-of in Pryce-Jones's thesis. It is his demonstrations and proofs that make his work so stunning and so indispensable in assessing the Arab issue.
When Pryce-Jones who lived in Tangier as a child, and who reported on wars and military affairs in the Middle East from 1967 through 1973
and who, as an Etonian who read history at Magdalen (Oxon), is hardly a mere inky wretch from Fleet Street when Pryce-Jones says 'the Arabs,' he is being typically precise. His work, first published in 1989 and revised and reissued after 11 September 2001, is not, and properly is not, directed to Islam, or to non-Arab Muslims. Pryce-Jones identifies the common cultural aspects of the Arab people, whether Druze, Maronite, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Sunni, Shia, Wahhabi, or wholly secular, and refuses to be drawn into seeking explanations for their current role in the world in mere confessional and religious identities.
It's much more grim than that.
Line by line, letter by letter, Pryce-Jones draws upon the popular and elite literatures of the Arabs of the XXth Century and of their salient forebears. Line by line, letter by letter, Pryce-Jones allows the Arabs to speak in the voice of their own writers and politicians and when, as is too rarely the case, one has been allowed by the despots who run the Arab world to speak out their own common people. Line by line, letter by letter, the unbiased and objective history of Arab political, legal, military, and social failure from the days of the Ottomans and before is set out, dispassionately, and from the Arabs's own records.
Line by line, letter by letter, the moral is spelled out: mene, mene, tekel upharsin: 'Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.' (The Book of Daniel, the Fifth Chapter, beginning at the 25th verse. Here endeth the First Lesson.)
The Arabs stand self-indicted, in their own words, from their own mouths.
'Aquinas understands
[i]t is no good
to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not on his own.'
GK Chesterton, in St Thomas Aquinas.
Of what, though, do the Arabs stand self-indicted? What is the upshot of Pryce-Jones's work as an historian of this culture?
What emerges without challenge is that the Arabs have never evolved a civil society, institutions of secular mutuality, or the rule of law. This is not to be laid to the door of Islam as a religion: it was true of the Arabs under the Roman and Byzantine Empires, before Mohammed arose to preach submission to what he claimed to be the Will of God; it is not true of the Turks, Muslims though they be, or of some other, non-Arab societies in which Islam is even a significant minority religion. As Pryce-Jones tellingly notes, in one of his many classically illuminating, epigrammatic, and aphoristic moments, the PFLP and its psychopathic leader, Dr George Habash, are not the enemies of Arafat's PLO and Fatah faction because of policy differences: they are split on ethno-religious lines, as between Arabs from nominally Christian families and Arabs from nominally Muslim ones.
Instead, Arab life proceeds as it has long proceeded, as a pre-modern society: one ruled not by laws but by men, in which all loyalties are personal (and often temporary and expedient, solely). Pryce-Jones amply and depressingly demonstrates the careerism, the personalism, the personality cultism, the shame-honor dialectic, and the other systemic primitivisms that drive Arab society and have caused its nations to be dismissed by many, many observers as 'failed states,' as 'tribes with flags.' A pervasive tribalism prevails, indeed, in an atmosphere of coercion, unfreedom, and atmospheric conspiratorialism. It is in this sense, quite rightly and most sadly, that Israel, as Pryce-Jones notes, is in a sense a 'colonial power' in the region: like the British and the French and indeed in many ways the Osmanli Turks, Israel is a recognizably modern society intervening in a sea of petty tribal clashes and inevitably drawn into the dialectics of power-challenging, in which she must either participate as a player or, through still more massive exertions and still more unchallengeable power, become the regional arbiter as between clients and supplicants jockeying for favor.
Pryce-Jones has accumulated a wealth of dispassionate detail, coolly collected and coolly deployed in the service of objective history. The deals struck between the Sauds and the Wahhab family; the dialectical processes at work in the perpetual mass back-stab that is Arab politics; the grinding oppression of the Arabs by their despots: all are calmly and unblinkingly set out. From Ottoman land law to the rise of Nasser, from the Soviet role in the rise of Arafat and the PLO to the mass institutionalizing of terror as a substitute for law and politics throughout the region, from the Hitlerian and Stalinist influence upon Arab strongmen to the emasculation of all intellectual freedom in the Arab world, Pryce-Jones makes an unanswerable case for his theses. It is as absorbing as it is depressing; and it is depressing to an extent one can hardly anticipate.
One cannot expect, and one does not, that Pryce-Jones can derive a solution to the region's, or the Arabs's, ingrained problem. What does remain to trouble the reader after the final page is devoured is a more fundamental question that Pryce-Jones raises, and cannot resolve.
It is clear that the Arabs are oppressed. It is equally clear, after reviewing the evidence Pryce-Jones has marshaled, that they are complicit in their own oppression. It is evident that they have yet to evolve the basics of civil society: democracy, the basic Jeffersonian freedoms, and the rule of law. It is equally evident, on Pryce-Jones's own showing, that they have no interest in doing so, and that they positively reject any attempts to graft these concepts upon their society, even though it is a universal jail from any human rights perspective: as witness the fate of Lebanon's experiment in self-government.
It is an inherent conviction amongst most of us in the free world that all people everywhere possess the same basic, inherent, inalienable rights. It is likewise our firm belief as a matter of first principles that all mankind everywhere desires to be free to exercise those rights. And while we may not often think to say so, it is our further conviction that with those rights go responsibilities, of which the most fundamental, perhaps, is the moral obligation to rise up against any oppressor who seeks to defease those rights. As Mr Lincoln put it in the 1840s (in words that came back to dog him in 1861), 'Any people anywhere, having the power, have also the right to throw off their existing form of government and exchange it for one that suits them better.'
We have held the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese to these standards, finding them complicit in the erection of despotisms in their countries in the 1930s and '40s, and requiring that they undertake the obligation to remain free, after those despotisms were destroyed. We have held the peoples of Eastern Europe and of the former Soviet empire to that standard. We are presently holding the Afghani peoples to that standard.
The Arabs, like the Chinese, stand as a stumbling block to this conviction. If we are not to appear racist and Euro-centric, we find we must apply these standards across the board, to all societies. But the conclusion that then derives is that the Arabs choose not to be free and not to govern themselves: a situation, given the threats it poses to world peace, that the world cannot, in self-defense, tolerate. Yet it is psychologically unbearable for us in the free world to conclude that the Arabs are somehow 'different' in ways that unfit them for self-government and liberty on their own, despite the fact that there are no and have never been any lasting free Arab states, although Muslim Turkey is free and Israel, with its ponderable Arab and Muslim population, is free and democratic: we cannot bear to conclude that, as the Arabs are evidently disinterested in governing themselves so as not to threaten their own liberties and the peace of their neighbors, they must be governed by others.
To this conundrum that arises from David Pryce-Jones's elegant, solid, and eminently readable work, The Closed Circle returns no answer. Yet at the moment, this is perhaps the most pressing of life or death questions before the world.
Recommended:
Yes
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mshawpyle
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
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Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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