Customer Reviews

Closed Circle

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4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book is a very distressing work. The author starts with a thesis and never lets go, analyzing almost every aspect of his chosen subject --the Arabs-- from social, political, sexual, literary, artistic, and other perspectives, reaching the conclusion that people are what they are, and that our attempts at rationalizing the behavior of societies that are totally alien to our own must end in absolute disapointment if not outright exasperation. The cultural weight of centuries rests on the Arabs and Pryce-Jones uncovers layer after layer of myth, folklore, history, lies, and the western folly of seeing Western problems and solutions mirrored in Arab realities, projecting onto a different people sets of values and accepted norms of behavior that are just not part of their lives. For the first time I have read an author that tells me something I suspected from my admittedly limited dealings with Arabs in 12 years: they understand power, but democracy escapes them as an absurdity. Any sort of sexual liberation that goes beyond the cosmetic (and even that is pushing it) is not bound to happen any time soon in the Arab world. Without it, any sort of "democracy" they may have will never be more than a mirage, a photocopy of the original. Their family lives are deeply dictatorial, and so is their social life. They will abase themselves in front of those seen as superiors, and they will humiliate those seen as inferiors. Any other treatment is alien. This is what makes this book disturbing: I have read other books on the subject and I see the coverage of news from that area of the world, and now I realize how deeply wrong those assessments are. Pryce-Jones understands politics in the Arab world as power-plays and power-grabs. He is right. The sooner we realize that, the easier it will be to deal with this reality. There are errors. The worst one is that the author insists on putting Arabs, Turks, and Persians in the same bag. They may, overall, share a common religion, even considering the Shi'a- Sunni rift, and the many other divisions inside the Muslim world (Alawites and Druzes being just a part of this deeply divided group), but they are not the same people. The book is subtitled "An interpretation of the Arabs": it should have been exactly that and leave Turks and Persians alone or, if the author really wanted to include these other peoples, the subtitle should have been changed. Also, the actor Omar Sharif is described as "not an Arab, but a Coptic Christian." Well, there are plenty of Arabs who are also Christians. Sharif is an Egyptian. That makes him an Arab. End of the argument. Still, these points are not enough to demerit a very courageous work that dares to present the views of the author as they are. These views, I feel, are very much true.

This book is a great book that will anger most of the arab readers. They will call it biases, bigotted & racist. However as an egyptian who lives in egypt, I believe that the author made it very clear & accurate; in a typical british style it's sharply critical & t-the-point. What the author said was nothing new to me; I was always wondering what makes the arabs so different after all these years with contacts with other cultures & all that money that some enjoy. I came to the same conclusions that the author came two. It's damn right! His appraoch is simple & clear, though not very scientific; and it lacks the comparative approach.

Pryce-Jones explores the question why there are no modern Arab liberal democracies.

He finds the answer in Arab social and political culture, specifically:

1. TRIBALISM. Pryce-Jones argues that Arab culture doesn't encourage Arabs to identify themselves as members of a state, but as members of a family or tribe. Arab political life therefore consists of a multitude of warring factions, none of whom seeks the good of the nation as a whole. As Karl Popper might describe it, they ask only the personal question "Who should rule?" (and answer: "I should!") and never ask the more fundamental institutional question "How should power be organized?"

2. THE SHAME / HONOR SYSTEM. Arabs place great weight on perceptions of their honor. This consideration therefore often trumps all others and results in behavior that looks, to western eyes, like insanity.

An example is the Aswan dam. Nasser announces that he will build the dam and that it will be a great thing, thereby committing his honor to its construction and success. Therefore, when his own experts tell him that the dam is a bad idea (it will disrupt agriculture, increase the spread of some diseases, etc.), he suppresses the information and does not back down. When the Eisenhower administration revokes the promised funding for the dam (because it's a bad idea), Nasser's honor has committed him so fully to the dam that he reverses his foreign policy 180 degrees and cuddles up to the Soviet Union to get it done. And when the dam, as predicted, turns out to be a curse rather than a blessing, Nasser goes on shouting its virtues.

3. THE POWER-CHALLENGE DIALECTIC. You're either in power in the Arab world, in which case you're paranoid and watching your subordinates and allies as closely as your enemies, or you're no, in which case you lurk in the shadows, plot and scheme until your hand is ready and you make your move to challenge the power holder. There is no notion of shared power, no notion of purely institutional power.

THEREFORE...

The result is that calls for democracy, like calls for socialism, Palestinian independence and even repentance and return to the true tenets of Islam, are bogus. They mask what would otherwise be naked grabs for power by an individual or a tribal group. The Arabs are constantly and consistently betrayed by their leaders.

Note that this is NOT a book about Islam. Pryce-Jones explicitly argues that this Arab culture pre-dates Islam and that Islam itself is often used as a tool or a pretext in power challenges (as in Wahhabism, for instance).

Although it makes one pessimistic about prospects for the Arabs, THE CLOSED CIRCLE gives answers to a lot of the questions that people have about that part of the world, question such as: Why the lack of heavy industry? Why the disdain for higher learning? Why the obsessive hatred of Israel? Why the hopelessly inept militaries? and Why the grandiose bluster they use in place of effective militaries?

Pryce-Jones wondered, too, for a lifetime, then took three years to produce this "interpretation", which is more comprehensive and lucid than any of the other works I've seen on the subject. His thesis is fairly simple: the Arabs, more than any other society, are bound by a code of shame and honor, which prevents them from advancing in nearly every field of human endeavor. The only dynamism in their sclerotic society is what Pryce-Jones calls "power challenging", the process by which one despot knocks another off his pedestal and assumes it himself, though even this can hardly be called dynamic, since one is just like another. They all operate according to these rules of power challenging, which may more simply be called the law of the jungle.

The shame/honor and power challenging theses explain a wide range of phenomena that can be baffling to an outsider. On one of the lowest levels, the village, Pryce-Jones gives the example of a local leader who decides to install an irrigation pump to improve agriculture. When a consultant warns of technical problems, the leader avoids the shame of appearing ignorant by pushing ahead with his plan, heedless of the warning. The pump overirrigates, leading to salinification, which ruins the village agriculture. But instead of being blamed by the village for the ruin, the local leader is honored for getting his way.

On a larger scale, why is it that Saudi Arabia, whose total revenues from oil some time ago passed the trillion dollar mark, needs the USA to defend it, needs American and European technicians to operate its oilfields, and needs imported labor from South Asia for any non-technical work? Simple: "Technical tasks, and of course laboring in all forms, demeaningly connote low status, and therefore shame." Thus, the Saudi squadrons of AWACS and other warplanes, and tanks, and sophisticated naval equipment, etc., are virtually useless to them, because while the purchase of such stuff brings honor, the maintenance and operation of it is low class and shameful. A fighter jet is little more than a trophy to show off to ones friends-and enemies. Rather than use a jet to defend themselves, "Al Saud prefer the technique of using money defensively...and to convert possible challengers into clients...the Saudis extend their money-favor nexus over the whole Middle East, enmeshing into it the entire spectrum of Arab power holders and challengers. The daily task of the Saudi ruler consists in assessing friends and opponents and then buying or holding them off, estimating and apportioning subsidies, bribes, subventions, the whole gamut of open or concealed transfers of money."

Pryce-Jones goes methodically through each Arab society, even one, Turkey, that is not technically Arab, and finds the same pattern in each: leaders that grab their power through violence, and hold onto it through violence and money. Even the much-heralded "Man of Peace", Anwar Sadat, began his career as a Nazi sympathizer, writing glowingly of Hitler in 1953 that the German had "become immortal in Germany" and that was "reason enough for pride". Sadat's subsequent protean career as a power holder took him through "pro-Nazi, pro-Soviet, socialist, capitalist, Jew-hater, and peacemaker" phases, the one constant being his always-cunning response to power challengers. After finally being murdered by a determined group of challengers, Sadat was commemorated by a handful of American presidents in his last permutation, that of peacemaker. His power holding legacy is carried on by Mubarak with Sadat's methods of repression and ample amounts of money, gotten not from oil, but from US foreign aid-payoffs for peace.

Pryce-Jones' thesis is not that all Arabs are murderous and power hungry. It does seem to be that one can't rise beyond a certain level in Arab society without being so. All of the leaders are authoritarian. None of the polities are open and democratic. Anyone who has traveled anywhere in the Middle East or Maghreb has met gentle and hard-working Arabs. Many Arabs would admire a leader such as Martin Luther King. But it would never occur to the leaders of the Arabs to take anything but a venal or violent approach to a problem. It's impossible to conceive, for instance, of Yasser Arafat leading a non-violent protest march through Israeli checkpoints on a day when Gaza was sealed off. Even if he were convinced that such an act would get him what he wanted politically, he would be unable to carry it out because of the enormous shame he would feel at being shown in such an ostensibly powerless position. What is shown in CLOSED CIRCLE is that it is impossible to take power or hold power in Arab society without employing the despotic methods of Gaddhafi or Sadat or Sadam or Faud or Arafat.

It's a pity that a book of this stature should be out of print in hardback. Something this vital ought to be available with one of the print-on-demand publishers.

Mr. Pryce-Jones presents some uncomfortable facts about the Muslim Middle East that should be understood by anyone who cares to begin to understand what's going on in the modern world populated by the likes of Osama bin Laden. One of the most powerful passages in his book is not opinion or conclusion, but rather a tragic listing of the murdered Arab leaders from 1948 onwards. This list is truly frightening. For Americans, it would be as if every president since Harry Truman had been assassinated during office and his successor the man responsible for the murder.

Say what you want about cultural relativism and its reponsibility to respect the way of life of others, this fact (together with the other well-researched data that Mr. Pryce-Jones presents) paints a troubling picture of tribal society, feckless international intervention and, ultimately a fertile ground for the disaffected who are fed militant Islam at every turn.

Take heed.

It's about time this book made it back into print! I wouldn't have understood a single day of the Persian Gulf War (II) without David Pryce-Jones' explanation of the Arab mind. When it first came out it was such an anachronism that it was widely ignored, despite the urgency of the issues it addressed. A book of ethnic psychoanalysis? In 1990, arguably the floodstage year of (multi)cultural relativism? Yet world events have hammered home the blunt fact that world cultures are not all alike but for cuisine and headgear, and that some cultures are flatly and demonstratably better than others.

This is a book of ethnography, not of demonology. Pryce-Jones discusses components of the Arab world-view: shame/honor, money-favoring, etc., always with the understanding that there are exceptions to everything, but that cultural patterns may still be discerned. He cites many Western scholars, but allows Arab voices plenty of scope to speak, also. Indeed, the book is a good introduction to many interesting Arab writings.

It is a demanding subject, even though the book is written for the educated layman, so it is slow going in spots. There is no confident sweep of history as in Bernard Lewis, nor many pungent polemics as in Daniel Pipes. Readers will find themselves skipping to chapters that are of immediate interest, but the entire book is a must-read. We can't afford to be PC--I mean, ignorant--anymore.

For those of us trying to make some sense of the tragedy of Sept 11 2001, this book is a must read. The author spent years living and traveling in the Middle East. His interpretation of the Arab culture and subsequent behaviors, published in 1990, is chillingly pertinent to todays events. Time and again I found myself relating his explanations to the events happening currently and finding answers for every behavior in his relation of the Tribalism, values, society, familial relationships,and acculturation of Arabs over the last 500 years. Particularly chilling and uncannily prophetic is his conclusion. To paraphrase, the West should avoid involvement in Arab affairs but if it must get involved, do so with overwhelming and sustainable force.

This is the work of a genius. Historians list events, commentators come with analysis and predictions, and politicians add their speeches of propaganda - and still it all does not make sense to us. Then along comes a genius and gives a solution to the puzzle, and everything becomes clear. This book is rich in historical facts and serious analysis and at the same time it is written in a fluent style and as absorbing as the best of novels. Pryce-Jones has the eye of an artist, and with it he looks at events and illuminates them. He arrives at the truth. The reader then says, 'Of course! Now it makes sense'.

The author gives the readers a key to understand the Arabs and muslims. Why Arabs migrate in millions and risk their lives in dangerous journeys to gain access to the West in search of livelihood, and yet hate the West. Israel offered its Arabs economic boom without having to travel away to the West but Arafat chose terror and killing, and hunger for his people. Nobody who had read the book's first edition would have expectd otherwise. It is a tragedy that CNN and the European Union politicians continue to support Arab rulers and their agression, and in this way ruin the lives of ordinary Arabs, and any chance of peace in the world. After this book, they have no excuse.

Pryce-Jones' book, reissued in 2002, is the best book I've read on the contemporary Middle East, and one of the best books I've ever read, period. (This includes great books by Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis.)

If supposedly informed people in the West understood Pryce-Jones' points about the Arab social order centered on clan, tribe, and religious sect and driven by honor and shame; the decline of Western models and influence; the absence of any recognizably political institutions (like "nations," "governments," and "laws") in the Western sense; and the classic pattern of armed careerist gangs divided along tribal and sectarian lines and locked in a perpetual cycle of challenge and power-seizure, they would not be surprised by much.

What happened on September 11, 2001, and what is happening now in Israel/Palestine and Iraq are just the latest examples, albeit with higher stakes. Suicide is a sign of the complete bankruptcy of a society. Self-pitying rage, arising from shame-honor, blocks reason. Mythologies of "imperialism" (more than 50 years after European withdrawal!) and "Zionist conspiracy" are clubs to beat dissidents and critics. The wealthy and powerful of the Arab world pour their resources, supported by oil revenue, into such delusions as these. The roots of Middle Eastern stagnation start here.

POSTSCRIPT: Did I write that 4 years ago? I'm still mad but now understand better. The crisis of the Arab world is only superficially a result of the mixing of politics and religion.

The deeper problem is the decline and collapse of the Muslim civilization once supported by the Ottoman Empire. As with so many vanished empires, the Ottoman collapse was precipitated by failed attempts at reform and disastrous entry into a modern war without preparation. The Ottoman disintegration left the Arabs to their dysfunctional habits of honor and shame, power-challenging, and endless tribal-sectarian warfare. The Arabs have not ruled themselves for over a millenium and show little talent for it today. Pryce-Jones sidesteps Islam so he can point to the true problem: the anti-civilization feuding culture the original Beduin brought with them from the desert as they conquered and converted the Middle East.

It is this culture that prevents the Arabs from forming modern societies based on broad social consent and that forces them to accept dictatorships as the only alternative. It makes modernization and democratization of the Middle East -- the formation of national units, national governments, and representative systems -- highly problematic. Islam theoretically trumps all these, but it is tribal communalism that nixes a state based on impersonal rule of law. See: Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan -- and Turkey, once a model of modernization, now regressing in the opposite direction. To the extent that non-Arab countries like Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan are influenced by the same tribal values, they suffer from the same problem.

Is there a way out? No one knows.

This book is a must. For those of you who get your view of the Arab world from distorted CNN reporting - this book is a must. It starts off a little slow - but stick with it - the pace picks up and it's hard to put down. I have a much better understanding of the Arab world, not very pretty, but clearer. All Americans should read this, and know that our Judeo-Christian values do not translate well in the Arab world.