Customer Reviews

Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The difference between a journalist and a scholar is that a journalist will write a book to mirror the views of his intended audience. This book is journalism, not scholarship. It is very well-written and will tell you what you want to hear. The author has advances an hypothesis as well as an agenda. I found Robert J. Lieber's book The American Era much more dispassionate and realistic.

The poor performance of Arab economies has been well documented, including in the much-cited Arab Human Development Report written by Arab intellectuals for the U.N. Development Program.[1] But the numbers, no matter how well presented, do not necessarily bring to life how Arab economies actually work as seen by the ordinary businessman or government official. Drawing heavily on his experience from 1998 to 2001 as The Wall Street Journal's Middle East correspondent, Glain provides a series of anecdotes about the lack of government transparency and accountability as well as the other main barriers to economic efficiency. He provides neither a structured or comprehensive account of how the economies work, much less what is needed to improve them. Glain's account is not the place to look for analysis about high politics and diplomacy. He touches on these subjects at times, but what he has to say is of uneven quality-this is obviously not his strong point. In particular, his comments about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are not insightful.

He does better when discussing the impact of politics on the economy where he skillfully musters tales from individual businessmen to bring to life how "ham-fisted, risk averse bureaucracy" stifles the rich talent of Arab entrepreneurs and workers. He gives a feel for life's frustrations with stories focused on the main problem of excessive state interference, in all its corruption, neglect, and bad management.

Glain considers six areas in successive chapters: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq. The best chapters by far are those on Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. These bring out how political interference has made two economies with such enormous potential into failures. He is particularly skillful at exposing the wide gaps between rhetoric about economic reform and the unpleasant realities of the continued dead hand of political interference to protect the well-placed. The Syria chapter is impeded by the difficulty of gathering information, and the Iraq chapter suffers from the problem of gauging how the economy is functioning under the peculiar circumstances of an occupation after decades of tyrannical rule.

Glain writes with obvious empathy for the suffering Arab peoples, and his confidence in their potential-if freed of such depressing governments-shines through. His account is a good example of the principle that the true friends of the Arabs are those who tell the brutal truth about the poor state to which they have been reduced by their leaders.

Patrick Clawson
[1] See "How the Arabs Compare: Arab Human Development Report 2002," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2002, pp. 59-67.

If you are looking for a book providing anaylsis on the economics of the Arab world, this is not it. The Arab world streches from Morraco to Iraq, yet the author only covers the handful of nations of the Levant. How does one understand the economics of the Arab world without exploring the oil industry of the Gulf nations, which dominates the economy and politics of the entire Middle East. The author's agenda is to blame the West in general and the US in particular for every problem in the region. Throughout the book he constantly pushes politically correct propaganda about Islam's peaceful history and tolerance and protection of other religious groups. The author paints a picture of an enlightend Islamo-Arab utopia that knew no malice until provoked by European Crusaders and colonization. And somehow the US is responsible now for what Europeans did then. In reality Islamic history is full of conquest, enslavement, violent coups, despotism, and pogroms. In this age of a global ecomomy, it is true that the politics and economics of the US (the richest nation) greatly influence the rest of the world. However, the author fails to consider the major factors contributing to Arab economic stagnation, such as cultural aversion to many types of work, low worker productivity compared to the rest of the world, geography that lacks diverse natural resources, cultural acceptance of corruption, graft, and nepotism at every level of government and business, religiously imposed finacial restrictions that are incompatible with modern banking systems, tribalism and sectarianism, the malaise that fell over the Arab world under the administration of the Ottomans (an Islamic empire). The author provides no depth of analysis. In fact, other than conveying the personal experiences and opinions of a few minor businessmen, this book isn't about economics at all. If you are looking for insight into economics of the Arab world don't waste your time with this book.

The premise of this book is very interesting, but the execution is terribly weak. The author's point is that as long as the governments of the Middle East don't provide economic growth and the potential for upward economic mobility, they are giving the religious fanatics in the region an opening to wins the hearts and minds of the next generation.

But the author's examples are hard to follow and even incoherent at times. They also reflect his past as a Wall Street Journal reporter in that he speaks only to the wealthy elite or people who are trying to become rich through entrepreneurial ventures. He doesn't speak to anyone genuinely impoverished or without hope, nor does he speak to anyone doing social services to help the impoverished masses. The result is that we don't really know if the mass of people believe that Muslim fundamentalism is a force for good or evil. We only know that people who were trained in the West or who are trying to build economic ties with the West are fearful of the fundamentalists -- and we sort of guessed that already.

The book also suffers from the way that reality can turn predictions on their head. For example, the author's introduction, which he wrote in late 2004, promised oil at $20-30 per barrel for decades to come. In fact, he said that low oil prices would probably be the straw that broke the back of the corrupt, inwardly focused Arab governments. Well, oil is now $130 per barrel.

In the same introduction, the author promises a representative democracy in Iran in about a decade, led by pressures from within the country's middle class. Today, it looks more likely that we will have a U.S.-led military attack than we will have a homegrown democratic movement in Iran.

If you want to read about the modern history of the Middle East, there are much better sources available, despite the author's admirable "I was there and talked with people" efforts.

"Poor journalism" does not begin to describe the weaknesses of this 2004 volume by a former Wall Street Journal "reporter."

The book is comprised of pure, unadulterated propaganda, almost entirely with gleanings from anti-Israel sources--and not a single reference to a primary historical Islamic or non-Muslim eye-witnesses. Rather, Glain relies solely upon secondary, extremely politicized sources.

Glain for example in-substantively quotes the otherwise balanced, thorough journalist and historian Christopher Sykes, in defense of his great grandfather Sir Mark Sykes, whom Christopher described as a "man of peace" who would have been appalled by the current turmoil in the Middle East.

But Glain surely knows, Sir Sykes was a bigoted British Middle East adviser during and after World War I, who cast disgusting pejorative upon groups whose destiny he influenced. Town Arabs, he described as "cowardly," "insolent yet dispicable [sic]," and "vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit." Bedouin Arabs he called "rapacious, greedy . . . animals."

As for Jews, writes David Fromkin in A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East Sykes "discerned" their imputed "web of dangerous international intrigue . . . in many an obscure corner." Sir Sykes sadly and mistakenly believed the Young Turks party to be governed by Jews, when none were privy to (much less within) their inner circle. Oriental affairs interpreter Gerald FitzMaurice and shared Gilbert Clayton, an adviser to Lord Kitchener, informed Sykes' pathetic distortion.

Glain moreover lionizes T. E. Lawrence and his debunked fairy tale, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and British Sir Glubb Pasha's adoring, hagiographic Life and Times of Muhammad, although in 1948 Britain appointed the latter to organize Arab forces against Israel.

According to this highly stilted view, Glain lauds the myth of al Adndalus al Andalus (debunked by Richard Fletcher in Moorish Spain, Eliyahu Ashtor in The Jews of Moslem Spain (2 Volumes in 1), Dr. Andrew Bostom's Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, his Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History and Robert Spencer in The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims, among others).

Glain ahistorically asserts that for almost 400 years starting in the 7th Century, "the Mediterranean was a Muslim controlled economic bloc administered by an enlightened and tolerant Arab empire," in which "Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted peacefully. The contrary evidence is overwhelming (see Bat Ye'or's Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude --- Seventh-Twentieth Century, her Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam and Moshe Gil's A History of Palestine: 634-1099).

The fact is, the early Islamic economy was built upon the imperialism, theft and plundering by the Islamic empire of the wealth and knowledge accumulated over centuries by the conquered peoples during their pre-dhimmi eras. Moreover, there was never a glorious historical Islamic financial system matching that of democratic Western markets and economies today (see Timur Kuran's Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism).

But according to Glain, the Arab world's current poverty stems not from Arab and Muslim illiteracy, restrictions and dictators but from, guess who, the U.S. Middle East policy, and of course those darned Israeli "settlers," whose communities compose less than 0.01% of the land mass in the entire Middle East.

I give a second star only because the author was good enough (though he omits footnotes) to include a list of "references" for each chapter in his book, thereby exposing his incredibly narrow, unschooled base of "knowledge."

But from a journalist, an "economic" journalist no less, the lack of intelligence and proper research demonstrated in this book otherwise represent a monumental disgrace.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Although a journalist for the Wall Street Journal wouldn't pass as an historical materialist, a stethoscope put to the economic malaise of the Arab world fairly threatens to uncover the prime mover of its current troubles. With a series of vignettes hopscotching through Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt, the author produces a significant diagnosis, with an emphasis on capitalist fundamentals that isn't market mania. Indeed, there is an ambiguity here. For all the emphasis on democratic capitalism by the West you have to wonder if these crocodile idealists with a nasty penchant for imperialism could havew done a better job crippling Arab economies if they had set out to do so deliberately. And the crippling of the economic potential of Palestine ranks as a bit of glaring contradiction to stated objectives.With so much money at stake in the status quo, it's better to blame Arafat.
Beyond that, the social mix of dictators and elites in the Middle East as portrayed is not a nice picture, and the degree of incompetence shown gets the silver metal after the Western powers for sheer botch.
The destruction of the Iraqi economy is especially depressing, as is the current American initiative amounting to considerable propaganda and the inability to restrain one's Halliburton compulsions. As the author notes, the systematic exclusion of Iraqi's from their own reconstruction fairly well shows the game in action, behind the market hype. The Iraqis had the electrical grid up and running in a few weeks after the first Gulf War.
Briskly informative and useful account.

I found this book riveting. The messages come from firsthand encounters with people rarely covered by the U.S. mass media. The concern for economics and business is a valuable complement to the excellent writing of Karen Armstrong, with her profound insights into religious and cultural patterns.
The value of this book is magnified given the drivel, propaganda, and ideological/theological obsessions that characterize most U.S. reporting and analysis of the Middle East.

The author is a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. And he's advancing a thesis that the Arab world is headed the wrong way economically. I tend to agree with that. After all, except for sales of natural resources, the Arab world is not particularly competitive. That's not a good sign. And while some people disliked Glain's anecdotal treatment of the region, I think it actually worked fairly well to highlight some of the problems.

Glain implies that a major Arab economic collapse wouldn't be good for anyone, and I certainly agree with that. Glain paints a pessimistic picture, and I basically agree with that as well.

Okay, why didn't I give it five stars? I seem to agree with its facts, its presentation, its conclusions, and, surely, with its politics.

But the truth is that I find fault with all of the above.

Had I been writing such a book and come to the section on Israel, I know what I would have said. I would have explained that Israel is a prime example of Arab failures to deal with truth and reality. And that it is also a prime example of present Arab opposition to justice and human rights. I would have connected all this to Arab economic and societal problems.

I would have talked about Camp David, and I would have shown how greedy and unjust Arafat's demands were (while admitting that neither side actually was offered anything of genuine value to it: Arafat was not offered Israel's head on a platter, and the Israelis were not offered peace). I would have made the point that Glain made, namely that Robert Malley and his boss, Dennis Ross came up with quite different views about the facts of what happened at Camp David. But I would have drawn the obvious conclusion from that! Namely, if you drag folks into negotiations with thugs, only to offer them nothing and then tell all sorts of lies about them, eventually people will refuse to negotiate with thugs no matter how much you want them to.

Instead, Glain seemed to imply that in a just world, Israel can't really maintain a huge 8000 to 10,000 square mile Empire. And that is pure nonsense. Worse, acceptance of such obvious absurdities is at the core of the failure of the Arab world to value truth, justice, human rights, and prosperity.

A coverage of the economic collapse of the Arab world might seem incongruous, but Stephen Glain's analysis in Mullahs, Merchants & Militants surpasses the usual history and contemporary political analysis to focus on an under-covered area: the region's economic structure. Chapters examine sustained economic decay in the region and its impact on political instability and extremism, recounting the ongoing decline of the Arab empire and its increasingly limited ability to pioneer new technologies and sciences. Stephen Glain was the Wall Street Journal's Middle East corespondent from 1998-2001: his familiarity with the region and his in-depth history adds a depth and dimension to discussions of economic instability.

History and economics are often taught as separate disciplines in schools public and private. This is unfortunate as they are thoroughly intertwined at all levels of life and society, from courtship, family structure, cities, states, nations and empires. This book does a great job of connecting history and economics together into a cogent diagram of the Middle East. The book was written by a journalist who has spent a lot of time on the ground in the Middle East over the past 20 years, most of it dealing and living with locals. The author divides the book into chapters, one for each of the major areas with a long history; Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. In each one, the author provides a short history of past glories, more recent colonial experiences, and current troubles under the auspices of dictatorships, and sometimes war. The overarching theme throughout all the chapters is that economic decline has given rise to Islamic fundamentalism and a host of other bad government policies. The economic decline is attributed to imperialistic policies of divide and conquer, over-dependence on oil, Cold War politics, and the trumping of economic common sense by nationalistic urges and political grudges.

The book is lacking on several points. The most prominent is that it essentially ignores the Arabian countries of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the UAE. The book also forgets about Libya and Qadafi, probably one of the most interesting Arab leaders of late. But overall, it is still a great book and a great study of the Middle East's problems.