From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. While a glut of recent books on the Middle East have addressed Western perspectives on the region, this excellent book emphasizes questions Arabs ask themselves. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iranian revolution serve as backdrops, but veteran Mideast correspondent MacFarquhar (
The Sand Café) focuses primarily on Arab nations and a grab bag of Saudi teachers, Moroccan dissidents broken by their years in prison, individuals searching for political freedom and Muslims struggling to sustain their faith in the face of violence from within and without. MacFarquhar's approach is well-rounded; he includes less palatable facts (those who argue that the word [jihad] contains no implication of violence are glossing over the fact that for some zealots, jihad means only one thing) and facts often overlooked (when most Arabs talk about reform, they usually mean curbing rampant corruption). If America is to overcome Arabs' deep distrust, MacFarquhar suggests, it must abandon policies too often based on expediency and listen, not to its own domestic politics but to the concerns of the people in [Arabs'] own countries.
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Drawing on his many years as a journalist in the Mideast, including work as Cairo bureau chief for the New York Times, American MacFarquhar starts with a detailed discussion about fatwa, jihad, Al-Jazeera, and other front-page political topics and then talks to people today in Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Libya, where he spent time as a child. He admits that his interviews focus on dissidents, diplomats, and government officials, while neglecting ordinary citizens. But he speaks Arabic, and the openness and immediacy of his on-site reporting reveals the diversity in country and culture as he explores current Arab attitudes toward the U.S., the oppression of women, the power of the Internet and satellite TV, the stifling control of the secret police, and much more. The professor forbidden to pluck her eyebrows sums it up: “They focus on the trivial . . . so we don’t worry about the big things.” Those big things will grab American readers, from religion’s blocking of science to U.S. expediency in backing the powerful and, always, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. --Hazel Rochman
