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BOOK REV I EWS that Maalouf’s new book casts on certain events – for instance, the Arab world’s jettisoning of its pluralist heritage, the disappearance of its Jewish communities, or the death of cosmopolitan Alexandria, which effectively “caused the end of a fruitful, centuries-old coexistence between countless Mediterranean communities”, all of which are given short shrift. Maalouf mourns them in passing, but does not delve further, which is surprising considering how he continually depicts himself as a product of two cultures. Instead, what Maalouf ex- cels at is articulating the almost inexpressible anger and frustration felt by the Arabs over the course of their recent (and not too recent) history: a history which until the brief euphoria that materialized in the wake of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s early victories in the 1950s, has been marked by “defeats, foreign occupations, unfair treaties, capitulation, humiliation and the shame of having sunk so low after having conquered half the world.” This is DisorderedWorld’s genius: that despite the countless titles currently in print which attempt to analyse the motivations behind would-be jihadists, I have yet to come across a passage as concise and revealing as this: Every Arab carries within him the soul of a fallen hero, and the desire for revenge on all those who have treated him with contempt. If he is promised revenge, he listens with a combination of expectation and incredulity. If he is offered revenge, even in part, even in a symbolic form, he gets carried away. Nasser had asked his brothers to raise their heads. While little of this will surprise the well-informed reader, what makes this treatise-cum-summary of recent world events so appealing is Maalouf’s fine writing. He has a knack for distilling complex thoughts into gems such as: In my view, it is the absence of a papal-style institution capable of drawing a line between the political and religious which explains the drift that affects the Muslim world, rather than a “divine directive” creating confusions between the two spheres. 204 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

BOOK REV I EWS That said, Maalouf again falls short, simply by virtue of raising a fascinating question, making a couple of historical references – reminding his readers of how the papacy successfully quashed such fanatics as Savonarola – but eventually losing patience with it all (his take on this topic lasts a mere eight pages), before moving on to a new, more pressing topic. But if DisorderedWorld loses points on the rigour of its argument, it gains them with its ethos. I for one do not agree with the blurb on the front cover of the book; Maalouf is not “the clear, cogent and persuasive voice from the Arab world that the West has been waiting for”. He is far too universal for that. Rather, he is a pioneer of the new global citizen that will in the future cease to be an exotic anomaly, but become more commonplace than many are for the moment willing to concede; take the following: What I don’t like about the contemporary Arab world is its poverty of moral conscience, and what I don’t like about the West is its propensity to turn its moral conscience into an instrument of domination.These are two very serious charges and they are doubly painful for me, but I cannot leave unspoken in a book which claims to tackle the sources of our imminent decline. Examples of this sort appear on nearly every page – and though it may seem repetitive to do so, I get the impression that Maalouf is not so much establishing his credentials as emphasizing how the topics which he deals with have very little to do with cultures or nations (or even empires) any more, but have become a universal question of survival, and in a sense, the only question worth pondering. And this is why, despite the faults outlined, there is no better emissary of this stark truth at the moment than Maalouf. Alas, unlike with The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, the concluding chapters of Disordered World are something of a let down. Maalouf bizarrely devotes ten rather histrionic pages to the topic of global warming, which – not to detract from the urgency of the issue – are written in the style of a rushed editorial and seem out of synch with the rest of the book.This is a shame, as Maalouf has obviously pondered over all of this for a while; the bibliography he includes is both tasteful, takes account of a large spectrum of opposing opinions, and is an excellent starting point for those interested in reading further. And while DisorderedWorld might have benefited from some stronger editing, this is perhaps a case of the specialist reader being infuriated by a book that is clearly meant to inform and entertain the more general reader. BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 205

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BOOK REV I EWS

that Maalouf’s new book casts on certain events – for instance, the Arab world’s jettisoning of its pluralist heritage, the disappearance of its Jewish communities, or the death of cosmopolitan Alexandria, which effectively “caused the end of a fruitful, centuries-old coexistence between countless Mediterranean communities”, all of which are given short shrift. Maalouf mourns them in passing, but does not delve further, which is surprising considering how he continually depicts himself as a product of two cultures. Instead, what Maalouf ex-

cels at is articulating the almost inexpressible anger and frustration felt by the Arabs over the course of their recent (and not too recent) history: a history which until the brief euphoria that materialized in the wake of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s early victories in the 1950s, has been marked by “defeats, foreign occupations, unfair treaties, capitulation, humiliation and the shame of having sunk so low after having conquered half the world.” This is DisorderedWorld’s genius: that despite the countless titles currently in print which attempt to analyse the motivations behind would-be jihadists, I have yet to come across a passage as concise and revealing as this:

Every Arab carries within him the soul of a fallen hero, and the desire for revenge on all those who have treated him with contempt. If he is promised revenge, he listens with a combination of expectation and incredulity. If he is offered revenge, even in part, even in a symbolic form, he gets carried away. Nasser had asked his brothers to raise their heads. While little of this will surprise the well-informed reader, what makes this treatise-cum-summary of recent world events so appealing is Maalouf’s fine writing. He has a knack for distilling complex thoughts into gems such as:

In my view, it is the absence of a papal-style institution capable of drawing a line between the political and religious which explains the drift that affects the Muslim world, rather than a “divine directive” creating confusions between the two spheres.

204 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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