One and many

The panoramic perspective of Eugene Rogan’s new 500-year history, Elias Muhanna writes, helps us look beyond the the increasingly dated idea of a single, common Arab identity

The Arabs: A History
Eugene Rogan
Allen Lane
Dh152

There is something almost old-fashioned about the idea of a book-length history of the Arabs. Broad, all-encompassing narratives of this kind were popular in the 20th century, when historiography frequently intersected with pan-Arab nationalist projects, and when the sense of a common Arab identity was vividly felt both by the region’s inhabitants and the foreigners who observed and engaged them.

Today, the Arabs are increasingly viewed (and seem to view themselves) either as a small subset of a larger civilisation – the Muslim world – or as a collection of disparate and fractious entities whose differences often overwhelm their commonalities. Indeed, the notion of “Arabness” as a shared and distinguishing element seems to have lost its currency as a prism through which to study the region, just as it has lost its charismatic appeal in the political culture of the contemporary Middle East.

It is therefore suggestive to re-encounter a panoramic perspective in Eugene Rogan’s excellent new book, which, if we are being frank, is not so much a history of the Arabs as it is a political history of the Middle East and North Africa during the last 500 years – with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. The narrative begins with the Mamluk army’s defeat by the Ottomans at the battle of Marj Dabiq (in northern Syria) in 1516, the event that “marked the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern age in the Arab world”, and then flits through the main developments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries before slowing down the pace upon arrival at the period of European colonialism.

Telescoping deftly between bird’s-eye-view narratives of large spans of history and the curious little footnotes that make for fabulous storytelling, Rogan weaves together the tales of an enormous, riotous cast of characters. We learn, for example, about the Algerian dey Husayn Pasha’s attack on the French consul Pierre Deval with a fly whisk in 1827, and about the affair of Colonel Husni al-Za’im, the leader of a short-lived military government in Syria who offered Israel full normalisation of relations in 1949 (an offer that was rejected by David Ben-Gurion). Rogan’s use of contemporary Arab sources (newspapers, magazines, memoirs, novels, first-hand reports) allows him to bring the reader close to the action at pivotal scenes, lending the work a very different flavour from its twentieth-century predecessors, including that of Rogan’s mentor, the great Albert Hourani.

Conitnue reading: The National: One and many