Sandcastles : The Arabs in Search of the Modern World (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East)

Rating:
Summary: A useful counterbalance to the neocon view of the Arab world
Review: Although this book has some flaws I am giving it the highest rating to compensate for the undeserved lowest rating bestowed upon it by the previous customer review.That review was deliberately misleading and defamatory, juxtaposing seemingly contradictory statements taken out of context, but what do you expect from a pro? Mr. Pipes does that sort of thing for a living.

Viorst is not an inexperienced novice in the Middle East who only interviewed "a few leaders". This book is the fruit of 20 years of newspaper and magazine reporting on the Middle East and foreign affairs and hundreds of interviews with people from every station in life.Far from being ignorant about the region, Viorst brings to light many aspects of the Muslim fundamantalist movement which the neocons and the Muslim Brothers would probably wish would remain quite obscure to the western public, all the better to exploit its excesses and use it as the justification for Israeli expansionism and furtherance of the US/British/French neo-colonialism which stunted the region's socio-political development in the first place.

If Mr Pipes had read beyond the chapters on Turkey and Syria, he would have found many other objectionable assertions, such as the fact that the returning Kuwaiti aristocrats massacred one thousand Palestinian residents of Kuwait in 1991 for cooperating with the Iraqi occupiers.

The aspect of SAND CASTLES that I found most remarkable was Viorst's construction of a very solid case - using sources in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel and the US - that the Reagan administration deliberately prolonged the Iran-Iraq war as long as possible and that the Bush administration deliberately provoked the series of events which led to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (though April Glaspie is innocent, in as much as a scapegoat is innocent by definition).

There are many other very significant observations in the book which are well worth knowing about, though I found the absence of a chapter on Saudi Arabia lamentable.Viorst's obvious sympathy for the Jordanians and Palestinians and his sympathy for the aims of the Baathist ideology, if not its leadership, is commendable.



Rating:
Summary: A book that holds up over time
Review: I haven't read a better book on the middle east. I especially enjoyed the part where he told how Bill Clinton killed the one woman who represented what we Americans would like to see all women in Iraq become. In 1986 Saddam built an eight story art center. To run it he appointed Leyla al-Attar. The author who met Attar at the museum describes her as the most stylish, most modern woman he met in the Arab world. She was in her mid forties, small, attractive with her hair in a pony tail. An artist she had a picture she drew of a nude woman with long hair half concealed in a grove of leafless trees on exhibit. Attar's husband was a businessman and she had three grown children. Neither she or her husband were Bathists. She had survived in Saddam's Iraq by being scrupulously non political. All her efforts were devoted to promoting the western oriented artists, writers and musicians who were her friends. Saddam indulged them in the hopes that they would bring him approval from the west. In the first Bush war with Iraq her home was bombed and many of her paintings destroyed. Fortunately the family was not home at the time. She moved with her husband and children to her sister's house. There in June of 1993 a missile fired under Clinton's orders as a response to the attempted car bombing of former president George Bush in Kuwait demolished the house killing Attar, her husband and one of her children.


Rating:
Summary: Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World
Review: Viorst, a reporter who has traveled in recent years to the Middle East for The New Yorker, can snag the startling quotation (a Gazan told him "The Arabs say they're our friends, and treat us worse than the Israelis do") and he can write incisively (President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria is a man for whom "an air of enigma is an instrument of state"). But the odd insight does not save a book chock-full of pretension, factual mistakes, cultural incomprehension, and political bias. The pretension starts with the subtitle: somehow, Viorst flatters himself into believing that a few trips to the Middle East and some interviews with Middle Eastern politicians gives him a base for interpreting the Arab experience with modernity. Some of his errors make one doubt that Viorst had his eyes open while traveling. How could a repeat visitor to Damascus assert that President Asad "shunned the creation of a personality cult"? In fact, Asad's representation is ubiquitous within Syria. Sandcastles contains illogical passages. We learn on one page that Asad has faced no challenge to his rule since 1970; seven pages later, Viorst reports on the carnage at Hama in 1982 that resulted from precisely such a challenge. Though he treads light on politics, Viorst betrays an all-too-familiar outlook throughout his account: stick it to America's allies (in this case, Turkey, Kuwait, and Israel), portray its opponents favorably. For example, his chapter on Turkey (not usually known as an Arab country, but included here anyway) bristles with antipathy. He describes Istanbul (in an ungrammatical flourish) as a "melancholy city" and exploits the bad weather during his visit as a metaphor for Turkey's unattractiveness.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1994