- Hardcover: 344 pages
- Publisher: Pantheon Books Inc (15 April 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0375401504
- ISBN-13: 978-0375401503
- Product Dimensions: 25.4 x 17.5 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,521,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
The Dream Palace of the Arabs
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.
For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
WHEN THE IRAQI poet Buland Haidari was buried in London in the summer of 1996, the men and women of Arabic letters who bade him farewell could not miss the poignancy of his fate. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
WHEN THE IRAQI poet Buland Haidari was buried in London in the summer of 1996, the men and women of Arabic letters who bade him farewell could not miss the poignancy of his fate. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If for nothing else, Fouad's essay on "The Orphaned Peace" is worth the price of admission. His insight is peerless, his prose lyrical (his editor did a wonderful job preserving his unique style and language), and his thoughts are, as always, challenging. As one can see from other reader reviews, it takes an uncommon intellectual courage for him to look with such unblinking eyes at the world he grew up in. It is a sad story, told in a unique idiom. A must-read for anyone, Arab or Jew, interested in the region.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is an absorbing blend of history and literary criticism. A somewhat melancholy narrative of the political and economic failure of the Arab World in the 20th century, it is also a study of Arab intellectual currents of the time. The author chronicles the lives and the thoughts of these intellectuals from the heyday of modernity in the middle of the century through pan-Arabism, secular nationalism and Nasserism.
The great dream of an Arab Awakening failed miserably. The total defeat of 1967 was a turning point in the move towards religious fundamentalism whilst the increased oil revenue after 1973 only exacerbated the fragmentation of the Arab World into brutal fascist regimes, medieval theocracies and oiligarchies.
There were and are exceptions to the majority of intellectuals who were united mainly in their hatred of Israel, like the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh and a few others. According to Ajami's insightful analyses, repeated failure led to extremism and further disasters and thus the cycle of hopelessness continued.
This book was published in 1998 so it preceded the expressions of more murderous nihilism as seen in 9/11, the further intifada against Israel and the genocide in Darfur. The embrace of religious fundamentalism has been facilitated by the nihilistic utopianism of writers like Edward Said and others. One of the results of this regrettable trend has been the more severe oppression of minorities like the Christian Copts in Egypt.
The book is illuminating on many levels: the Shia/Sunni divide, The Iranian revolution and Arab perceptions of it, The Oslo accords, Iraq's war against Iran and Kuwait, the assassination of Sadat and the attitudes of the Arab intelligentsia towards Israel.
Dream Palace Of The Arabs is a most enlightening read for those who wish to understand the tragic history of the Middle East. The work is scholarly and well researched, but the writing has a riveting and poetic quality that keeps the reader captivated throughout.
The great dream of an Arab Awakening failed miserably. The total defeat of 1967 was a turning point in the move towards religious fundamentalism whilst the increased oil revenue after 1973 only exacerbated the fragmentation of the Arab World into brutal fascist regimes, medieval theocracies and oiligarchies.
There were and are exceptions to the majority of intellectuals who were united mainly in their hatred of Israel, like the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh and a few others. According to Ajami's insightful analyses, repeated failure led to extremism and further disasters and thus the cycle of hopelessness continued.
This book was published in 1998 so it preceded the expressions of more murderous nihilism as seen in 9/11, the further intifada against Israel and the genocide in Darfur. The embrace of religious fundamentalism has been facilitated by the nihilistic utopianism of writers like Edward Said and others. One of the results of this regrettable trend has been the more severe oppression of minorities like the Christian Copts in Egypt.
The book is illuminating on many levels: the Shia/Sunni divide, The Iranian revolution and Arab perceptions of it, The Oslo accords, Iraq's war against Iran and Kuwait, the assassination of Sadat and the attitudes of the Arab intelligentsia towards Israel.
Dream Palace Of The Arabs is a most enlightening read for those who wish to understand the tragic history of the Middle East. The work is scholarly and well researched, but the writing has a riveting and poetic quality that keeps the reader captivated throughout.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Fouad Ajami has no ax to grind (unlike Ed Said) and cuts to the quick of the Arab culture. It's not for nothing that he was a regular guest on the McNiel Lehere report for a good while. Worth reading.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Ex-Arab intellectual looks back on failed dreams
This is a very personal book, in which Ajami looks back on Arab, and particularly Lebanese, writers and poets of the 1940s to the 1960s, and examines how their dreams of a free... Read more
Published on 18 Aug 2008 by Too many books
The anguish of a self-loathing and deracinated intellectual
Ajami's book is a perfect example of the disasters inflicted on the Arabs by a group of self-loathing and deracinated intellectuals,who could not come to terms with their own... Read more
Published on 19 May 1999
Melancholy, heart-wretching, thought-provoking
The current generation of Arab literary intellectuals perspective of what has befallen the Arabs in the Middle East during the past fifty years. Read more
Published on 5 Feb 1999
flowery, ornate, but not too deep
I am in two minds abou this book. On the one hand, it is beautifully written and it taught me a great deal, but I do not think it does the subject justice. Read more
Published on 26 Mar 1998
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