The Middle East: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides) [Paperback]

It is now futile to introduce anyone to the Middle East: even the fervently uninterested are subjected to media inundation, typically of a kind more tailored to policy imperatives and sensationalist appetites than the region's realities. Philip Robins grasps that the serious beginner must unlearn before starting to learn.

Robins opens by acknowledging the "wars, civil strife, revolutionary change, the military in politics, terrorism, human rights abuses, the maltreatment of women, and ethnic and religious minorities", the "grotesque and painful images" through which Western audiences first encounter the Middle East. Yet, he argues, these experiences have afflicted many other parts of the world to a similar or greater degree; contrary to popular perception, "the Middle East judged against global standards is not a basket case". Against the depiction of the Middle East as some kind of global exception, with that claim's implicit demand for intervention, Robins sees the Middle East in comparative context, defined by many of the same challenges as the rest of the developing world. He eschews the vacuous Al-Qaedaholism that has devastated the public understanding of the region.

This is a Middle East far from the headlines, but it is one a Middle Easterner might actually recognize: one where the obsession with soccer reliably outranks preoccupations with terrorism, and where political leaders, however fearsome, are above all the target of popular jokes. Much commentary on the Middle East either suffers from partisan bias, or, in an attempt to avoid it, becomes simply boring and banal. Robins' most valuable talent is his ability to deliver sustained critical analysis that any fair-minded Arab, Israeli, Persian or Turk would, perhaps with a guilty gulp, recognize as accurate. When it comes to the region's real flaws, Robins is unsparing: "The capital cities of the high wealth states in the region enjoy many of the medals of success: multi-lane highways; grandiose buildings of steel and glass; fancy shopping malls, full of American franchises. But do they deserve them?" The Arab world is "big on consumption but low on development." The region - including Israel - is not only male-dominated, but "women also suffer from being an arena over which ideological men argue."

If the Middle East's chief problems, such as inadequate education systems, conservative religious orthodoxies, and brittle power structures, are mundane rather than peculiar, they also do not admit of easy or rapid solutions. The "potentially mould-breaking forces" such as "new media literate young people, entrepreneurial businessmen, medical researchers, artists and high achieving academics", are still "confined to the edges of Middle Eastern societies." This cautious pessimism, however discouraging, is a welcome corrective to the blind optimism of transformation through air campaigns and paroxysms of violence. Nowhere does Robins judge Middle Easterners, Arab or Israeli, with such words as he reserves for the architects of the Iraq war: "ignorance" and "insufferable arrogance" - strong words from a taciturn don.

The book's cover assures us that this is a "beginner's guide", and so it could be. It gives the facts needed to guide further study, and plenty of flavor to encourage it. But it is also a work of scholarship in disguise. Not only are shrewd observations and nuggets of wisdom buried throughout, but Robins' treatment of seemingly conventional matters is original and thought-provoking. In a chapter on leadership, he challenges "the dominant image...of the brutal autocrat", drawing new distinctions between the "founder-leader", the "big-man leader", the "negotiated leadership", and the "institutional leader" that will intrigue the specialist as much as the beginner.

A true novice might find the text, which skips along cheerfully without troubling to spoon-feed basic facts, slightly intimidating. This is not a "guide for dummies". The greatest beneficiaries may be politicians, journalists, diplomats, and other attentive students of world affairs, who require an antidote to a policy and media discourse that often does appear "guided by dummies". Will someone please post a copy to Obama?