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The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey
 
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The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey (Hardcover)

by Fouad Ajami (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • 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.co.uk Sales Rank: 171,661 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #90 in  Books > History > Political History > Nationalism

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  • See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Review

"An important and illuminating book . . . a valuable testament to a tragic generation that tried to bridge the Arab past with modern ideals." --"The New York Times"
"The Dream Palace of the Arabs is an absorbing and sadly moving account of what political and economic failures on a grand scale have meant in human terms and at an individual level." --"The Washington Post Book World
""Eloquent. . . . A clear-eyed look at the lost hopes of the Arabs. It opens the door to the thought processes of a society whose motivations have been little understood and often feared. The Dream Palace of the Arabs is a courageous book." --"The Christian Science Monitor"

"From the Trade Paperback edition."



Synopsis

Offers an elegiac account of a group of Arab men and women living after World War I, whose hopeful vision of Arab culture and nationhood clashed with traditional Arab customs.

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The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey
66% buy the item featured on this page:
The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey 3.9 out of 5 stars (7)
The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Canto original series)
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The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Canto original series)
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Customer Reviews

7 Reviews
5 star:
 (3)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.9 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Melancholy Dream Palace, 19 Jun 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Dream Palace of the Arabs (Vintage International) (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.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Failed Awakening, 30 Oct 2005
By Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: The Dream Palace of the Arabs (Vintage International) (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.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Fouad is a brutally honest commentator & has keen insight, 5 Feb 1999
By A Customer
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

3.0 out of 5 stars 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 14 months ago by Too many books

1.0 out of 5 stars 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

5.0 out of 5 stars 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

4.0 out of 5 stars 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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