Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age.

• Author: Daniel, Elton L.
• Position: Review

R. Stephen Humphreys. Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. 272 pages + notes and index to p. 297. Hardcover $29.95.

This book is a refreshing change from the flood of sensationalized and alarmist treatments of contemporary Middle Eastern politics unleashed in recent years in the popular press and media. It is expressly addressed to an essentially American audience of "interested nonspecialists" seeking to make sense of events and cultural developments in this important and often volatile region (understood here to include all of North Africa, the Sudan, and Afghanistan as well as the core territories of Egypt and Southwest Asia). The author, a well known authority on medieval Islamic history, brings to bear both scholarly expertise and personal experience in his writing, which provides the book with a welcome sense of depth and perspective. His treatment also represents what might be called a post-Orientalist approach to his subject: He rejects the notion that the Middle East is any more "mysterious" or "exotic" than other areas(including the United States), questions whether foreign "experts" have insights or knowledge a bout this region that are innately superior to or more "objective" than those of its inhabitants, and is keenly aware of the dangers of stereotyping or over-generalizing when dealing with what is in reality a vastly complex and diverse world of individuals and cultures.

The first chapter of the book is entitled "Hard Realities" and paints a generally bleak picture of the Middle East in terms of its demographic problems and the failure of most countries to develop modern, technological, export-oriented economies. It is followed by a chapter surveying the historical forces that have shaped attitudes in the contemporary Middle East, most notably the shattering experience with imperialism over the last two centuries. The remaining eight loosely connected chapters deal with a number of topics that tend to figure prominently and often erroneously in the American imagination of the Middle East: its fascination with radical ideologies, its seeming preference for authoritarian governments and erratic despots, its incendiary mixing of religion and politics, its militancy and anti-Westernism, its oppression of women, and its disregard for issues of human rights. In each case, Humphreys argues that things are neither so dismal as conventional wisdom might...