Cruelty and Silence.

• Author: Maksoud, Hala

"This book was never about scholarship in the first place," states Kanan Makiya in the concluding chapter of his book Cruelty and Silence. He adds: "History and scholarship can wait for better days, which I am certain will come." (pp. 326-327) This disclaimer cannot shield the book, however, from being judged by the criteria of precision and responsibility, the two main components of scholarship. Nor can it protect its author from the charge of distorting and mistrepresenting facts. To be an "intellectual," as Makiya portrays himself, requires a level of integrity, which is lacking in the book, and a level of knowledge of one's subject which in Makiya's case is flawed. To disregard scholarship in an historical analysis is to defeat the stated intent of the book, namely to redress the existing situation in Iraq and other Arab countries; a situation which is intolerable and which consequently should be addressed responsibly.

Commenting on the book A.M. Rosenthal predicted that Makiya "will now be the target for Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals. The book will drive them crazy." (The New York Times, 13 April 1993) Rosenthal is right about the anger at Makiya, but he is wrong about the reasons. No one is angry with Makiya's account of the cruelty of the Iraqi regime, nor is anybody angry about his departing from what he describes as a built-in Arab cultural bias which makes one refrain from "washing [one's] dirty laundry in public while gruesome cruelties and whole worlds of morbidity unfold around us." (p. 325) His is not the first account of the horrible situation in Iraq, nor will it be the last. It is one more addition to a substantial documentation by many credible experts. In fact, even though some of the testimonies he recounts in the first part of the book are very powerful, his withholding of the witnesses names takes away from the power of the narrative.

Furthermore, and contrary to both his and Rosenthal's assertions, no one is angry over his descriptions of cruelty in other parts of the Arab World. These are also well-documented by Amnesty International and various other human rights groups including Arab Human Rights organizations. Arab intellectuals have written extensively about such practices and many of these writers are in prison or living in exile because they became targets of some of the regimes they criticized. Cruelty and Silence, one can assert, would not have elicited the interest it did by Rosenthal and others had it...