Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #404986 in Books
• Published on: 1995-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 340 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Blending history, reportage and sharp profiles of key players, this insightful study tells how American "Arabists"--diplomats, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, Protestant missionaries, military attaches--formed an elitist, expatriate professional caste in the 19th-century Middle East. The Arabists, in Kaplan's ( Balkan Ghosts ) view, carried on a "romance" with exotic Islamic cultures, and many supported pan-Arab nationalism. Blind to what Kaplan deems the inevitability of the birth of Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust, American Arabists today often see Israel "in only the simplest stereotype," he asserts. Kaplan charges that Arabists adapted to and promoted the Bush administration's appeasement of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, as exemplified by U.S. ambassador April Glaspie's wooing of Saddam right up to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Occupational hazards facing the latest crop of Arabists, warns Kaplan, include rampant shallowness, careerism and an insular, sterile embassy life divorced from local realities.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Kaplan supplies a secondary source of minibiographies sketching the lives of dozens of Protestant missionaries and U.S. State Department officials who worked in the Arab world over the past 200 years. Addressing current concerns, he shows that the opposition of missionaries and Foreign Service officers to Israel's creation--meant to appease the Arabs--led to the various wars in the Middle East and, ultimately, to the Gulf War of 1991. Since so many people are mentioned in this account, Kaplan ( Balkan Ghosts , LJ 2/15/93) can give only superficial treatment to each one (from a few paragraphs to a few pages). As a result, the text seems fragmented, and the introduction of each new character reads like an entry out of Who's Who. Recommended for specialized collections only.
- John D. Horton, MLS, Royal Saudi Navy, Jubail, Saudi Arabia
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Kaplan turns his attention to the myths and realities of the State Department's Arabists: "men and women . . . who read and speak Arabic and who have passed many years of their professional lives . . . in the Arab world." Tracing the origins of the Arabist tradition to the Protestant missionary families who established schools and hospitals during the nineteenth century in Beirut, Cairo, eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Saudi peninsula, Kaplan contrasts the idealism of Americans' initial involvements with the Arab world with the imperial machinations of "sand-mad Englishmen" such as T. E. Lawrence. After World War II, Arabists whose families had lived in the Middle East for generations hoped for stronger ties between the U.S. and the young Arab nations; however, the cold war and U.S. support for Israel dashed their hopes. The Arabists blends graceful, empathetic portraits of specific individuals with succinct descriptions of developing trends in U.S. politics and diplomacy and Mideast relations up to the Gulf War. A thoughtful, reflective analysis of a subject painfully immersed in controversy. Mary Carroll

Customer Reviews

One-of-a-kind, but not Kaplan's best
Not Kaplan's best, but that's because the subject was difficult to follow. Most of the diplomats were rather obscure and unaccomplished names in history - either teachers / professors or evangelical Christians at or around the American University of Beirut - so not the easiest to follow. Fact is, that not until recently have somewhat scholarly people begun to pay attention to the Middle East - Arab nations. Hence the term 'Arabists' connoted a unique and elite group of arabophiles - a rare breed these days, but not quite as uncommon as say a century ago.

A Good Introduction to the Old Arabists
Arabists, at least the "old" generation, tend not to like this book because they feel that it unfairly stigmatizes them as hopelessly affected with clientitis, diplomats who have "gone native," and who are fundamentally biased towards Israel and out of touch with U.S. interests. Yet in highlighting these Arabists Kaplan provides an excellent introduction to the field: the legendary figures of the U.S. Foreign Service in the Arab world, among them diplomats like Bill Eagleton, Richard Parker, and Hume Horan. Also included are some of the "new" Arabists like Alberto Fernandez, who as of this writing heads up the public diplomacy efforts of the Near East Bureau in the State Department. He's one of the few U.S. government officials whose Arabic is good enough to frequently appear on Al-Jazeera talk shows.

dance of diplomacy
I really enjoyed this book, and to interject a rather shallow comment, I quite like its cover design!

Though I am not a serious student of foreign policy or foreign service, I do wonder daily about the present conflicts in the Middle East and how (and why) the U.S. will continue to define itself in relationship with all the seething and churning in that part of the world.

What I really enjoyed most about the book was the diplomatic perspective of Middle Eastern history, which, for me, had something akin to the page-turner effect of a thriller, there was so much intrigue suggested.

Ultimately though, at the end of the book, I was left with my own analogy between diplomacy and dance. It seems that the kind of Western (U.S.) diplomacy critically described in this book is much like Western classical dance - choreographed, predigested, and distant - as opposed to Middle Eastern dance, which is grounded, "tribal," improvised, even carnal, but always inspired by reality rather than romanticism.

Perhaps diplomats should be given dance lessons!