A Middle East Mosaic
Fragments of Life, Letters and History
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In times of war and in peace, from the earliest days of the Roman Empire to our own, Westerners have journeyed to the lands of the middle east, bringing back accounts of their adventures and impressions. Yet it was never a one way exchange. From the first Arab embassy to the Vikings in the 9th century to the internet musings of the Taliban, A Middle East Mosaic collects a rich, boisterous literature of cultural exchange.
We see the American Revolution through the eyes of a Moroccan Ambassador and the French Revolution through a series of Imperial Ottoman proclamations. We find surprising portraits of Napoleon ("a brigand chief"), TE Lawrence and Ataturk. We learn what George Washington and Machiavelli through t of Turkish politics and hear Flaubert and Thackeray rail against eastern crime and punishment. We peer into Voltaire's business correspondence and follow the footsteps of Mark Twain, Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell and Ibn Battutta, the Marco Polo of the east. Great discoveries are recorded - an Egyptian Ambassador is introduced to electricity and dismisses the spectacle as "frankish trickery;" another pronounces the invention of a secure mail system most useful for assignations. We enter the harem with a 16th century organ maker and emerge with Ottoman reform.
It was not until the sixteenth century that the first middle eastern rulers entered into diplomatic relations with European rulers, but trade often precede diplomatic relations. Business men from the days of the crusades against Saladin to the oil prospecting of Samuel Cox and his descendents have seen great possibilities in the markets of the middle east. And throughout the centuries we have been united by war. We witness the outbreak of the Crimean war with Karl Marx and enter Egypt with Napoleon. We observe Arab customs with George Patton and visit Baghdad and Cairo with George F. Kennan in the second world war. When Usama bin Ladin rails against "Jews and crusaders" occupying the holy land, he is rehearsing a grievance with a long history.
This symphony of voices, full of wit and wisdom, spite and wonder, suspicion, befuddlement and occasional insight, is ordered and explained by our foremost living historian of the middle east. The fruit of a lifetime of scholarship and erudition, A Middle East Mosaic is a dazzling capstone to a brilliant career. In a spirited reappraisal of western views of the east and eastern views of the west over the last two thousand years, Bernard Lewis gives us a brilliant over-view of 2,000 years of commerce, diplomacy, war and exploration.
This book is a delight, a treasury of stories drawn from letters, diaries and histories, but also from unpublished archives and previously untranslated accounts. Diplomats and interpreters, slaves, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries, princes and spies, businessmen, doctors and priests all pour forth their stories of the people and events that shaped history. A Middle East Mosaic cannot fail to appeal to anyone with an appetite for history and a curiosity about the vagaries of cultural exchange.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Balance distinguishes this compendium of writings collected by one of the world's foremost scholars of the Middle East. Lewis (The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years), a professor emeritus at Princeton, demonstrates that both the Middle East and the West, in their interactions through more than a millennium, have exhibited both a mutual curiosity and a tendency to settle for uncomplimentary generalizations about each other. In the 13th century, for instance, an Islamic observer wrote that no people were "more filthy" than the Franks. Other entries indicate that such negative attitudes persist to this day: Lewis reprints a short selection from a contemporary Afghani Web site in which it is alleged that, in forcing women to work, the West has destroyed the "personality, position and identity of a woman." He also cites the mid-20th-century American diplomat George Kennan calling Iraq a country ruined by "selfishness and stupidity," full of a "population unhygenic in its habits." While Lewis does not shy away from the troubling history of this cultural interaction, he also highlights some of its positive effects--devoting a chapter to words such as "sugar" and "magazine" that have entered the English vernacular from Arabic languages, as well as the descriptions of the rules and etiquette of both societies as described by travelers and diplomats. Nor does Lewis ignore more domestic and less momentous matters: There are chapters on cookery and one titled "Wit and Wisdom." What emerges is a vivid, nuanced account of the fascination that the West and the Middle East have had for each other and the troublesome ways that members of both cultures have tried to navigate and then explain their differences. While several chapters contain brief introductions, the nonscholar might want to keep a general history of the Middle East nearby as an accompaniment. Photos not seen by PW.