Source books on a sore subject, the Middle East

STORM FROM THE EAST: THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE ARAB WORLD AND THE CHRISTIAN WEST

By Milton Viorst

Modern Library, $21.95, 224 pages

FAITH AND SWORD: A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM CONFLICT

By Alan G. Jamieson

University of Chicago Press, $29.95, 256 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES

The authors probably did not mean to dispirit me quite so badly, but reading these two essential source books on the background of today’s Middle East frustrations makes one come away with a couple of gloomy insights. Such as:

While nearly all Arab nations, cultures and religious sects hate the United States, the state of Israel and Western civilization in an order of intensity, they are equally suspicious of each other to an astonishing degree. Thus the odds of total Arab unity to either expel the West’s presence or to resolve their own conflicts are slim to none.

Whether one starts with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 A.D., or the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 612 A.D., the collision between the West and Islam has been marked by incredible stupidity and greed on the side of the Christians and intransigent savagery and self-destruction on the part of the Islamists from that day to this.

Every American president of the past 100 years bears some of the blame for the heritage of arrogance that has fueled today’s crisis. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson chose ardent Zionists as U.S. ambassadors to the Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Since then the best that can be said is that most presidents have committed sins out of ignorance; something that cannot be said of the British or the French, whose cupidity and brutality in this past century defies belief.

Other conclusions: If Israel were suddenly to vanish, few Arab leaders would notice and none would be pacified. The United States cannot abandon its commitments to the region any more than it can increase the effectiveness of its effort. Things will get worse before they get better. Only the Arabs themselves can solve their problems and 14 centuries of history argues against that happening.

Either of these books is a valuable primer but together they provide the two requisites of any handy library on a topic — hard facts and authoritative interpretations as a guide. And in these perilous times we need all the guidance we can get; a sense of history is mandatory if the future is not to be a bloody rerun of the past.

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