Stuck in the Middle

By BEZALEL STERN

POWER, FAITH, AND FANTASY
America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present
By Michael B. Oren
672 pages. W.W. Norton. $35.00.

Imagine this scenario: The year is 1784. You are an American businessman of entrepreneurial spirit, proud of your new country, and looking to make yourself and your nation a good profit. To that end, you hire a ship to send goods to Europe, North Africa, and even as far as the Far East, and receive precious luxuries, rare in the 13 states of the Union, in return.

Imagine your anger and surprise on learning that your ship has been attacked, your goods ransacked, your men taken hostage. Imagine your sense of powerlessness! Your country has no navy, and, indeed, has no real means of protecting itself from these marauding pirates. And who are these pirates? They are no Caribbean-roving quasi-British brigands, such as those imagined by the folks at Disney. They are Islamic bandits—some would call them terrorists—from North Africa.

For many Americans, our country’s relationship with the Middle East was assumed to have begun on September 11^th, 2001. For others, with perhaps a bit more knowledge of history, America has been seen as a driving force in Middle Eastern politics, and the Middle East, in turn, has been embroiled in American affairs, at least since the turn of the 20^th century. With the advent of Zionism and the creation of a Jewish state on the one hand, and America’s thirst for oil on the other, no one would deny that the Middle East has played a large role in shaping the United States’ international and even domestic politics and policies.

Most people do not realize, though, that America has had a long and troubled relationship with the greater Middle East—the Islamic world spreading from Western North Africa to Afghanistan and Pakistan—for almost the whole of its existence. Michael B. Oren, in his grand survey of America’s relationship with the Middle East, attempts to and greatly succeeds at correcting this misperception in his Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present.

Oren, an American-born and -educated scholar currently living in Israel, is somewhat famous for his previous book, Six Days of War, which is now considered by many to be the definitive account of the 1967 Israeli-Arab war. In that book, Oren analyzed six days; in this one, he tackles almost 250 years. The good news: this new volume is, for the most part, a real achievement. Oren provides, in great detail, evidence that the greater Middle East has played an enormous part in the development of our own country.

The author categorizes the relationship between America and the Middle East into three classes, helpfully distinguished by his own title: “power,” “faith,” and “fantasy.” In the “power” section, Oren illustrates the military and conquest relationships between the United States and the Middle Eastern World. In this section we learn, for example, that Napoleon III’s attempted power grab of Mexico in the 1860s was accomplished with the help of hundreds of Egyptian troops. Oren also illustrates in these sections just why those Islamic pirates of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries focused specifically on American targets, and how they influenced the writing of the Federalist Papers and the creation of a permanent American navy.

In the “faith” section, in some ways the most interesting area of the book, precisely because it contains the least amount of conventional historical fireworks, Oren shows how Protestant evangelicals established some of the first universities in the Arab world, and how Christian missionaries were the true sources behind Arab nationalism. This sounds, I know, almost preposterous, and it takes a scholar of Oren’s skill and breadth of knowledge to prove that it is indeed true.

Finally, the “fantasy” section of Oren’s book analyzes America’s often artificially sweetened perceptions of the Middle East. We learn, for example, that T. E. Lawrence—the famous British citizen who wore a kaffiya and led Arab legions—was actually a diminutive patsy who never won a battle. When, at the Chicago Exposition of 1893, a wide-eyed tourist walked through an intricately constructed Algerian bazaar, he would have been shocked to discover that many of the “Arabs” he met were actually local actors. Indeed, much of America’s historical fascination with the Middle East, Oren successfully argues, has been one of fantasy.

What is truly amazing about Power, Faith, and Fantasy, though, is the fact that Oren, a proud citizen of Israel and a former member of the armed forces, can be so unbiased in his treatment of Israel, Zionism, and the Arab world. It is true that a good portion of the book deals with Zionism, and early American Jews are highlighted—necessarily, one believes, due to their often overwhelming influence on Middle Eastern affairs. But there are also chapters on early 20^th-century American-Arabs, and the Israeli agenda is never given more scholarly veracity than that of Israel’s enemies. This, I know, should not be surprising, for a work of scholarship. But, unfortunately, in this age of partisan politics, when Middle Eastern Studies departments are likely to be made up of professors promoting radical agendas, in the classroom and the textbook, Oren’s work—at once an unbiased scholarly treatment of an untapped subject and a startlingly enjoyable read—is a refreshing delight.