The best magazine
Naively, we tend to assume that history, by definition that which is over and done with, ought to be a constant.
But history, of course, is only understood when it is interpreted, and both understanding and interpretation are always conducted by contemporary interests.
It is hard, maybe impossible, to write a history of one's own time, since all conclusions are still waiting to be drawn.
That, perhaps, is why we label such activity 'speculation'.
But it is always of interest to recall how current issues used to be seen, even when events have moved on.
Such an experience awaits the reader who opens Thomas Kiernan's 1975 book, The Arabs.
In his preamble, the author promises not to write propaganda, but rather to present the Arab point of view as it is presented to him.
The intention is to seek out contemporary positions and priorities from interviews with contacts throughout the Middle East and beyond.
But Thomas Kiernan's project is immediately much grander than journalism, since he intersperses these contemporary reflections and assertions with chapters on hard, time-worn history.
Indeed he goes far beyond the declared limit of his intention in that he not only covers Arab history, but also, perhaps inevitably, that of the Jews.
Add to that significant passages on ancient and contemporary Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the history of Israel, politics and conflict that led to changed strategies for the region and, just for the ride, a superb tract on the history of Islam, and it becomes clear that this is a massively ambitious, but also potentially informative project.
Forty years on, the book's weakness - and it does have one - lies in the contemporary, journalistic sections that, at the time, would have been its most immediate and perhaps more interesting content.
Today's reader of Thomas Kiernan's The Arabs will thank the author for his clear and comprehensive historical and cultural chapters that clearly identify and define the issues much more than the descriptions of, or perhaps speculations on the contemporary context.
The book starts in Lebanon, fought over and bombed at the time.
As a journalist in the thick of things, Thomas Kiernan is able to offer an account that brings the death to life and reminds us how little might have changed, though the location may be different and the technological efficiency of the process might have improved.
Nowadays it seems less risky to go about killing people.
But from 2014 the perspective offered by Thomas Kiernan's The Arabs seems devalued by two contemporary assumptions that now seem to place a distorting lens between our current experience and that offered in the book.
In 1975 the effects of the first punitive rise in the price of oil were only just being felt.
OPEC's muscles had only recently been developed and at the time had been little flexed.
Add to that a necessity to interpret everything through the filter provided by the Cold War and it can be understood why much of the contemporary analysis might at first sight seem less than relevant to today's problems in the Middle East.
A major issue at the time was that a fear that the vastly increasing wealth of Arab states would result in the effective buy-out, or take-over, of Western interests, both commercial and strategic.
This now seems like a non-issue, since twenty-first century capitalism places most of us in a position where the eventual ownership of an enterprise is neither known nor seems to matter.
Also, if the feared buy out was possible, then by now it has already happened and the results seem to have proved less catastrophic than imagined forty years ago.
But the real body blow to the book's continued relevance comes right at the end, when the author indulges in speculation about the future.
Who cares about asset ownership if superpower conflict is likely, as argued in the postscript of The Arabs? Thomas Kiernan in 1975 thought that such a conflict was inevitable in the Middle East, with the two Cold War superpowers becoming engaged in a war over territory, influence and resources.
Such a Cold War scenario hardly fits in today's world, where conflict currently simmers in Israel-Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Libya, not to mention Yemen or Sudan, or even Egypt where the military has suppressed both democracy and uprising.
An analysis that sees the region still embroiled in conflict sponsored by external empires no longer seems relevant, does it? On the other hand...
Thomas Kiernan's The Arabs presents a superb historical, cultural and religious history of the Middle East.
His forty-year-old speculation on the future now looks rather dated and irrelevant until, that is, the reader edits out the labels of the time and updates the identity of the actors.
Nothing much changes, it seems.
Source: ...