Exotic Delights. - Review - book review

National Review, July 17, 2000 by Christopher Caldwell

A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters, and History, by Bernard Lewis (Random, 469 pp., $35)

At the opening of the Ottoman parliament in 1908, the newsman Francis McCullagh looked around the square of Saint Sophia, filled with "Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, mariners from the Isles, shepherds from Asia Minor, Arabs from the Holy Cities and the mysterious Peninsula, Monte negrins, Bulgarians, Mongols, Turk omans, Tartars, Kirghiz, Aryans, Kurds, Kutzovalaks, Jews, Gypsies, Caucasians, Druses, Maronites, and representatives of all the other races which make up this most composite empire." McCul lagh was on the verge of snickering at this motley mob, when it occurred to him that he should be humbled by it. "This, after all, is no mean assembly," he wrote. "It contains representatives from Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Mecca, from the races which have given us the Talmud, the Bible, and the Koran, from the tribes which founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islam . . ."

One of the great strengths of Bernard Lewis's anthology is that it reminds us that the Middle East is still such a place. Oddly, we need the reminding. In the early 20th century, the region spurred the imagination of adventurers like T. E. Lawrence and writers like Wilfred Thesiger, Peter Fleming, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who set out in droves to discover it. In the early 21st, few other than specialists even keep up with it in the daily newspapers, and rare is the person who can tell a wali from a wadi, or a pasha from a parshat.

The Princeton historian Lewis is perhaps the only man who could pull off such a sweeping reintroduction. His Middle East Mosaic gathers two millennia's worth of snippets on every conceivable subject from both Middle Easterners and Western observers. The passages range from medieval Turkish love poetry to Henry Kissinger's memoirs, from the rabbinical wisdom of Pirqe Avot ("Love work and hate lordship") to an attack on feminized Western woman ("she has become no less than a bitch, chased by a dozen dogs in heat") from www.taleban.com. Lewis links these selections with short and elegant introductory essays.

He is firmly grounded in the major languages and literatures of the region: Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and Persian. So we learn that sepoys in British India and spahis in French North Africa take their names from the same Persian root for "cavalryman"; that we have an Arabic word for spirits (alcohol), while Arab countries have a European word for alcohol (sbirto); that Reza Shah decided to rename Persia Iran (which is cognate with Aryan) only in 1936, after a lecture from Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht.

Many of the best passages in this book are accounts of Western visits. Gustave Flaubert delights in the company of nomadic slave traders as much as he deplores the company of Western bourgeois, while Friedrich Engels pre fers the bourgeois, calling Bedouins "a nation of robbers." Dean Acheson describes Mosadeq with his "two bright, shoe- button eyes." Mark Twain, perhaps the ugliest American to appear in these pages, remorselessly describes trying to loot an archeological site:

We brought not a relic from Ephesus! After gathering up fragments of sculptured marbles and breaking ornaments from the interior work of the Mosques; and after bringing them at a cost of infinite trouble and fatigue, five miles on muleback to the railway depot, a government officer compelled all who had such things to disgorge!

Lewis's great gift as an anthologist is his delight in exoticism-even in an age such as ours, in which the whole idea of the exotic has been discredited as politically incorrect. The peoples of the Middle East are interesting because they're different: theocratic, misogynistic, polygamous, and probably more bigoted. Perhaps the most consistent shock to Western visitors in the Middle East has been the region's relative unconcern with equality. Ibn Qutayba, who collected the sayings of Muslim rulers in the early Middle Ages, quotes the following maxim of Anushirwan: "Govern the best of the people by love; mingle desire and fear for the common people; and govern the lowest by terror."

Likewise, Middle Eastern justice has astonished Westerners down the years with its arbitrariness and brutality. Adulterous women used to be thrown into the Bosporus in sacks. Men who violated the fast during Ramadan were forced to drink molten lead. Merchants were beheaded for using false weights, and bankers for collecting interest, which is illegal under Koranic law. Thieves were subject to "guanching"-heaving a man with his limbs bound behind him onto a stake, so he can take a day or two to die. (In modern Iran and Afghanistan, they get buried under rubble dumped by a Caterpillar tractor.)

The Middle East shows more political continuities than the West. Thus Lewis notes that, while medieval Christian Crusades were launched in imitation of Islamic jihads, the most important difference between the words "jihad" and "crusade" today is that the latter is never used in its original non- meta phorical sense. He also contrasts the Crusades' military successes and their religious failure. Middle Eastern ers viewed the Crusaders as an invading army. Period. They had an almost total lack of interest in the principles and values the Crusaders professed to be crusading about. "Ter rorism" is hardly new, either, as Lewis shows by including accounts of the 11th-century "Assassins," ur- terrorists at the beck and call of the Persian holy man Hasan-i Sabbah.