Exotic Delights. - Review - book review

National Review, July 17, 2000 by Christopher Caldwell

Nor is the current state of Israel such a radical departure. Jews outnumbered Muslims in Jerusalem even under Mus lim rule. What is striking are the shifts in Israel's backers. A 19th-century shah, arguing with a wealthy Jewish acquaintance in Paris about the condition of the Jews in Persia, sounds like a proto-Zionist when he says: "I consider the best thing to do would be that you should pay 50 crores to some large or small State, and buy a territory in which you could collect all the Jews of the whole world . . ." (He adds, "We laughed heartily, and he made no reply.") During the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Prince Faisal is gushing in his praise to Felix Frankfurter ("We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement"). And Anwar Sadat's account of El Alamein, the first decisive Allied victory of World War II, in which he promises Rommel to raise an army to back the Nazis, shows just how unlikely he was to be the first Arab leader to reach a peace agreement with Israel.

Arabs were shocked by European "licentiousness," particularly in matters of liquor. (The Turks called their Euro pean possessions "Romeili"-the Land of Rum.) But in nothing are Westerners so barbaric as the way they treat their women. The Turkish ambassador complains in 1720 that in Paris "it is the women who sit in the shops and haggle and bargain and deal." An Egyptian sheik in Paris a century later notes that Frenchmen "are the slaves of women and subject to their commands whether they be beautiful or not." Muslim natives were always discomfited to see Western women traveling alone, but such women had a great advantage over male correspondents: They could be admitted to the closed world of harems.

Islamic law permits four wives, unlimited mistresses, and divorce on demand. Surprising to feminist ears will be Lewis's assessment that women visitors formed, "in general, a more positive picture of a woman's life in the East" than men did. Some Europeans even found a silver lining in the prevalence of slavery. The 19th-century British diplomat Sir Charles Eliot remarks that the Muslim world has always been marked by a high incidence of slavery (including sex slavery) but a low one of prostitution, and a high incidence of begging but a low one of indigence.

In Machiavelli's time, the Islamic state was an alternative; by Burke's, it was a ball and chain. Today it seems like an anachronism- but it seems more of an anachronism than it actually is, thinks Lewis, who views Islamic theocracy (of the Ayatollah Khomeini's sort) and secular democracy (of Kemal Ataturk's sort) as "the two most likely alternative futures for the peoples of the Middle East." The great sadness of Middle Eastern history over the past few centuries has been Islam's slow-dawning realization that Western Christen dom-those doughfaced boozers, those henpecked half-wits, those inelegant infidels-somehow left Is lamic culture behind. Figuring out why this happened preoccupies at least a dozen of the Europeans and Middle Easterners whose writings Lewis has collected.