BOOK REVIEW: 'Faith Misplaced': Far From Unbiased History of U.S.-Arab Relations from 1820-2001
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
In his June 16, 2010 "Letter from Istanbul," New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman delivered a perceptive assessment of the shift in Turkey's role as a mediator between the Middle East and the West as the nation slides into extremist Islamist positions that are a major tectonic shift from its former role as a secular country.
He quotes a Turkish foreign policy analyst: “We are not mediating between East and West anymore. We’ve become spokesmen for the most regressive elements in the East.”
An admirer of Turkey, Friedman says "....it is very troubling when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan decries Israelis as killers and, at the same time, warmly receives in Ankara Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the bloodshed in Darfur, and while politely hosting Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government killed and jailed thousands of Iranians demanding that their votes be counted. Erdogan defended his reception of Bashir by saying: “It’s not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide.”
Friedman's observations are important to understand a book I just finished reading and am trying to assess: "Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820-2001" by Ussama Makdisi (PublicAffairs, $28.95). Makdisi is an American-born historian at Rice University in Houston. He's a Lebanese Christian on the tightrope that Christian Arabs must walk in their dealings with the Muslim majority in the region.
Erdogan's statement about Muslims and genocide is jaw dropping in light of the Ottoman Empire's Muslim genocide of Armenian Christians during World War I and the persecution of Armenians prior to that horrific event.
Makdisi is meticulous in listing the misdeeds of Jewish Israelis since the creation of Israel in 1948, but he's extremely selective in describing -- most often not even mentioning -- massacres of Jews by Arabs. One significant one missing in "Faith Misplaced" was the Aug. 23-24, 1929 massacre of Hebron's Jews -- 67 of them, with many more injured.
Nineteen local Arab families saved 435 Jews by hiding them in their houses, risking their own lives from the savage mobs intent in killing Jews. The survivors were evacuated from Hebron by the British authorities. Many returned in 1931, but almost all left again during 1936–1939. Hebron is sacred to Jews as the site of Abraham's tomb.
This event led to the creation of the Haganah -- the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to defend Palestine's Jews and eventually led to the training of the Special Night Squads in the 1930s under the direction of British philo-Semite and Christian Zionist army officer Orde Wingate (1903-1944).
All histories are by their very nature selective, but I expected more from Maksidi, who earned his doctorate at Princeton. Maybe I'm expecting too much from the nation's academics, who seem these days to be overwhelmingly pro-Arab and anti-Israel.
Makdisi is best when he describes the American Protestant missionaries who came to Syria, Palestine and other parts of the Ottoman Empire beginning about 1820. Their goal was to convert Muslims and the indigenous Christians to their American form of Protestant Christianity.
They weren't very successful in this attempt, but they did create the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut -- an institution that later changed its name to the American University in Beirut (AUB) -- a place where Muslims, Christians and Jews were offered Western-style higher education in a region notably lacking in such institutions.
Makdisi rejects what he calls the spurious idea -- advanced by historian Samuel Huntington and others -- of a "Clash of Civilizations" between Islam and the West. He suggests that the presence of the American missionaries created a positive view of a nation -- the U.S. -- that had formerly been unknown to most Arabs.
This is a pretty rosy picture, considering the Muslim massacre of Christians in Damascus in 1860, which Makdisi himself references, and the opposition to missionary work by American Protestants by the Maronite and other Christian sects in the Ottoman Empire. The missionaries early on wisely decided not to try to convert Muslims, instead instilling in them a positive view of America through the AUB and a sister institution in Cairo.
Makdisi writes that the ideas of President Woodrow Wilson on self-determination, in the midst of wide-scale immigration of many Arabs -- mostly Christians -- to America, continued this era of good feelings.
Enter the bad guys, the British and the French victors of World War I, who carved up the former Ottoman Empire into virtual colonies including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, and semi-independent countries like Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
Along with this disaster, in Makdisi's opinion, was the idea of self-determination for the Jews of Palestine in the wake of Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration. Self-determination is OK for Arabs and not Jews?
Makdisi doesn't indulge in the blatant anti-Semitism of Lebanese-American newswoman Helen Thomas, who recently suggested that the Jews of Israel -- "occupied Palestine" in her view -- leave and go to Germany, Poland and the U.S., but Makdisi writes approvingly of anti-Semites like William Eddy, the offspring of the American missionaries, who opposed the idea of Jews in Palestine and joined with the Arabists in the U.S. State department in vigorously opposing President Harry Truman's decision to recognize the new state of Israel 62 years ago.
I believe Orde Wingate qualifies as a Christian Zionist, but Makdisi calling Truman a "Christian Zionist" is stretching the definition. Truman understood public opinion in the U.S., which was overwhelmingly in favor of the outnumbered Jews of Palestine.
Not all of the people Makdisi attacks in his book are Jews like American Dennis Ross and Australian-born and naturalized American Martin Indyk, although he has few good words for American Jews like the late Leon Uris, a World War II Marine Corps veteran and author of the best-selling pro-Israel novel "Exodus."
He also considers Lebanese-born American scholar Fouad Ajami to be beyond the pale politically. Ajami, author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" and other books, initially attacked Sam Huntington's theory about the "clash of civilizations" but later modified his views. Ajami, a Shia Muslim, has been called a neo-conservative for his outspoken support for the Iraq War, which endeared him to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
Ussama Makdisi is Arab American Educational Foundation Professor of History at Rice University. In April 2009 the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar for his contributions to enriching the country's discourse on Islam. His previous book, Artillery of Heaven, won the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize.