Fouad Ajami's The Dream Palace of the Arabs

They had the ability to look at their take in experiences critically and to begin to draw important conclusions nearly what they were learning about the population. They were beginning to see themselves both as they were and as others saw them and to understand how foreign perspectives on the Arab homo in the modern age affected the way good deal saw themselves. There was no longer a naive insider perspective that was good and an external angiotensin-converting enzyme that was bad, but an dental amalgam of internal and external perspectives that continually influenced each other.

The inheritance - the lay political idea and the dream of progress - had worn thin. The chock up of the generations, that subtle compact between one generation its substitute about what to retain, discard, or amend, had been torn up. In the privacy of their own language, when Westerns, Israelis, "enemies", and "Orientalists" were not listening in, Arabs spoke with candor, and in code. They did not adopt much detail; they could speak in shorthand of what had befallen their world (Ajami, 1999, p. 6).

That shorthand that existed for Arabs in the middle of this century has now disappeared, and the ofttimes tragic consequences of that loss of sense and of easy definitions is one of the issues that Ajami takes up throughout the book as a point of great concern. Simple definitions, easy ship canal of understanding who

In the simplified interpretation that we throw off of that civilization, the young had taken to theocratic administration; they had broken with the secular politics of their elders. They had done that, but there was more at adventure in that great cultural and political drama. Home and memory, the ways of an inheritance, the confidence in unexamined political and social truths, had been lost (Ajami, 1998, p. 7).

Ajami is changed as the world changes around him. He becomes who he is because of his time and his institutionalise in the world and also because of his family, and so he decides to become a storyteller, and an Arab storyteller, and he tries to find out what it means in the late government agency of this century to be an Arab storyteller with a story that is partly of the West and partly of the East.

it is that one is have a great deal of appeal - especially if one has been allowed to craft a sense of definition for one's self and not had this identity thrust upon one from outside. And so we give up such simple definitions with reluctance, even when they no longer clothe the reality of the world. Even if perhaps they no longer harmonize the reality of the world.

This last task is what Ajami is also doing, helping to immortalise how a set of intellectuals in a given part of the world and for a few generations learned how to use a specific set of ideas to define who it is that they are and how they see themselves in the middle ground of history that each one of us occupies without thinking much about what it means to balance our lives everlastingly between the past and the future. Ajami's book looks only at a corner of the world in the same way that Hughes did, although the jibe here is certainly not exact because Hughes looked only at the high cultural traditions of certain Western nations - Germany, France and Italy - not because he was interested in taking a regional entree but because he considered this not to be a regional approach. These to him were the countries and the intellectual traditions tha
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