The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey By Fouad Ajami Pantheon. 344 pp. $26 Reviewed by Robert Irwin Sunday, March 1, 1998; Page X01

Fouad Ajami's account of political and cultural developments in the Near East since World War II is similarly melancholy, a kind of unsystematic group biography of disappointed Arab intellectuals. Ajami himself was born in southern Lebanon (a predominantly Shiite region) in 1945. The leading figures in The Dream Palace of the Arabs belong to an older and once more hopeful generation. They include Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911), the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist; Khalil Hawi (1919-82), a Lebanese poet and academic; Louis Awad (1915-90), a Coptic Christian academic and journalist; Nizar Qabbani (b. 1923), a Lebanese poet; Adonis (b. 1930), a Syro-Lebanese poet; Abdelrahman Munif (b. 1933), a novelist whose works have caused him to be exiled from his native Saudi Arabia; and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (b. 1937), a Syrian Marxist intellectual.

Some in this generation of secularly minded intellectuals had been inspired by a classic of political-historical polemic, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab Nationalist Movement, published in 1938 by George Antonius. In that book, Antonius chronicled the collapse of Turkish power in the Near East and implicitly looked forward to the complete emancipation of the Arab world. Although Antonius was a Christian Arab born in Lebanon and educated in Egypt, he gave preeminent place in his book to the Palestinian Arab struggle against Zionism. According to the concluding lines of The Arab Awakening, "the logic of facts is inexorable. It shows that no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession." It seems from the immediately preceding paragraphs that their author assumed that it would be the Jews who would be dislodged or exterminated. Antonius, who died in 1942, did not live to see his expectations confounded by the defeat of a coalition of Arab armies and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Nevertheless, despite the catastrophe of 1948, Arab politicians and thinkers continued to nourish great expectations throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s. The withdrawal of Britain and France from a colonial role in the Middle East and North Africa encouraged optimism. After Col. Gamal Abdul Nasser's triumph over Britain, France and Israel during the Suez crisis of 1956, he became a focus of hope not just for Egyptians but for most Arabs. The politically engaged adopted Pan-Arabism and socialism. Above all, expectations were fueled by the rhetoric of politicians, pressmen and poets, rhetoric that promised that Israel's days were numbered. If there is a fault in Ajami's book, it is that he is too kind to poets, such as Qabbani, who by manufacturing slogans of uncompromising resistance have helped to create a political culture that prefers martyrdom to practicality.

The Naksa, the "Relapse" of 1967, when Israel once again inflicted crushing defeats on Arab armies in the Six-Day War, was therefore a horrid shock. (Sadiq Jalal al-Azm's gloomy tract, Self-Criticism After Defeat, was one of many books written after the event.) Other disasters took longer than a week to detect. Ajami's account of the economic performance of Arab countries is notably bleak. The Middle East and North Africa combined export a smaller volume of manufactured goods than does Finland. In Egypt, it could be seen, Nasser's policies of agricultural reform and import substitution had been as unsuccessful as his military adventures. Other countries were hardly more successful. Lebanon was taken apart by feuding militias led by unprincipled warlords. Algeria's ruling regime corruptly wasted its oil and mineral resources – and the princes of the Arabian Peninsula did likewise. Iraq launched bloodily expensive and ultimately unsuccessful attacks against Iran and then Kuwait. The Palestinian leadership in exile, after a more or less unbroken record of strategic miscalculations, finally signed an agreement with Israel that gave them very little indeed.

The young, having despaired of Nasserism, pan-Arabism and Palestinian activism, as well as of their ineffective and unbelieving parents, began to turn to Islam for the answers to clearly perceived political and economic problems. For Ajami this is no answer, but merely another problem – a disaster even. (His account of the persecution of Egyptian secularists and Coptic Christians by Islamic fundamentalists is particularly harrowing.) The Dream Palace of the Arabs is not just a lament for what has failed to come to pass; it is also a lament for what has been lost – the old, confessionally and ethnically tolerant, polyglot, Levantine ambiance, the ascendancy of enlightened liberal elites, and the open-minded engagement with Western culture. Louis Awad used to maintain that he was really a European who had been stolen away by gypsies. Others, admittedly, were more ambivalent; Adonis argued against stealing modernity from the West but added that "when we reject its machines and technology, this should not mean that we reject the intellectual processes that produced these machines. It should mean only that we oppose the way this technology is dumped on us, the way it turns us into mere consumers, the way it turns our country into a large flea-market."

According to Ajami, "it has been the besetting sin – and poverty – of a good deal of writing on the Arab world that it is done by many who have no mastery of Arabic." His book, on the other hand, is very much an insider's book, a group portrait written by one who has known most of those in the picture. The Dream Palace of the Arabs is an absorbing and sadly moving account of what political, economic and social failures on a grand scale have meant in human terms and at an individual level.

Robert Irwin is the author of several books on the Middle East as well as of several novels. His most recent book is "Islamic Art in Context."