Faith Misplaced
The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820-2001
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The two-hundred-year-long relationship between the Arab world and United States has been fraught with tension and resentment. What began in the nineteenth century as a favorable exchange of cultural understanding and economic opportunity deteriorated with America's increasing interest in oil, and finally collapsed when America's pushed for the legitimization of the State of Israel. In this provocative new book, Lebanese-American historian Ussama Makdisi explores America's fractured relationship with the Arab world, and offers policy recommendations that can lead to its repair.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A history of foreign policy gone wrong, Makdisi s study argues convincingly that Americans have rarely engaged with the Arab nations as autonomous peoples with cultures and histories of their own they ve preferred "glib generalizations" and that such myopia is at the core of much of the Middle East s animosity toward the U.S. In his history of the Middle East, Makdisi (Artillery of Heaven) privileges Arab voices and, for the most part demonstrates an impressive ability to render societies and individuals as multifaceted. He efficiently debunks the Huntingtonian belief in an inevitable clash of civilizations and resurrects a forgotten history of mutual curiosity and cultural cross-pollination between the East and West. It s unfortunate, then, that he reduces Zionism and Zionists to a cog in the machinations of Western power politics, rather than presenting a more complex, messy, and accurate picture of competing narratives and their impact on American policy making. His pat simplification undermines his otherwise commendable effort to defuse the "mutual incomprehension" and "mutual demonization" between the U.S. and the Arab world.
