Samir Kassir (2006) Being Arab. London: Verso. 116pp, £10.99, 1 84467 099 6 बी सम

Samir Kassir (2006) Being Arab. London: Verso. 116pp, £10.99, 1 84467 099 6

‘Being Arab,’ is a surprisingly frank assessment of the modern ‘malaise’ of self-perpetuated ‘victimhood’ facing the Arab world today (p.15). The book opens with a very succinct portrayal of what it means to be an educated, Western oriented and liberal Arab in today’s Arab as well as Euro-American worlds. The Author, the assassinated Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir, epitomises the fate of the most educated and radically aware of Arab intelligentsia, often forced to leave their own countries and base themselves (at least on a part-time basis) abroad ( in Kassir’s case France), if they valued their own lives and that of their families. The Author, being part Palestinian and Christian, as well as having been brought up in cosmopolitan Beirut with its underpinnings of French ‘haute’ culture, is uniquely qualified to elucidate on the fate of the Arab people, caught between a clash of religiously inspired revivalist ‘Islamist’ traditionalism and modernity. Kassir takes us on a journey through the Arab world, dealing with country after country from the Levant and the Gulf to North Africa and identifies the main stumbling blocks that each country faces in its quest to achieve modernity or parity with the West. The Author also goes back in history, tracing the evolution of the Arab people and their settled culture and civilisation since the emergence of Islam in the 6th century A.D. As a litterateur, the Author lays more emphasis on the so-called ‘Nahda’ or golden age of modern Arabic literature and culture in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, as the Ottoman Empire deteriorated. He questions why this revival did not result in the ‘modern’ or ‘liberal’ Western-oriented Arab world that many of the cultural entrepreneurs of that period had designed it to. Kassir opines that the Arab people’s failure to embrace modernity lies in their unfortunate mass diversion to other pseudo-ideologies such as Arabism as well as religious fundamentalism. This has resulted in the Arab world being at the mercy of superior Western powers and even lags behind most other developing societies in the world today. In the end, Kassir seeks to find solace in the revival of cultural creativity in the Arab world today. The Author does not feel that there is as yet any call for optimism in the Arab world. To quote him, “the Arab world, the Levant in particular, remains the prisoner of a political and social system that may allow diversity to express itself, but never allows it to translate into any change in the decision-making processes”(p. 91). And he ends the book with what he feels should be a waking call to all the Arab people, namely, “that we Arabs abandon our fantasy of a matchless past and finally see our real history, so that we can then be true to it” (p.92).It’s unfortunate that we have lost such a brilliant analyst of ‘the Arab malaise’ as Kassir so cogently summarises the problems of his particular world region. The book under review would benefit very much from being elaborated into a much larger and deeper tome, as no doubt the Author would have done had he been alive today. It would be a fitting tribute to Samir Kassir, should some other writer carry on his particular crusade of speaking and analysing truthfully about the ‘Arab malaise’ in today’s world.