614
PARTISAN REVIE
of the Chosen Race, an uncultured tent-dweller, blood-brother of th
Prophet, one of those extraordinarily insouciant creatures who came u
from the desert to inherit the lushness of Damascus and Jerusalem
when the western and Sassanid empires-Greece, Rome, Byzantium
Persia-were dead.
These men used camel's urine to dress their hair. They were organ
ized-as they are today, in Arabia-like gangsters, raiding each other fo
sport and spoil, subjecting the sedentary peasants to systems of "pr
tection," pressing constantly against the frontiers of sedentary existence
From the dawn of history they had been spawned by the desert, drive
by famine, spilling over-Assyrians, Chaldeans, Aaramaeans, Phoenicia
Hebrews and finally Arabs,-into the Fertile Crescent. This time the
bore Islam on their lances. In the course of a few generations, th
conquered the Fertile Crescent, Persia, North Africa and Spain. Th
even pushed as far as Tours, in France. Rapidly, they assimilated th
culture, and the astounding wealth, of their victims. They built
th
Bagdad of the fabulous Haroun al-Raschid, conserved the heritage
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antiquity and broadened the horizons of science, at a time whe
Europe lay fallow and barbarous under the gothic tribes. The empi
they established were in turn invaded and devastated by Crusade
Mongols and Turks, split by religious heresies, mined by the stubbo
particularism of certain peoples, such as the Spaniards, the Persian
and the Maronite monks of the Lebanese Mountain. To cement th
peoples, there was Islam and a language. But the enterprise was vitiat
by Arabic polity, which was merely an extension of the old nomadi
gangsterism. In the end, cities built by Roman governors were overru
by Mongols, covered with mounds of skulls and left to the envelopin
sands. Irrigation ditches were abandoned. Whole areas were returned
the desert and lost, perhaps forever, to man.
Why do I recite this twice-told tale? Because it is stilI going on.
Th
medieval Arabs created a rich and gracious urban civilization, support
on a social system which now lies like a corpse across the land. On
cannot touch this system without cutting into the archaism of
lsi
That much is unhappily clear. On the other hand, Islam left the heri
of Arabism, which today expresses itself, for example, in the Lawrenc·
"snobbery of the desert," and in the short-lived political triumph
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Faysal, but which also implies with some truth that the Maronite Pat
riarch of Beirut and King Abdullah share a common language an
culture.
This places the pan-Arabic intellectuals of Beirut before an impossibl
dilemma. They base their dream of the future on the universalism
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