From his philosopher’s study in a Baltic seaport, Immanuel Kant took on the intellectual problem of promoting peace in the world. This was the kind of thing Enlightenment thinkers did; Kant’s project would emerge as a structure for the modern international state system.
Kant’s logic chain began with the extreme places of the world. Arabia, as Fouad Ajami’s masterwork Crosswinds never lets us forget, is the extrême de la extrême: in climate, topography, faith, and fanaticism. Ever since the swift, stunning rise of Islam, most intensively through the Victorian nineteenth and war-riven twentieth centuries, “orientalist” scholars and aesthetes, adventurous travelers in disguise on the hajj, sojourners, diplomats, journalists, and spies tried to grasp this phenomenon. Some were alarmed by what they found, others intrigued, many captivated by “heart-beguiling Araby.” In our time, as the stakes grew ever higher, a cadre of policy and security analysts urgently joined the search for clues to the riddle of the sands.
At last we have Fouad Ajami, a uniquely gifted figure in this cavalcade, a thinker and a writer of astounding insight and depth: Muslim, scholar, political philosopher, category-defying public intellectual, American—just the one Kant must have hoped would arrive to carry his logic chain forward.
Put most simply, Kant concluded that the cause of peace would most pragmatically be advanced through an international association of states with republican governance and the willingness to refrain from bringing their religious beliefs to the negotiating table of world affairs and to foster an open trading system that would benefit, and benefit from, those extreme regions of the world. Thus we see the immense significance of today’s Saudi Arabia, whose statehood has been indispensable but profoundly troubled, whose religious faith has been internationally hyperactive, and whose world trade has been dominated by the “curse” of oil.
Ajami makes good use of his predecessors, the Victorian travelers Palgrave and Hogarth, but not until the final page does he mention Doughty, the best of them all.
Travels in Arabia Deserta, published in 1888 by Charles Montagu Doughty, gained a reputation as a monumental achievement of English prose. In it Doughty created an elevated, archaic style to convey the elaborately wild yet elegant culture of honor and blood of the Arab tribes. The book was, as its student T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote, “the first and indispensable work upon the Arabs.” Lawrence summed it up: The Arabs have “no half-tones in their register of vision.” They show no longing for great industry; “their largest manufacture [is] of creeds.” Their thoughts live easiest among extremes, the only refuge and rhythm of their being is in God. He is “the commonest of their thoughts.” The Arabs Doughty dwelt among were unselfconscious in their premodern authenticity, as yet undeparted from what twentieth-century philosophers would call their “being.”
But, noted Lawrence, writing after World War I, during the decades after Doughty wrote Arabia Deserta, the Arabs “had learned enough of the ideas of Europe to accept nationality as a basis for action. They accepted it so thoroughly that they went into battle against their Caliph, the Sultan of Turkey, to win their right to national freedom.” Out of this idea would come Saudi Arabia as a state in the international state system.
Herein dwells the dilemma of Saudi Arabia today. By the self-assessment of the Saudi hierarchy, ensconced upon the three pillars of tribal authenticity, royal supremacy, and religious orthodoxy, no regime, no polity conceivably could be more Muslim than they. The Saudi flag says it all: a field of green representing the faith with the calligraphic creed “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet,” underlined by the sword of strength and conviction.
Imagine then the shock as Ajami vividly describes what happened in November 1979, coincident with the fourteenth century of the Islamic calendar, when fanatics, proclaiming the arrival of the Mahdi, the redeemer, seized control of the sanctuary and mosque of the Kaaba in Mecca—Islam’s most sacred site. Saudi Arabia, self-defined as impeccably Islamic yet also as a legitimate sovereign state, faced the radical charge that the two—Islam and the state—are incompatible. From this point forward the Saudis would try to ride both galloping steeds at the same time: statehood in a global economy and an ever more radical Wahhabi observance of the faith. Saudi Arabia thus stands for what may be seen as a momentous civil war within the Muslim Middle East: those who seek to be both authentically Muslim and internationally responsible versus those who say Islam cannot tolerate the established world order and must oppose and replace it.
In the lands of the Middle East today, Iran no longer presents to the true believers the inspirational model and the challenge it did in 1979. Yet the Saudi monarchy must still, in some way, balance reform and a pro-Western orientation with the traditions and beliefs that run deep in segments of that society, and the pride and sense of exceptionalism that color the way Saudis face the world. It is Ajami’s unique access to all levels of Saudi society that gives this work its depth and clarity.
Ajami’s book is no traveler’s account but a work of profound political thought, bringing world-historical complexities into the lives of Arabs high and low to illuminate their tensions and hopes as no other writer could do. Crosswinds is thus a classic for our time, worthy of mention in the same sentence with Doughty’s great volume, and might well have been titled Arabia Perplexa.
I have at hand the battered copy of the Oxford Book of English Prose chosen by the Victorian-era don Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which forty years ago accompanied me to Vietnam. Mine is the 1925 edition; there hasn’t been one since, an indicator of the parlous state of the literary art. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta is represented here. If an edition for our time were possible, surely Ajami’s prose would be featured. This is more than a matter of style. The greatest prose masters possess intellectual, emotional, and visual intelligence all at once; they see the universe at a unique angle of vision, and their human and societal portraits exfoliate beyond metaphor into vocabularies and cadences of matchless instructional value. In Crosswinds, as in Fouad Ajami’s entire oeuvre, we see the ideas, emotions, and objects of Arabia as, in Doughty’s words, “a flowering tree full of murmuring bees of the desert.”
CHARLES HILL
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
Cochairman, Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order