Modernization and the Middle East

...The study points up the contrast between Egypt and Turkey...

...In Turkey, on the other hand, it has been government policy, initiated by Kemal Ataturk and continued by his successors, to bring education and economic progress into the villages, however difficult this may be...

...Here are the "people on the move," easily manipulated by those who handle the communications media...

...Since, however, the latter "take their political convictions more lightly, are more subject to seizures of ambivalence, and are more likely to weaken in the presence of crisis the pro-Russians whose personal involvement with their political ideology is very intense consolidate their gains in a crisis situation...

...It might be worth asking whether non-economic frustrations arising in the family, sexual life and personal relations might not be equally significant...

...Some of them, involving personality, as well as institutions, are hinted at in the section on Persia, but they cannot be fitted into the work's theoretical framework...

...Few of them have ever heard a radio, nor could they understand a news-broadcast if they heard one...

...The gap between town and country increases...

...The book's wealth of material and analysis rule out any adequate review, or even summary, in this limited space...

...the Parisians ask Rica in Montesquieu's Lettres Persannes...

...Questions like "What would you do if you were president editor of a newspaper, etc...

...The study shows how socio-economic frustrations on the part of the alienated intelligentsia lead to extremist syndromes...

...Alienated from the governing system he goes forth among his fellows to preach a new faith and gain loyalties for a new power...

...Upward mobility does not reward excellence in the varied productive skills needed for modernization, but is pre-empted by those skilled in mobilizing mass enthusiasm for the central power...

...The study deals with six countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Persia, Syria and Jordan...

...In the former, hunger and unemployment drive the rapidly increasing village population into the towns, where they are not absorbed, not "urbanized" in any real sense of the word, but where they form a floating mass of "urban nomads," who live nowhere and work nowhere...

...Modernization, not imperialism, seems to be the real cause of anti-Westernism...

...A whole new outlook rapidly rises before his eyes, but he is not able to cope with it...

...A fuller study would need to analyze not only the "male vanity culture'' element, but the whole "revenge-insecurity-vanity" syndrome, which modifies the Middle Easterners' scale of values and allocation of mental, physical and emotional energies, and pre-disposes them to certain attitudes in international affairs...

...Its influence on policy-making will be worth watching for...

...Much of the hatred of the West is shown to arise from involvement with it...

...The author develops a simple scale of three major classifications: "Traditionais" (those whose thinking is still unchanged by the impact of the modern world) ; "Transitionals" (those who have been shaken out of their traditional attitudes) ; and "Moderns...

...Once exposed to modern media of communication, the traditional's world crumbles rapidly...

...Moderates, whether " l e f t " or conservative, tend to be pro-Western...

...They are not the kind of people who will make a revolution...

...It is the merit of this book—or rather the studies on which it is based—that it elicits and analyzes what over 1,500 Middle Easterners think and feel about themselves and their environment...

...The "traditionals" are as far removed from the idyllic picture that was once painted of them as they are from the latter-day romantics' concept of the "revolutionary masses...

...in many ways it was less so, yet many of the differences existed even then...

...He learns new needs before he can satisfy most of them...

...They have no thoughts on politics, national or international, because they have no grasp of a world outside the radius of their own life and work...

...But it raises questions and even criticism in the reader's mind...

...The desire to emulate Western achievements, yet inability or unwillingness to pay the price, the wish to be accepted by the West together with the gnawing fear of being undervalued, combine with the guilt feeling of the well-to-do or the culturally and religiously alienated to find release by venting frustrations onto the West...

...Provincial as well as metropolitan towns have been growing, yet the gap between town and country has not increased, it may even have shrunk...

...Syria is going the same way...

...But really, what does it feel like to be a Persian...

...Moreover, Riesman seems to feel bound to launch a number of irrelevant volleys against Israel, a country not examined in the book, which receive neither elaboration nor supporting evidence...

...The concept of "modernization," valuable though it may be as a working hypothesis, can be dangerously misleading...

...Lerner's work torpedoes this facile optimism...

...Egypt seems increasingly the captive of a false position...

...Whatever intellectual debt Lerner may owe to David Riesman, the latter's introduction not only fails to introduce the study, but vulgarizes it...

...Persia is worrying...

...They seem to form part of the writer's compulNASSER : 'EXTREMIST SYNDROME* sive insistence on dissociating himself from Zionism, however irrelevant the context...

...belated perhaps, but far-reaching...

...It required financing on a scale which only opulent U. S. institutions of learning could afford...

...They are not only poor, unhappy and fearful—they lack any idea that things might possibly be better...

...It leaves no room for the differences between oriental-Islamic and Western-Christian society...

...It deserves to be called a pioneering study, and gives genuine cause for hope that a revolution in Middle Eastern studies is on the way...

...How extraordinary...

...Applying modern sociological techniques to a regional study, over a dozen people worked on this for several years...

...Jordan is suffering from indigestion...

...The book leaves one rather depressed...

...Until a few centuries ago, the West was not more modern than the Middle East...

...This thesis is also borne out by Colonel Nasser's behavior in venting the main force of his hatred not against Britain and France but precisely against his benefactor, the United States...

...The questionnaire, with more than a hundred questions, was designed to gather information on the questioned's education, range of knowledge, exposure to communications media, political and religious attitudes, economic status and personality...

...A deft analysis of this frustrated elite (or "counter-elite" as it is called here) shows how it can produce either "extreme left" or "extreme right" attitudes, which result in violent anti-Westernism...

...The towns, Cairo in particular, absorb everything: money, newspapers, films, radios, while the villages grow even poorer...

...It is the classic posture of the revolutionary agitator...

...Its conclusions— which are borne out by the studies of Egypt and Syria—point to an "extremist personality" which seems to be the basis for extremist ideologies rather than their result...

...Newspapers and movies belong to another world...

...The focus of the study was on "modernization" rather than on the rival or complementary concept of "Westernization...

...It seems so different from the "bravenewworld" optimism with which it was fashionable to approach Middle Eastern problems a few years ago : The U. S. would come in with economic aid and an oustretched hand, repairing the wrongs done by the nasty British and French...

...It is based partly on a questionnaire, partly on other studies and unpublished material...

...The question is a legitimate one, but unfortunately it has escaped so many writers on Middle Eastern affairs, who take it for granted that they know what every Persian and Arab, every Egyptian or Afghan peasant thinks or wants...

...In Egypt, education has tended to produce a vast, unemployable whitecollar proletariat, which Turkey's more balanced development has avoided...

...There emerges a clear 'extremist syndrome'—an underlying psychic structure of political extremism which combines high dissociation from institutions [family, religion, etc.] with a high degree of interaction among people...

...Lebanon is not allowed to develop...

...From the answers, the author has tried to elicit not only what members of various groups in the Middle East think and feel about major issues, but also why they do so...

...The book briefly mentions the concept of the "male vanity culture" of the Middle East, but only as a factor affecting the status of women...

...The world seems so much more promising and yet so much more menacing...

...The sins of the West—real or alleged—seem to have preciously little to do with it...

...In Egypt, things are getting worse...

...The over-lavish use of sociological jargon in the introduction, too, may frighten some readers away from the book, which would be a pity...

...seemed simply blasphemous to them...

...Urbanization in Turkey has been slower, but it has been more genuine...

...The study of Persia concentrates particularly on the problem of political extremism...

...It might appear ungracious to take issue with a book whose virtues I have described so inadequately...