Who's Watching the Foundation Stores?
LOVE, KENNETT
Who's Watching the Foundation Stores? THE EGYPTIAN ARMY IN POLITICS By P. J. Vatikiotis Indiana. 300 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by KENNETT LOVE Staff Writer and former Middle East...
...His ability to get grants so far exceeds the quality of what he does with them that it makes me wonder who is watching the store at those big foundations...
...Vatikiotis' taste is also manifest in his remark that Egypt's religious and mystic orders, comprising three million adherents, "sport a variety of saints and cults...
...The book reads like the work of a big talker, not a thinker...
...There are no entries for Israel or Islam...
...This seems quite unnecessary...
...One major question it raises is why the Indiana University Press thought fit to publish it...
...In short, it is the kind of book that never would have gotten into print if anybody involved had paid competent attention to what he was doing...
...Also, neither the index nor any other part of the book provides any appreciation of the dissent in Syria which finally wrecked the UAR...
...But a dozen pages later the author pushes it even further: "It would be unwise, at this time, to attempt any final assessment of the role of the military in Arab politics, or to project current analyses into the future...
...is a worthless effort with virtually no saving graces...
...of an academic operator, not a scholar...
...Vatikiotis' previous book, The Fatimid Theory of State, was published in Lahore, Pakistan...
...Later he cites at least seven previous studies: Lucian Pye's Armies in the Process of Political Moderniation, on page 216...
...I doubt if a comment of that stripe has ever been printed before...
...Vatikiotis promises much and delivers nothing...
...I wonder if he would say Islam outsports Christianity—saints-wise, that is...
...The only justification for reviewing it is that people starved for merit in the glut of Middle East books may be tempted by the title and by the publisher's reputation...
...Reviewed by KENNETT LOVE Staff Writer and former Middle East Correspondent, New York "Times" P. J. Vatikiotis' book is worth neither the $7.95 it costs nor the five or more hours it takes to read it...
...This looks like a new frontier in caution...
...Dankwart A· Rustow's The Army and the Founding of the Turkish Republic, on page 244...
...Fred Frye's Arms and the Man in Turkish Politics, on page 280...
...The book has an index in which Nasser is cross-referenced under ? as "President Nasser," but not under N. The main entry, "Abdel Nasser," gives the first name as "Gamel," which means "camel...
...Here is Vatikiotis' nearest approach to an analytical conclusion: "We may be justified in hypothesizing that the Army in Egypt since 1952 has achieved a political revolution from the top by a swift seizure of power, quickly followed by the elimination of all possible opposition...
...It is also the kind of work that tries to get one up on the reader with airy asides like: "One recalls the Bassassiri coup d'etat in Baghdad in the eleventh century...
...What Vatikiotis here dismisses as "unwise" is his own introductory assurance that "the concluding chapter attempts the formulation of some general hypotheses regarding the total role of the military in Arab politics...
...Manfred Halpern's Middle Eastern Armies as the Vanguard and Chief Political Instrument of the New Middle Class, on page 219...
...Gamal" is the name, not "Gamel...
...If Vatikiotis really absorbed these studies, I am at a loss as to why none of their merit has shown through...
...without the commitment of both leaders and followers to certain values that are commonly associated with a secular political system...
...This is the kind of book whose pages are ostentatiously peppered with parenthesized transliterations of Arabic words, i.e., "the Islamic Congress (al-mu'tamar al-islami...
...Mamoun Kuzbari, the new Syrian Premier, is mentioned on three different occasions as a minister in previous governments, but there is no reference to him in the index...
...Early in the book, the author puts his judgment in the dock by describing Taha Hussein, the internationally admired blind Egyptian sage, as "a garrulous writer and not always an honest thinker...
...He begins with absent-minded arrogance by stating that no "study of the army in the Near East as a political group" had been attempted before his own...
...A Ford Foundation grant helped pay for this one's publication by Indiana...
...In his acknowledgements, Vatikiotis omits Ford but thanks Rockefeller...
...and, on the same page, the 1959 RAND Corporation seminar of scholars on the role of the military in the politics of backward nations...
...Dull, disorganized, dishonest, repetitious, written in bad English, containing little information and some of that wrong, and as weak in scholarly conviction as it is extravagent in academic presumption, The Egyptian Army in Politics: Pattern for New Nations...
...Morroe Berger's The Military Elite and Social Change, on page 264...
...Let me add a random example of the wordy nonsense that fills the intervening pages of The Egyptian Army in Politics: "The author doubts the adequacy of a developmental theory with empirical content to provide the basis of a stable modern polity in the U.A.R...
Vol. 45 • January 1962 • No. 2
