A complex region encounters bigotry and prejudice

Robert Kaplan's latest book aims to offer a fresh survey of the 'Greater Middle East', but in doing so, it grossly simplifies complex political issues, reflecting American interests and prejudices

The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

Author: Robert D Kaplan

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: 377

Price: Rs 999

With the sheer size and frequency of his books, Robert Kaplan has established a reputation as a travel writer who explores new and exotic places for the Western reader, seeks to marry geography, geopolitics and culture, while embellishing his personal observations with copious references to earlier commentators on the region.
 

Mr Kaplan’s works share certain characteristics: They are aimed at the generally uninformed American reader, largely reflect American interests and prejudices, grossly simplify complex historical and political issues, and project knowledge and learning through extensive references to writers who share the author’s mindset and world-view.
 

This book, Mr Kaplan’s 22nd, has all the attributes of his earlier works, but is perhaps his most irritating. It is poorly organised with numerous stray thoughts and ideas, contains several contradictions, and has numerous observations that led this reviewer to write “Rubbish” in the margin.
 

Mr Kaplan offers a fresh survey of the “Greater Middle East”, the territory from the Aegean Sea to the borders of China, going southwards from Central Asia to Ethiopia, where he has the ambitious plan of seeking “to identify the signals of decay and renewal across the infinity of time”. His travels take him to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. In each chapter, he recalls his earlier visits, provides a thumbnail sketch of the relevant history and politics, recalls the writings of earlier historians, sets out the views of certain local commentators, and finally puts forward his own observations. His conclusions about most of these states are replete with references to violence, oppression, corruption and state failure.
 

But there are hardly ever any references to Western interventions in West Asian affairs. Thus, about Egypt he says: “… the British, for all their faults, truly gave Egypt a chance at democratic self-rule”, when in fact the exact opposite is true. About Saudi Arabia, he says: “… Saudi Arabia is Arab and Islamic and nothing but,” completely ignoring its role in global energy, commerce and finance, and its emerging role in regional and global affairs.
 

Accompanying these loose remarks, are observations that are breathtaking in their fatuousness. Thus, he traces chaos in West Asia to Prophet Mohammed’s failure “to bequeath a political system”, ignoring Mohammed’s community at Medina and the diverse Muslim political orders since then that were shaped by Islam’s tenets relating to power and legitimacy. He mentions West Asian history as being influenced by “the intersection of religion and politics”, ignoring that this was also true of Europe for over a millennium.
 

He makes the banal remark, “Arabs have never been a happy family”, while failing to note that most communities have rarely been “happy families”; recall here the blood-letting that has defined the European family for centuries.
 

Mr Kaplan traces Syria’s present-day tragedy to its people’s yearning to live under “a sort of a postmodern version of the Ottoman Empire”. What escapes the author is the fact that the tragedy has been caused by external powers, backed by the US, which have intervened in the country to effect regime change.
 

On the same lines, Mr Kaplan believes that Iran has a “bleak, radical, utterly despised and dysfunctional regime” on account of “serious weaknesses that also hark back to history and culture”. There is hardly reference to the vicious and intrusive interventions of Western powers or the recent US sanctions that have impoverished middle-class Iranians.
 

Mr Kaplan has an extraordinary fondness for discredited Western historians of the 20th century, who, shaped by imperialist triumphalism, judged colonised peoples as undifferentiated collectives. Thus, he approvingly quotes one writer as referring to the Greater Middle East as the “Land of Insolence” only because the people dared to resist colonial domination. He speaks of the “human perversity” of Saddam’s Iraq, but fails to recall the horrific US perversities at Abu Ghraib. Shockingly, he describes the Indus Valley Civilisation as a “satrapy of Achaemenid Persia and the forward bastion of Alexander the Great’s Near Eastern empire”.
 

He refers to “the indisputably high level of violence and political instability” in the region, which has generated 58 per cent of the world’s refugees and 68 per cent of battle-related deaths. He fails to note that in every instance — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran — the conflicts were deliberately instigated by the US and its allies. Much later, Mr Kaplan criticises US interventions in Iraq and Libya, shrugging off the hundreds of thousands dead as “mistakes”.
 

While Mr Kaplan spouts his banal observations and quotes outdated and bigoted historians, it is surprising that a book that seeks to discuss the Greater Middle East has just a few stray references to the Palestine issue and has no separate chapter on Israel. He quotes a senior Egyptian official as saying that there would be no stability in West Asia “while millions of Muslim Palestinian Arabs remained under Jewish army occupation”, but offers no comment of his own. Clearly, the Israel-Palestine issue is off-limits in a book that purports to educate Americans about the region.
 

Mr Kaplan happily quotes TE Lawrence’s “memorable passages” where he describes Arab thinking as being “at ease only in extremes … they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity”. This description surely applies to Robert Kaplan himself.

The reviewer is a former diplomat