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This is an absurd distinction and bound to last for only a few short moments. But at present, the book to which I devoted the last decade of my life is out-selling Thomas Friedman on Amazon. Every so often, there are glimmers of justice in the universe.
I celebrate this particular achievement for at least two reasons. First, among people writing about the Middle East today, few--if any--come closer than Friedman to reproducing the discourse of colonial economism that is my book& #39;s primary object of analysis and critique.
Friedman has for decades now peddled endless variants of an argument that people in the Middle East are uniquely susceptible to the incentives of monetary gain and that what appear to be complex political conflicts can be resolved through (neoliberal) projects of economic growth.
As was true a century ago under British rule in Egypt, this particular kind of claim about the economic determination of politics is, in fact, a claim about racial difference dressed up in the universalist garb of economic quantification.
In other words, it is a way of asserting that some populations of people are unequipped or unprepared to construe politics in terms that exceed their own narrow material interests and that those people are, consequently, unqualified to participate fully in governing themselves.
My book is a history of how those sorts of claims—in this case about Egyptians as distinctly economistic human subjects—were engineered into a project of colonial rule and of how several generations of anti-colonial thinkers and activists sought to challenge and rebut them.
There are many reasons why this history seems particularly relevant today. The fact that folks like Thomas Friedman continue to employ their prized public platforms to disseminate strikingly similar claims about the Arab World right now is certainly one of them.
Second, like many Americans my age, the Second Gulf War was a central event in my political formation. In the early 2000s, Friedman& #39;s latter-day reproduction of colonial discourse about the Arab World was matched by his support for the US gov& #39;t& #39;s neo-colonial venture in Iraq.
In October 2003, my classmates and I in Oxford& #39;s MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies were invited to have tea with TF before a lecture he was giving at St. Antony& #39;s College. Several of us who had been active in opposition to the war took the chance to ask him some questions.
When we inquired whether the mounting civilian death toll in Iraq had in any way altered his enthusiastic support for a military invasion in the name of democracy promotion, he flew into an angry tirade that ended with his shouting, "You can f*&k off!"
Anyway, I will draw some (perhaps petty) satisfaction from the fact that, for a few hours at least, more people are interested in reading "Egypt& #39;s Occupation" than "From Beirut to Jerusalem."
