On Political and Social Thought in the Contemporary Middle East

This is a very good collection of primary sources on Middle Eastern political and social thought as of about 1981. The stated aim is to identify the currents the editor, Kemal Karpat, thinks will guide the region’s future. It gathers perspectives from the Arab world (the largest share), from Israel (really Zionist thought), from Turkey, and from Iran. I’m not sure the material on Israel belongs here, and it’s disproportionate to the size of the country — especially obvious given how small the section on Palestine is within the Arab thought. Broadly, the perspectives across all of these countries fall into three categories: nationalist, modernizing-Marxist, and fundamentalist. Arab nationalism, shuʿbiyya, Turkish nationalism, Turanism, and Zionism sit best in the nationalist camp; the modernizing-Marxist section has an enormous range, from Baʿthism to Kemalism and most of the leftist texts; and the fundamentalist section runs from Hassan al-Banna in the Arab world to Kahane in Israel and Khomeini and the MEK in Iran.

The major absence, given the region’s recent history, is neoliberalism — though I can’t really fault Karpat for it. Many Middle Eastern and North African states pursued neoliberal policies in the 1980s, after the book appeared, in response to mounting debt crises. In Tunisia, rising costs forced the founding president Habib Bourguiba to turn to the IMF, which imposed a structural adjustment program; the resulting liberalization fell well short of what the IMF wanted, since cutting bread subsidies set off riots across the country and Bourguiba had to withdraw the harshest reforms. Still, most Middle Eastern countries — Turkey and Israel included, after Likud’s successes in the 1980s — liberalized their economies, which entrenched the establishment and deepened corruption. The turn to neoliberalism wasn’t something the region’s intellectuals or leaders thought out and prepared for; it was a reactive response to urgent conditions. But it was an important turn, and neoliberal policy and thought remain important across the Middle East. As a sense of the most important intellectual trends of around 1980, this is a fine book.