Modern Arab World
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Ajami finds that the Arabs after 1973 lived now in a world that was more nearly an Arab world, with the Ottoman empire only a fading memory. However, he also finds that a certain grimness crept into Arab affairs after the Six Day War: "The sensitive could sense the gathering of the storm" (Ajami 4). For Ajami, this was the beginning of the fear as Arab politics turned more deadly serious than had been true in the past. Ajami finds that there is good reason for this fear because the politics of the Arab world repeatedly degenerated into bloodletting and was marked by "imagined transformations followed by despair that there is some immutable core that disfigures it all, that devours all good intentions, that mocks those who would try to change things" (Ajami 4). The sort of braggadocio that had served Arab leaders prior to 1967 was not longer sufficient, and cities such as Beirut, cities that had seemed cosmopolitan, were now revealed to be torn by tribal biases and prejudices. Ajami further indicates that the three major events of the period were the Six Day War in 1967, the October War of 1973, and the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79: "Men fought, worked, and reflected in the shadow of these events" (Ajami 5). Being defeated in 1967 led to a stronger response than being victorious in 1973. In 1967, the leadership had to put together an answer to its own defeat in order to survive, and the war in 1973 was that answer. Ajami finds a whole host of advantages learned by
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he discovery and development of oil in the Arab countries, and shifts in the world geo-political situation, with the results of the most recent shifts on the latter macro-level still in the process of working themselves out on the world stage. The Middle East holds a place of particular strategic importance, and the tensions existing there impinge on relations between nations outside the region.
As the discussion of community fear shows, though, an analysis of the political economy does not tell the whole story, for there is also a community-wide psychology, a reaction to the atmosphere that exists, a psychology that pervades the society even though most people do not recognize its source or its meaning. The fear is something a society feels when uncertainty prevails, as is true in much of the Arab world since the end of the old regime and the beginning of the new.
2. Most societies have their conservative and their liberal elements, divisions which have different meanings according to the tenets of the given society and the history of past developments and relations. Islam is both a religious and a social movement and has its conservative and liberal wings each with a religious and a social component. The divisions in the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2057
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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