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Modern Arab World

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 the leadership in the period between the two wars. The leadership could rely on patriotism and did so in terms of having a limited task to accomplish. This actually brought the leaders down from a metaphysical plateau where they could argue philosophically about the Arab world into a practical reality where they had to develop relationships and create a political structure, learning all the while how the international political system worked and how they could...

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Modern Arab World. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:45, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690724.html