Fouad Ajami's The Dream Palace of the Arabs

This essay discusses the main theme of the above-entitled book by Fouad Ajami, the conflict between the intellectual content of Arab nationalism and the realities of the Middle East in modern times and the resulting disillusionment and alienation of many Arab intellectuals. The main focus of the essay is Chapter One, The Suicide of Khalil Hawi: Requiem for a Generation, with reference to excerpts from other chapters and other sources with respect to the period leading up to Hawi's death on June 6, 1982.

Intellectual Origins of Arab Nationalism

Hawi was a Christian Arab of Greek Orthodox origins who was born in December 1919 and grew up in mountainous areas east of Beirut, Lebanon. He was exposed at an early age to the ravages of the Turks and the hardships of post-World War I Lebanon. He became well-known as an Arab poet and as a professor at the American University in Beirut (AUB) and at Cambridge University in England. Ajami uses his life and the development of his thought to trace the disenchantment and despair his generation of Arab intellectuals felt toward the directions Arab nationalism had taken since the days of his youth.

In the late 19th century as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and its hold over the Middle East weakened, a new generation of Arabs, largely centered in Damascus and Beirut and in Cairo, struggled to shape a new identity for the indigenous peoples in the Middle East, which came to be known as the Arab Awakening. As

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"the appeal of Islam was emphasized less than the appeal to Arab nationalism and unity" (403-404). Hourani said "throughout the 1960s the public life of the Arab countries continued to be dominated by the idea of a socialist, neutralist, form of Arab nationalism, with [Nasser] as it leader and symbol" (404). In Egypt, Nasser promoted land reform, the High [Aswan] Dam, industrialization, education and social justice. These dreams of Arab progress, so widespread in the 1960s, failed to come to fruition, the turning point being the disastrous defeat of Egypt and its Arab allies by Israel in the Six Day War of June 1967. According to Israelis Kimsche and Bawly, "the shock of defeat was the greater because of the high expectation of victory which had engulfed the Arabs immediately before the war" (238-239). Ajami said the '67 war left "the charred remains of the edifice of Arab nationalism" (121). According to Hourani, the events of 1967, and the process of change which followed them, made more intense that disturbance of spirits, that sense of a world gone wrong, which had already been expressed in the poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. The defeat of 1967 was widely regarded as being not only a military setback but a kind of moral

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