Harvard University Press Blog

Tracing the Ties that Bind Blacks and Jews in History and Myth

Tudor Parfitt, once described as “a sort of British Indiana Jones,” writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas that he first encountered black Jews “in any form” in late 1984, when he’d traveled to the Sudanese border with Ethiopia. He’d been sent to the border’s refugee camps to investigate reports that the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) there were being mistreated by the Christian Ethiopians, all of whom were fleeing the year’s famine. Though their status as Jews was being contested, Parfitt was present for what he describes as “the first stages of the Israeli attempt to save thousands of these impoverished and desperate people from famine and persecution.”

Not long after, while speaking in South Africa about the Ethiopian Jews, Parfitt met another group of black Jews, this time from the Lemba tribe. The Lembas explained to Parfitt that they were blood relatives of the Ethiopian Jews, and that the Israeli acceptance of the Ethiopians should also legitimize their own Judaism, hitherto difficult to claim. Despite being intrigued by the notion that the people he’d met in the Sudan were now acting as a “proof community” for others, Parfitt found the idea of any connection between the Beta Israel and the Lemba of Soweto doubtful.

Out of curiosity he spent time with the Lemba, and while he came to consider it quite possible that their customs and traditions had something to do with the Semitic world he was unable to uncover any record of Jews having settled in southeastern or central Africa as far back as the Lemba’s oral tradition extended. Another year or two passed before, while researching a history of the Jews of the Yemen, Parfitt uncovered some evidence that could actually corroborate the Lemba’s story of their own heritage. “And it was at this point and rather out of frustration,” he writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, “that I turned to genetics.”

In 1999 the findings of the Lemba’s genetic tests were front page news around the world, the subject of television documentaries such as NOVA’s The Lost Tribes of Israel, and even featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. As reported by the New York Times:

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection… But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The genetic signature of priests—a hereditary caste, different from rabbis but with certain ritual roles—is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Dr. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, says that he has discovered Senna—Lemba tradition maintains they came from that mysterious northern city—and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.

Since that burst of coverage over a dozen years ago interest in the Lemba has been steady, and, coupled with the worldwide interest in the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, there was evidence of an enduring fascination with the very idea of black Jews. For Parfitt, the intensity and duration of that fascination sparked a new series of questions:

Why did these stories generate such media interest? Was it because the stories were about Jews? Or because they were about blacks? Or both? Was it because, at some deep level in Western consciousness, Jews are actually assumed to be black and that therefore these stories about black Jews could be taken as a final vindication of an age-old presumption? Or was it that people believe that Jews are not black at all and cannot be black and therefore that the idea of black Jews appeared more than usually quixotic—and therefore good copy? Whatever the reason, this topic achieved worldwide coverage, and articles on the Lemba and Beta Israel have appeared in the world’s major newspapers with some regularity. The topic touched a nerve in a way that none of the work with which I had hitherto been engaged had done. Somewhere at the nexus of these issues of history, prejudice, and convention there seemed to me to nestle aspects of Jewish and black history that had not been fully studied before.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, our most thorough tracing of the ties that bind blacks and Jews in history and myth, is the result of Parfitt’s work to understand those histories.

The Rise and Fall of Syria's President for Life?

Roger Owen writes in The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life that he became interested in the subject in the spring of 2009, and soon after decided to write a book. It was virtually completed by the end of December 2010, “just as the first rumblings of opposition to President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia suggested that these systems of quasi-monarchical government were much more vulnerable to popular pressure than almost anyone had previously imagined.” Faced with the question of whether or not to amend his work to reflect the inchoate Arab Spring, Owen compromised: “I would adapt my manuscript to take account of the fall of two presidents, Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; the tremendous pressure faced by three more, Bashar al-Asad of Syria, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya; and the announcement by Omar al- Bashir of Sudan that he would not seek another term as president when his present term expired in 2015. This meant, in effect, the end of the system that my book seeks to explicate as a particular form of modern Arab political practice.” Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya have of course since been removed from power. In Syria, however, Bashar al-Asad remains. With the massacre last week of over 100 villagers in central Syria ratcheting international outrage yet higher, an end to Asad’s reign may be growing closer. We offer below an excerpt from Owen’s book that outlines the common features of the system of Arab monarchical republics, which may also be seeing its end.

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The systems of Arab presidents for life were many decades in the making, having their origins with the (mostly military) leaders who came to power from the late 1960s onward and soon learned how to construct the coup-proof regimes that would allow them to remain in offi ce for as long as they lived. From then on, only one Arab republican president, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani of North Yemen, left office more or less of his own free will when his term expired in 1974. Other unusual exceptions were Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, who got pushed aside by ambitious subordinates, while two more, Gafar Nimeiri of Sudan and Chadli Bendjedid of Algeria, were removed by fellow military officers in 1985 and 1992, respectively.

As of 31 December 2010, the list of longtime presidential survivors included Muammar Qaddafi, who got rid of the Libyan monarchy in 1969; Ali Abdullah Saleh of North Yemen (1978–) and a United Yemen (1991–); Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (1981–); Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia (1987–); and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (1993–). By then, just one—Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (1970–2000)—had managed to pass on power to his son, Bashar. But there was every reason to suppose that others, like Mubarak, Saleh, and Qaddafi, fully intended to try. Meanwhile, at least two of the Middle East’s remaining monarchies, Morocco and Jordan, had become significantly more presidential in their exercise of royal authoritarian power.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise to those who have read the long history of political republics, beginning with the emergence of powerful figures such as the Caesars of ancient Rome. Then, too, there are the cases of the two powerful leaders of the revived form of republicanism represented by the American and French revolutions, with George Washington fighting off the various influences suggesting that he become another type of monarch and Napoleon Bonaparte agreeing to become emperor in the interest of ensuring that the revolution could be continued on a permanent basis.

Nevertheless, it took some little time to understand how, in a roughly similar republican context, roughly similar pressures encouraged the leaders of the world’s newly independent states to take their first step in the process toward permanency by allowing themselves to serve on and on without thought of retirement. It remains true that, in the Arab world at least, the general rationale of such systems, their structures, their politics, and the ways in which they sought to legitimize themselves remain little researched and poorly understood. All this in spite of the work of a small group of academic researchers, mostly political scientists, who have begun either to explore the present political dynamics of individual Arab presidential security states such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia or to look comparatively at certain aspects of these same dynamics either across the Middle East or, in a few cases, across all or most of the former colonial world.

Forward Into Things That No One's Ever Heard Before

For years Robin D. G. Kelley has been one of the most well respected scholars of American History, especially within the interdisciplinary circles of American Studies. The publication in 2009 of his wonderful biography of Thelonious Monk helped to propel Kelley’s work to a broad audience outside of the academy, and we’re thrilled to have worked with him on a new book that builds on that study. In the excerpt below, and in the accompanying video, Kelley explains the meditation on modernity that he presents in Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, and how his work helps us to reconsider the origins of jazz itself.

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By exploring the work, conversations, collaborations, and tensions between both African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization, I examine how modern Africa figured in reshaping jazz during the 1950s and early 1960s, how modern jazz figured in the formation of a modern African identity, and how various musical convergences and crossings shaped the political and cultural landscape on both continents. This book is not about the African roots of jazz, nor does it ask how American jazz musicians supported African liberation or “imagined” Africa. Rather, it is about transnational encounters between musicians, or what the ethnomusicologist Jason Stanyek calls “intercultural collaboration,” and encounters between musicians and particular locations (such as Lagos, Chicago, New York, or Cape Town). In other words, it hopes to explain how encounters with specific places, people, movements, cultures, provided fertile ground for new music and musical practices.

As a nod to the great critic and poet A. B. Spellman, whose Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966) serves as a model for this book, I focus on four artists and the various groups they led during the age of African decolonization (roughly 1954–1963). Two of these artists, pianist Randy Weston and bassist and oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, hail from the United States (or, more precisely, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn); drummer Guy Warren is Ghanaian; and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin is South African. Each of these artists was propelled by the upheavals of the 1950s to seek new musical forms, new collaborations, new fusions across time and space. They shared neither a common agenda nor a common culture, though they recognized and often embraced cultural commonalities, “jazz” being one. Nor did they always succeed. On the contrary, they occasionally clashed with fellow artists, or bumped up against prevailing assumptions, the intransigence of the market, an oppressive state that viewed their music as a threat to order, or consumers whose own stereotypes made them incapable of hearing and appreciating the work.

Yet they all shared a vision of jazz as a path to the future, a vehicle for both Africans and African Americans to articulate and realize their own distinctive modernity while critiquing its Western variant. And, from their vantage point, standing at what appeared to be the precipice of freedom for Africa and black America, the continent represented a beacon of modernity blazing a new path for the rest of the world, but one tempered by deeply spiritual, antimaterialist values. Indeed, I suggest that African American musicians were seeking new spiritual and ideological alternatives to what they saw as a declining West that led them to a deeper exploration of African music and culture. Likewise, African musicians who were drawn to jazz as a particular idiomatic expression of black modernity also saw the need to infuse it with the music of their homeland. Echoing the late poet Aimé Césaire, in the atomic age, when colonialism and the Holocaust left the West spiritually wanting, Africa represented both an ancient, pristine past possessing a higher spiritual order and a modernizing force able to maintain its humanity precisely because it presumably would not relinquish the best elements of its traditional values. This sort of Janus-faced modernism is key to understanding the nexus of jazz and Africa in the age of decolonization. As Veit Erlmann warns, we have to resist the easy binary of modernity and tradition, especially when the subject is music. “Modernity and tradition,” he writes, “are not only the two most significant historical fictions here but also the tropes whose role in the Western discourse about itself and the others is reflected and configured in the very grammar of musical performance itself.”

 

African Victory in the Age of Empire

In the late nineteenth century, when it seemed that all of Africa was destined to come under European colonial rule, Ethiopia succeeded in thwarting European conquest and preserving its own independence. The pivotal event in its resistance to Italian colonial advance from Eritrea was the Battle of Adwa, in which an army of black Africans under the leadership of Emperor Menelik decisively defeated the Italians. The Battle of Adwa, which marked the first time in the modern era that a non-European power had defeated a European power without the aid of a European ally, is considered one of the most important events in modern African history. In The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, historian Raymond Jonas makes the case for the broader global historical significance of the conflict. 

There are a number of complex reasons for Italian failure at Adwa. Italian leadership had assumed, wrongly but not without credibility, that it could play on factional conflict within Ethiopia. As a result the Italians were unprepared for the unity Menelik was able to inspire, and thus the Italians drastically underestimated the size of the Ethiopian army, and the firepower at its disposal. But Menelik’s forces didn’t merely outnumber the Italians; the Emperor also outmaneuvered them, in what Jonas describes as one of the great military campaigns of modern history.

Inevitably, Ethiopian victory was interpreted in racial terms, for not only had an African army defeated a European army, but a black army had defeated a white army. In the Jim Crow United States and elsewhere around the globe, Adwa gave the lie to the inevitability of European domination—both political and racial. We recently spoke with Jonas about the worldwide implications of what happened at Adwa in 1896. A bit of video from our conversation:

 

Editing The Image of the Black in Western Art

This month marks the publication of the second and third parts of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art. As the fifth and sixth of an eventual ten books, these new releases put us past the halfway point in our work to complete this fascinating series, and so offer a nice occasion to reflect on the challenges that it presents. To that end, we invited HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova, one of the many people who have been dedicated to this project over the decades since its conception, to tell us a bit about her experience working on the books. Her piece is below.

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When two years ago my manager told me that I would be the production editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art series, I was thrilled to be a part of this monumental project. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have very much to do. The first four books were scheduled to come out in the fall of 2010, and three of them had been previously published as part of the first incarnation of the series. There was little new text to edit, and a media research company in London had been contracted to deliver the images. We just had to flow it all into the new design and redo the index. Easy as pie.

How naïve I was!

When Dominique de Menil first conceived of the Image of the Black project in the 1960s, she had assumed it wouldn’t take very long to complete it. She had not anticipated the astonishing wealth of material or the complexity of the iconography of blacks in Western art. Fifty years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Everyone at the Du Bois Institute and HUP was excited to renew the efforts to complete this monumental undertaking, but few of us were fully aware of its intricacies.

First and foremost, we had to contend with the passage of time. The very title of the series reflects how much has changed since the conception of this project. The Image of the Black in Western Art: the meaning of nearly all of those words has grown more complicated in the years that have passed. And, as we started to work, it became clear how much else had changed. There were references in the text to East Germany and West Germany, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, Sri Lanka was still Ceylon.

Ensuring that the text accurately and consistently reflects today’s geopolitical map has been only one of the challenges, and not the biggest one by far. The real Herculean task has been locating all the art. Since the publication of the first edition, museums have disbanded, galleries have changed their names, manuscripts have moved from one library to another. Vases have disappeared. Inscriptions on tombstones have faded. Broken statuettes have been restored. Research from the past thirty years has shed new light on the dates and titles of artworks. Paintings that were previously accepted as the work of X are now believed to be by Y.

Producing these books sequentially would have been demanding. No book that includes 200 illustrations could ever be easy. Producing them in batches, as efficiencies in publishing demand, has come dangerously close to insanity. There are so many details to keep track of, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Even the most inconsequential decision becomes paramount when multiplied by ten books. Changes in one book usually necessitate changes in another. Many of our conversations about IBWA (our shorthand for the series) include the phrase “Wait, which volume are we talking about?” The six books that make up volumes I through III have more than 1,500 images total. To date, I have received about 4,700 emails about IBWA and I’ve sent about 3,800.

It’s hard to explain what it is that I do for this series. I’ve done some copyediting, a little proofreading, a lot of fact-checking. I also nag, beg, and bully everyone else on the team when the deadlines loom large in front of us. It’s a miracle my colleagues still talk to me.

The Image of the Black in Latin America

This spring PBS aired a four-part series from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called Black in Latin America. The series examines the influence of African descent on Latin America, and is the third part of what Gates calls a trilogy that mimics “the patterns of the triangle trade.” The trilogy began in 1999 with Wonders of the African World, and continued in 2004 with America Beyond the Color Line. The first series explored the relationship between Africa and the New World, the second reported on the lives of modern-day African Americans, and now Black in Latin America shows how the rich cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean are the products of Africa and Europe coming together. All four parts of Black in Latin America can now be watched online, courtesy of PBS. There is also a book, also titled Black in Latin America, written by Gates and forthcoming from NYU Press this summer.  

On top of all that, Gates is also the co-editor, with David Bindman, of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a series that we recently resurrected in partnership with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, which Gates directs. Last fall we published the first four books of what will ultimately be ten, and the fifth and sixth are due this fall. In the fifth book, which is actually Part 2 of Volume III, there is a chapter called “The South American Scene,” which illustrates much of the history covered by Gates in Black in Latin America.

The Image of the Black in Western Art documents representations of people of African descent throughout the history of Western art. Much of that representation begins with the slave trade. As Black in Latin America makes clear, the overwhelming majority of the African slaves brought to the new world were taken south of the United States. As Gates explained in an interview with PBS, of the 11.2 million Africans that are known to have survived the Middle Passage and landed in the New World, only 450,000 came to the United States. So, what Black in Latin America explores, and what The Image of the Black in Western Art documents, is this incredible history of the presence of people of African descent in South America and in the Caribbean.

In The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol III, Part 2, we see this, the first visual representation of an enslaved African in the Americas: 

A History of Tahrir Square

Nezar AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture and Urban History, and Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the recently released Cairo: Histories of a City. In February, he wrote here of the powerful financial interests involved in the reshaping of Egypt’s political system. Now, while international attention has shifted to the war in Libya, AlSayyad steps back to reflect on the history of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a space that has finally earned its name.

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The recent revolution in Cairo has made Tahrir Square a household name. No one, not even a historian who has written a book on the city, could have imagined that this aptly named public space would nurture a spark that would set the entire Middle East ablaze.

Tahrir Square, 2011

Tahrir, which means liberation in Arabic, is one of the oldest squares in modern Cairo. The images of the square recently aired during broadcast coverage of the uprising—images now engraved in the minds of people all over the globe—were taken from the rooftops of the few high-rise buildings situated south of the square. Just beyond this location, looking west and north, is a collection of overlooked buildings that capture the history of modern Egypt and render the revolutionary happenings in Tahrir Square all the more poignant.

 Tahrir Square, 1962

A photograph of the square from the early 1960s helps tell the story. Appearing under the Cairo tower is the headquarters of the Arab League and next to it is the former Hilton Hotel, which is currently under renovation as a new Ritz-Carlton. North of the hotel is the salmon-colored Egyptian Museum and behind it is a building that would ultimately become the headquarters for President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP). In the foreground is a statue-less pedestal crowning a green roundabout. Each of these landmarks plays a role in the making of modern Cairo, a city that is nearly four thousand years old. Most scholars would agree that the city is only one thousand years old, but its metropolitan expansion in the twenty-first century engulfed all earlier settlements from Memphis to Giza, making Cairo many millennia older.

During the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the square was simply a patch of desert. By the time the Fatimids established Al-Qahira (which was later Anglicized into Cairo) in the tenth century, the Nile River had changed its course and swallowed much of this land. The area later became marshland covered by water during flood seasons. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, by the time Napoleon occupied Cairo, the land had dried up enough to allow the French forces to camp there. It was not until the time of Mohamed Ali, the founder of modern Egypt, that the network of barrages built to control the flow of the river, stabilized the banks of the Nile in Cairo.

Tahrir Square was born as a green field.

Military, Money, and Motives in Egypt

Nezar AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture and Urban History, and Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was raised in Cairo, and as a practicing architect has designed many buildings in the city. His Cairo: Histories of a City, forthcoming this spring, chronicles the many Cairos that have existed through the centuries, and the figures who have shaped them, including Hosni Mubarak. Below, in a piece co-written with Tara Graham, Publications Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, AlSayyad identifies the powerful vested interests threatening this vulnerable moment of transition in Egypt.

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“Egypt has passed through a critical period in her recent history characterized by bribery, mischief, and the absence of governmental stability . . . Accordingly, we have undertaken to clean ourselves up and have appointed to command us men from within the army whom we trust in their ability, their character, and their patriotism. It is certain that all Egypt will meet this news with enthusiasm and will welcome it.”

The statement above could have been uttered in the recent past by some YouTube revolutionary or Facebook organizer, but Free Officer Anwar Sadat made this early morning rally call nearly six decades ago, on July 23rd in 1952, when the Egyptian military launched a coup to overthrow the king. A few years later, the new republic swore in its first president.

The Egyptian people have long referred to that day in July as their liberation day, and Tahrir (or Liberation) Square in downtown Cairo owes its name to this early military revolt. It is both appropriate and ironic that the square became the site of the more recent revolution resulting in the removal of President Hosni Mubarak from power. Tahrir Square has certainly earned its name.

Mubarak, who stubbornly stood his ground in three successive speeches delivered during the course of the recent uprising, never announced his own resignation. In the end, he was most likely exiled by his Armed Forces, to whom he supposedly delegated his authority as president. It seems history has just repeated itself, but this time with the military ousting a president, instead of a king.

Today, as pundits of all political persuasions engage in speculation about the future of Egypt, it is important to take a more tempered attitude toward the prospects. It is not yet clear whether the Egyptian uprising will be a Velvet Revolution, as many have hoped, or an Iranian-style Islamic Revolution, but it is clear that all has not devolved into a Tiananmen Square crackdown. At least, not yet.

The country’s future now depends on the actions of the Egyptian military over the course of the next few months. While the five communiqués issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces give reason for optimism, they don’t readily reveal the military’s true stance on matters. The army may not have intervened to silence the anti-Mubarak protesters, but it maintained the same passivity when pro-Mubarak thugs went on the attack. The rationale here is unclear, but it’s worth noting that the military has much more to lose in the current environment than it has to gain.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Now that President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, Egypt can turn itself to the still highly uncertain question of what comes next. As we watch, and still scramble to make sense of this global spectacle, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on some of the commentary and imagery of recent days.

The left and even much of the center in the U.S. have seemed universally to support the protesters and their aims. For many of these Americans with still inchoate understandings of Egypt’s dynamics, the recently enhanced role of the Egyptian military may have been difficult to assimilate. No matter one’s own political persuasion, a military force being welcomed, cheered, kissed by an enormous crowd of young protesters is not a familiar site, though there it was, yesterday, after the military’s first communiqué and apparent intervention. In such scenes we’re likely more inclined to fear for the protesters’ safety than to expect their elation. Certainly, many of the Americans expressing solidarity with the protesting Egyptians who were embracing their military are among those least likely to have such an affinity for our own. And yet, just as quickly as we were surprised, the military seemed to have backed away from any apparent plan to oust Mubarak, and now, in the hours following his abdication, the military’s intentions are still unclear.

Even still, this disconnect—this possibly jarring, nearly upside-down imagery of active young politcial dissidents actually physically embracing an independently empowered military—should serve as one indication of how little many of us really understand about the situation in Egypt. We’ve witnessed a massive political upswelling, one that we couldn't help but be moved by, and our commitment to the principle of democracy inspired many of us to feel strongly that if this many people thought that their leader should go immediately, then the man should take his leave.

If democracy is the goal, though, there are voices urging us to remember that Egypt is more than Tahrir Square. That point was the focus of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by many-time HUP author Edward N. Luttwak on February 4th. “The Obama administration, like much of the world, is not reacting to the situation in Egypt—a mostly rural country populated by poor peasants,” he wrote. “It is reacting to the media spectacle in the center of Cairo, in which huge but largely middle-class crowds have gathered to demand President Hosni Mubarak’s removal.”

The piece continues:

Interestingly, the few journalists who speak colloquial Egyptian Arabic report that among the poor majority of the population—those who wear the traditional robe (djellaba) and depend on bread subsidized by the state—many still support Mr. Mubarak. They know that Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, and that part of it is paid for by U.S. aid. While market prices have increased by 17% since last October, the rationed bread of the poor remains very cheap.

Perhaps the impoverished—a quarter of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day—fear that a government more modern than Mr. Mubarak’s paternalistic dictatorship will stop the current bread subsidy, or that a more Islamist government will not receive U.S. aid. Either way, many Egyptians have the prudence of the very poor. They cannot afford to take risks with the unknown—including a post-Mubarak government.

Now, we can place alongside the topsy-turvy imagery of protestors embracing soldiers the notion of the Wall Street Journal as defender of the impoverished, but Luttwak’s point here is sound. Though it doesn’t affect us in the U.S. nearly as much as it does others, food prices around the world are soaring, as noted by Paul Krugman, among others. Luttwak’s larger point was that a quick Mubarak exit would be too risky, and that the country should be given time to organize proper elections. This, like his noting of the impoverished, is on its face a reasoned gesture towards universal democracy. But much has changed in the week since he wrote, and had Mubarak not stepped down on his own the situation’s escalation may yet have overshadowed the traditionally cautious concern for what happens after foreign political transitions.

Egypt: A Select Reading List

John Eklund represents Harvard University Press in the North- and Mid- wests, and blogs at Paper Over Board. Below, he condemns the self-absorption of American broadcast news coverage of the events in Egypt, and as an antidote offers a dozen books on the region from HUP and our colleagues at Yale University Press.

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Yet another international development that supposedly erupted out of nowhere. What a crazy, unpredictable world!

I don’t think the “out of nowhere” standard applies when traditional broadcast media haven’t done elementary reporting on a country for a decade or more. It only seems "out of nowhere" to us ignorant Americans, protected as we are from the dangerous journalism of Al Jazeera as we luxuriate in the freedom to watch Skins.

For some reason I turned on the NBC Nightly News yesterday, thinking I might get the latest on what’s happening in Egypt. Instead, it was the usual self-centered, US-centric blather: a screaming, cheesy slogan (Rage and Revolution!); a focus on one particular American woman who is afraid to leave her apartment; endless looping visuals of people clashing in the street with no context to really understand what’s happening; and, inevitably, the heroic anchormen, Brian and Lester.

The fact that journalists are apparently being targeted by the regime and these two empty media suits might be rattled becomes the focal point of the whole story. Forget Mubarak, will the anchormen and the old woman get out of Cairo alive? Yes, it might seem to be about the Egyptians but really, as always, it's about us! Would it be too much to ask for an interview with an Egyptian political scientist or two, who might actually give American viewers some informed background?

Thankfully, we still have books for that job. Even with the vast resources of the internet, books are still the undisputed go-to source when seemingly inexplicable world events pop up. There have been many worthy titles on the subject of Egypt and the region, the Islamic renaissance, and Middle East politics published over the past decade.

Here are a dozen from our presses that I heartily recommend. There are many more, so please check with your local bookseller for their recommendations. Spend thirty minutes with any of these and I guarantee more enlightenment than you’ll get from long hours enduring Brian Williams & Co.

 

A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani and Malise Ruthven (Harvard University Press)

Hailed in 1991 as the definitive history of Arab civilization, this panoramic masterpiece has been brought up to date with a new Afterword.

Cairo: Histories of a City, Nezar AlSayyad (HUP)

This loving forthcoming homage to Cairo as an urban space, and a history of the built environment—by a working Egyptian architect—now takes on added significance.

The Mind of Egypt: History & Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, Jan Assman (HUP)

This sweeping 2003 history by the noted scholar is excellent deep background.