Martin Kramer selects the six most influential English-language books on the Middle East.

1. Six Greatest Stories Ever Told
About the Middle East
by Martin Kramer | www.martinkramer.org
Here is my listing of the six most influential modern books
on the Middle East (in the English language). I selected each
not on the basis of quality, but my rough assessment of a
book’s impact on readers and politics, short-term and long.
It’s rather rare for a book on the Middle East to have much
of an influence in America and Britain; at most times, it’s a
marginal region. But events have propelled a few books into
the limelight, and these six, for better or worse, had an
impact, influenced perceptions, and may have changed
history.

2. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence (1926). I rather
like Charles Hill’s depiction of Lawrence as someone “who
wrote himself into history as a fictional character leading
Arab tribes in revolt against the Ottoman Turks.” (Hill calls
the book ” a novel traveling under the cover of
autobiography.”) But the book lives, and is even said to have
inspired U.S. counter-insurgency theorists in Iraq.

3. The Arab Awakening by George Antonius (1938). This purported
exposé of British double-dealing provided all the pretext that Britain
needed to retreat from its support for the Jewish National Home in
Palestine, culminating in the 1939White Paper. The British commander
of forces in Palestine in 1946 said he kept the book “on my bedside
table.” It also became the bible of American sympathizers of Arab
nationalism. “We had our revered texts,” wrote the American Arabist
Malcolm Kerr, “such as The Arab Awakening.” It has been refuted on
many grounds, but while its influence doesn’t endure, it lingers.

4. Exodus by Leon Uris (1958). Recently I asked a class of grad students
in Mideast studies whether they’d heard of it, and I didn’t get a single
nod. But this fictionalized account of Israel’s founding was said to have
been the biggest seller since Gone with the Wind, propelled by a
blockbuster motion picture starring Paul Newman. The novel,
confessed journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, “set me, and many others, on a
course for aliyah, and it made American Jews proud of Israel’s
achievements. On the other hand, it created the impression that all
Arabs are savages.” Arabs have been searching for their equivalent of
Exodus ever since.

5. Orientalism by Edward Said (1978). Sigh… I suppose “baneful”
is the best adjective. No book has done more to obscure the
Middle East, and impart a sense of guilt to anyone who has had
the audacity to represent it. The French scholar Jacques Berque
(praised by Said) put it succinctly: Said had done “a disservice
to his countrymen in allowing them to believe in aWestern
intelligence coalition against them.” But the book gave rise to a
cottage industry inWestern academe, and helped tilt the scales
in academic appointments. Its influence may be waning, but it’s
still on syllabi everywhere.

6. From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman (1989). It
spent nearly twelve months on the New York Times bestseller
list and won the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction.
Coming in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1987
intifada, it captured the “falling-out-of-love-with-Israel” mood,
although it cut no slack for the Arabs either. Friedman has said
he keeps threatening to bring out a new edition with this one-line
introduction: “Nothing has changed.”

7. What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis (2002). The book
appeared in the aftermath of 9/11, and it rocketed to the
New York Times bestseller list, where it spent 18 weeks.
Lewis used his broad historical repertoire to explain “why
they hate us.” (In a word: resentment, at failed
modernization and an absence of freedom.) Lewis later
summarized his view thus: “Either we bring them freedom,
or they destroy us.” Some inWashington took him literally.