Arab Rebirth

In this eloquent essay, Jacques Berque has distilled a lifetime’s love for, and study of, Arab history, life, and culture into a synthesis of remarkable insight and power. Moving effectively from pre-Islamic Arabia to twentieth-century Morocco, from theology to linguistics, from desert oasis to urban slum, from T.E. Lawrence to Nasser, from poetry to the politics of oil, he presents a perceptive synoptic portrait of a civilization in the grip of change. He conveys all the misery of a situation still stamped by centuries of foreign domination, and all the hope of a renaissance now a hundred years old and yet still in its infancy.