Life magazine misread the Arab world in 1962.
March 7, 2012 12:00 A.M.
By Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
‘Once mellowed and mouldering, the far-flung civilization of the Arabs is being swept today by invigorating winds of change. A fruitful kind of disorder is replacing the old fixed patterns of life.” Those contemporary-sounding words were published in 1962, in a glossy, picture-laden, 160-page book titled The Arab World.
The volume boasts three virtues that make it worth a review a precise half-century later. First, the editors of Life magazine, then the outstanding American weekly, produced it, implying cultural centrality. Second, a retired senior State Department official, George V. Allen, wrote the introduction, pointing to the book’s establishment credentials. Third, Desmond Stewart (1924–1981), an acclaimed British journalist, historian, and novelist, wrote the text.
The Arab World emphatically represents an artefact from another era. While not entirely sugar-coating his subject matter, Stewart offers a benign, gauzy, patronizing approach that would gag even the most euphemistic writers today.
