Arabists: The Romance of an American EliteSimon and Schuster, 1995 M07 1 - 368 pages A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the “Arabists” were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite. |
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... Maronite church. “The Lebanon I knew as a boy was such a peaceful place,” says David, who like his father and greatgrandfather grew up to become president of the American University of Beirut. Indeed, “peaceful” and “sleepy” are words ...
... Maronite church. “The Lebanon I knew as a boy was such a peaceful place,” says David, who like his father and greatgrandfather grew up to become president of the American University of Beirut. Indeed, “peaceful” and “sleepy” are words ...
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... Maronites, and others—who had truly usurped the Holy Land, by emphasizing the hypnotic mechanics of liturgy over the Word of God! The Protestant missionary animus toward these strange Eastern rite churches, products of Byzantine rule in ...
... Maronites, and others—who had truly usurped the Holy Land, by emphasizing the hypnotic mechanics of liturgy over the Word of God! The Protestant missionary animus toward these strange Eastern rite churches, products of Byzantine rule in ...
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... Maronites. It was the Maronites that particularly irritated the missionaries. In the Protestants' eyes, Greek Orthodoxy was the idolatrous and corrupt East, pure and simple. But because the issue with the Maronites was more complex, the ...
... Maronites. It was the Maronites that particularly irritated the missionaries. In the Protestants' eyes, Greek Orthodoxy was the idolatrous and corrupt East, pure and simple. But because the issue with the Maronites was more complex, the ...
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... Maronites switched allegiance to the Egyptian Mamluks, who soon drove out the Crusaders. As Mamluk dominance in the Middle East weakened, the Maronites resumed ties with the Catholic Church on the eve of the Ottoman Turkish invasion ...
... Maronites switched allegiance to the Egyptian Mamluks, who soon drove out the Crusaders. As Mamluk dominance in the Middle East weakened, the Maronites resumed ties with the Catholic Church on the eve of the Ottoman Turkish invasion ...
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... Maronite Christians, whom the “agitator” Bliss immediately recognized as the very incarnations of a calcified ... Maronites and the Druze, Bliss learned another thing: a distrust of statecraft, even the British or American variety ...
... Maronite Christians, whom the “agitator” Bliss immediately recognized as the very incarnations of a calcified ... Maronites and the Druze, Bliss learned another thing: a distrust of statecraft, even the British or American variety ...
Contents
Aggrieved Area Experts | |
Mugged by Reality | |
Horan of Arabia | |
Indiana Jones | |
Debacle | |
The Icy Eyes That Had Contemplated Nineveh | |
Cowering in a Dark Alley | |
Hostages to Idealism | |
Reality | |
Mr Foreign Service | |
Old Hands | |
Never a Dull Moment | |
Redemption | |
A New Species? | |
Bibliography | |
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Common terms and phrases
Akins American missionaries antiSemitism April Glaspie Arab country Arab nationalism Arab world ArabIsraeli Arabists Aviv Baghdad became Beirut Bill Stoltzfus Bliss British cables Cairo career Christian Cluverius colleagues College Congregationalist Coon Crane culture Custis Damascus David Department Department’s desert Doughty Eagleton Eastern Egypt Eli Smith expatriates Falashas Feisal Foreign Service French FSOs Glaspie’s going Hermann Eilts Hume Horan Iran Iraq Iraq’s Iraqi Islam Israel Israeli Jerry Weaver Jerusalem Jewish Jews Jidda Kelly Khartoum Killgore Kissinger Kissinger’s knew Kuwait language Lawrence Lawrence’s learn Arabic Lebanon lived Loy Henderson Maronites Mesopotamia Middle East military mission Moslem NEA assistant secretary never officer Operation Moses Palestine Palestinian Parker peace Philby political president Protestant Roy Atherton Sadat Saddam Saudi Arabia says Seelye’s Shiite Sisco SixDay Soviet Sterner Sudan Sudanese Syria Talcott Seelye U.S. ambassador U.S. diplomats U.S. embassy United University Veliotes Washington Western Wiley William Yemen