After the missionaries came the oil speculators. Abdelrahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt, about the arrival of the first American oil explorers in the 1930s in the eastern Saudi province near Dhahran, is one of the few Arab testimonies translated into English about the United States as an explicitly colonizing force. To see “the American” portrayed this way is contradictory to our sense of ourselves as liberators rather than colonialists, especially because we also rarely see American characters portrayed as mysterious and menacing foreigners, the way Arabs and Asians are so often depicted in our own newspapers, films, and books. “The Americans were something completely new and strange,” Munif writes, “in their actions, their manners and the kind of questions they asked, not to mention their generosity, which surpassed that of all previous visitors.” Like Malaparte, Munif writes of this new people’s immature qualities, “who looked and behaved like small children, showed endless, unimaginable surprise and admiration.” The Arabs sent to work on American oil fields watch their huge American ships arrive, gape as the bare-armed women disembark, laughing, and despair as the foreigners waste water carelessly. “Why did they have to live like this, while the Americans lived so differently?” Munif writes of the Arabs’ wonder. “Why were they barred from going near an American house, even from looking at the swimming pool or standing for a moment in the shade of one of their trees? Why did the Americans shout at them, telling them to move, to leave the place immediately, expelling them like dogs?”
Cities of Salt is a novel few Americans read, and its initial reception in 1988 might have something to do with why. That year, John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that Munif was “insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel.” He called the writer “a campfire explainer”: “There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance.” This was an odd expectation of a novel about an event in which the collective experience is paramount, and in which the larger moral point is that there was nothing “equal” about the Americans and the Arabs. “Arabs are discomfited, distressed, and deranged by the presence of Americans in their midst,” a concept that, for Updike, “wears thin.” Munif’s novel was banned by the Saudi family beholden to American oil interests. In the United States, the country’s leading man of letters, John Updike, in its leading magazine, The New Yorker, concluded that “the thought of novels being banned in Saudi Arabia has a charming strangeness, like the thought of hookahs being banned in Minneapolis.”
The great Arab novel, for an American critic, hadn’t been modern enough; for Updike, the experience of Americans in a foreign land simply wasn’t important to American ideas of literature, while for Munif, the discovery of oil and the American occupation of Arabia “was a breaking off, like death, that nothing and no one could ever heal.”
*
THE HISTORY OF the Arab world had so often been reduced in America to a battle over Islamic extremism, but rarely did Americans question from what Islamism had emerged—why it had become such a potent political force in the first place. In the postwar era, there had been other hopes for liberation in the region, especially in Egypt, with the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the time, neither nascent Islamic fundamentalism nor Constantine Zurayk’s notions of Western progress had compared to the appeal of Nasser’s secular nationalism. The Americans even supported Nasser’s coup against the Egyptian monarchy and the British, because they wanted an Atatürk, someone “ruthless and efficient” to rule the country, as the academic Hazem Kandil writes. In the beginning of Egypt’s independence, the Americans preferred a strongman in power.
Nasser, enjoying the adoration of the region, quickly proved himself an independent-minded pest. Though he welcomed American aid, he would not go as far as joining the anti-Communist Baghdad Pact, which brought together Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and, informally, the United States, against the Soviets. Nasser favored something called “positive neutrality” in the Cold War. This was the decade of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Bandung Conference, when leaders such as India’s Nehru and Indonesia’s Sukarno promoted the possibility of independence from both Cold War behemoths. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in the name of Egyptian sovereignty, President Eisenhower defended the Egyptians, hoping his support would eventually convince Nasser to become a bulwark against communism, rather than a full-blown nationalist. Time and again, the Americans saw nationalism as support for Moscow, not an assertion of independence.
Eisenhower would eventually turn his back on Nasser, and Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination, completely. By 1967, the Americans supported the war of Israel against the Arabs in hopes that it would bring about Nasser’s downfall; Charles de Gaulle even called Israel’s war an American proxy war. Israel’s defeat of the Arabs was the beginning of several humiliations that would undo the promises of Arab nationalism. “Nasser may have fallen, and with him the dreams of a generation, but Pax Americana helped usher in an age of defiant religiosity, resistance, and cynicism,” Ussama Makdisi writes. When Nasser died, citizens around the world wept. The antagonism of Arab nationalism by the Americans helped to open a social vacuum for Islamism, and, in Egypt, for the Muslim Brotherhood.
The total capitulation of the new Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, to the demands of the United States during a series of negotiations after the 1973 war with Israel sent Egypt hurtling down a path of subservience and economic devastation. Kissinger, amused by the Egyptians’ prostrations, encouraged Sadat to sell out his entire country; according to the agreement, the Suez Canal would never be closed to Israel, Egypt would supply Israel with energy products, President Nixon would be received in Cairo by cheering crowds. Even that wasn’t enough. During the Camp David Accords five years later, the Americans wanted the Egyptians to accept a degradation of their own military prowess in order to elevate Israel as the dominant force in the region. The foreign minister of Egypt said afterward: “I almost died of disgrace, disgust, and grief as I witnessed this tragedy unfold.”