American Orientalism

"We should say it right out: Americans, including academics, are behind in terms of the Middle East. And that is because when Americans studied the rest of the world before all the trouble began in the Middle East, basically we studied Europe. We studied Asia and Latin America as a deep second to Europe, but the Middle East was almost completely ignored. The only interest that the United States had in the Middle East was oil and protecting the new state of Israel. So very little time was spent in history courses or political science courses in the United States on the Middle East as an area. Hence when Doug Little’s book came along it was a real pioneering effort in many ways to talk about America’s attitude to the Middle East. There is something else to say on this point – even when Americans write books about the Middle East and Egypt, they are less aware of the internal history of those countries than they are of the history of any of the European powers, and that leads to oversimplification. Now there are other books around, but it seems to me that the worth of this book has already been illustrated by the fact that it is in its third edition now. And it keeps expanding and covers the area all the way back to Mark Twain and up to the present, so I think it is a wonderful survey. He doesn’t single out Egypt as much as I do in terms of seeing it as the key area for American influence. But he fits it into the problems of dealing with nationalism from Nasser on, and trying to satisfy both the Egyptian desire for self-determination and American desire to keep a strong hegemonic influence in the area."