Book Review

Methods/Theory

The field of Middle Eastern history is a contentious space within which epic debates have taken place; some, involving the future of the Middle East, are still in progress. Orientalists and their heirs have not always developed the broadest or most significant research questions, and the language skills and depth of knowledge necessary to investigate certain topics preclude outsiders. At the same time, we complain about the way features of life in Middle East, particularly the Arab and Islamic worlds, are treated as conditions of "exceptionalism," and that the bizarre continues to attract more attention than the quotidian. These facts complicate my review of editor Mary Ann Fay's collection of essays devoted to biography, autobiography, and other relevant historical materials from the Arab and Ottoman world. In the end, I can only report as a regional specialist, albeit with some consciousness of other readers' concerns.	1
Distinguished scholars are represented in this collection, but it should not be understood as a Who's Who of key biographers. Nor does it present a particularly consistent or well-argued debate among biographers about the nature of history and historical methodologies in the region. Instead the volume provides an eclectic selection of several approaches to the study of individuals, and the contributors occasionally address the specificity of Arab or Ottoman biography with insight. With the exception of Fay's own chapter, which is a contribution to economic and social history, many of the other chapters focus on intellectual history, including religious scholars and topics.	2
The editor's task was a difficult one, and I commend Fay for her tenacity even while disagreeing with certain methodological suggestions, choices of inclusion, and her organizational schemata, which is explained in the introduction. She asserts that there is an "Arab understanding of history and historical method as biography" and that this "exposes the Eurocentric nature of postmodern claims that biography is the product of Western humanism and the Enlightenment" (p. 2). Since most of the contributors whose intentions are clearly biographical consistently cite Western theorists to explain their ideas of biography, these assertions are a bit of a red herring. (Besides, I think this problem predates postmodernism.)	3
The key dividing point in this volume appears to be premodern vs. modern approaches to history rather than West vs. East, or individual vs. community. The materials fit into four categories. The first set of essays historicize biography in a rich and useful manner and illustrate a familiar and accessible style. William L. Cleveland provides an excellent portrait of George Antonius, a father of "Arabnationalism" and author of Arab Awakening (written between 1933 and 1938). Cleveland emphasizes Antonius's cosmopolitanism, by which Cleveland means his ability to serve as an intermediary across political and cultural divisions, and also documents British ambivalence, and sometimes discrimination, toward him. Dina Rizk Khoury draws our attention to several contradictions in the work and thought of Jamal al-Zahawi, an opinionated and influential Iraqi public intellectual and poet whose ideas at first seemed precipitate and then fell out of fashion. Like Cleveland, Khoury has a keen sense of the different and overlapping worlds, and shifting intellectual trends among the Arab intelligentsia, that affected her subject's career. Garay Menicucci contributes a study of a forgotten Palestinian ethnographer, Kulthum Auda. At first, he attributes her invisibility to the fact that she emigrated from Palestine in 1914 to the Soviet Union, and relatively few scholars have examined the study of the Middle East in Russian sources and archives. He then adds that, compared to that of the better-known anthropologist Hilma Granqvist, Auda's work was explicitly feminist and imbued with the revolutionary goals of Marxist social scientists. Didier Monciaud's contribution assesses the memoirs of Khalid Mohiedinne, one of the "Free Officers" of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952.	. . .