Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East

OVER-STATING THE ARAB STATE: POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE EAST. By NAZI AYUBI. London, I. B. Tauris, 1995. 300 pp. 45.00.

This is a veritable tour-de-force: a survey and new synthesis of conceptual thinking about the dynamics of Middle East politics, along with an immensely wide-ranging historical and contemporary review of the empirical data.

The book starts out with a Marxist-style analytical toolbox. But this is very much a Gramscian toolbox, and one, moreover, that has been adapted by the author himself to suit the evidence he encounters. He ties in the Middle Eastern case study to the more general debate on the Third World state. Ayubi adopts an approach which considers `not only the way in which the state's form and characteristics are modified under the impact of changing economic imperatives and socio-economic alliances, but also the way in which the state in many cases adjusts the economic imperatives and reshapes the socio-economic alliances'. The state may, especially in the periphery, manage to create its own classes (p. 14). This is a fortiori the case in the Middle East, where the state's historical background is without a hereditory nobility, where wealth and status have been closely tied to connection with the state, and where there has been `little room for independent "bourgeois" classes to emerge' (p. 15). Beyond this, a degree of cultural specificity may be seen in non-Western conceptions of what `the state' (dawla) entails; in the existence of the concept of umma and the Khalifa; and in the prevalence of 'corporatist' thought and dynamics.