The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Summing up 5,000 years of history
Arthur Cotterell’s puzzling new book The Near East: A Cultural History brought to my mind an old story by Jorge Luis Borges about the Muslim philosopher Averroes.
Fascinated by medieval Islam’s intellectual culture, Borges tried to imagine what it must have been like for Averroes, born in 1126 in Córdoba, to read Aristotle, born in 384 BC in Stagira, and to attempt to explicate him to enquiring contemporary Muslims. Averroes’s Aristotelian commentaries are one of the intellectual landmarks of medieval culture, but they also document the profound handicaps generated by cultural distance.
Borges’s story, “Averroes’ Search”, homes in on the moment when Averroes comes to the Poetics. Equipped with Arabic translations, he understands the words but cannot grasp their meaning, for one simple reason: his culture has no conception of theatre or acting. In the story, as in history, Averroes misses Aristotle’s sense entirely, and defines “tragedy” as “a song of praise”.
Borges, as he would, noted that the joke was really on him. Trying to imagine his way into Averroes’s head, seven centuries later, and from a different culture again, he was doomed to exactly the same failure. “I felt,” he wrote, “that the task mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me.”
I cannot think of a better summary of what it means to do cultural history, which crystallises what is so puzzling about The Near East: A Cultural History: it is not a cultural history. Culture is not a few exemplary works of art, architecture and literature: that it is something all-encompassing, which both controls our conception of reality and remains mostly invisible to us. Reaching out of our own culture to reconstruct a past one is on some fundamental level impossible.
To adapt the literary critic Paul de Man, that is not a valid reason for not doing cultural history, any more than the impossibility of curing death is a valid reason for not doing medicine. But it is a grand old task, so I understand why a historian might avoid it. I do not quite understand, though, why a historian would do what Cotterell has done and write a brief guide to the military and political history of a region, from firmly within his own cultural preconceptions, and then call it a cultural history. If you want a cultural history of the region, this is not that book.
That said, The Near East is in its way a fairly remarkable book – and, at 327 pages, a miracle of compression. Cotterell’s region covers everything between the Black and Caspian Seas, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf of Persia. With subtractions and additions depending on the era, that is about 2.5 million square miles, for which The Near East gives 5,000 years of history, from the first Sumerian cities to Daesh.
As Cotterell points out, such a book could “never hope to be more than introductory” – and so it is, in the way that well-written encyclopedia articles are. Though it is hard to get past the fact that The Near East is not what it says on the tin, Cotterell – the compiler of several historical A-Zs – is a gifted epitomiser. To give him his due on this count, The Near East is crammed with information, and plays to his strengths. This is not a quotable book, and it does not have a driving thesis. Nor does it reflect on the challenges of its task. But it is readable. Cotterell can be engagingly Boy’s Own- ish about military history: on a 14th-century BC Babylonian horsemanship manual, for instance, he notes that the relationship aimed for between man and horse was “not dissimilar to that felt by a fighter pilot for his Spitfire during the Second World War”. There are things here that most younger historians would dispute violently – the description of Islam’s rise as “A World Crisis”, the implied benignity of British colonialism, or the queasy historicisation of ongoing horrors in Syria and Iraq – but as an introduction, you could do worse.
Cotterell’s preface gives the genesis of the book as questions from fellow passengers on a Mediterranean cruise. This is about the right frame to read him in. You can certainly imagine far less interesting people to be stuck on a P&O liner with.