Modernity's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East

Abstract

Nathan Citino uses the theme of “modernization” to explain U.S.-Middle East relations between 1945 and 1967. He demonstrates how, after the Second World War, modernization became manifest in “not only economic development policies, but also the ideas elites used to explain social change” (1). Those elites, Arab and American, considered the quantitative and qualitative aspects of modernization within the legacy of Ottoman reforms, the prospect of secular nation-building, the politics of the Cold War, and the Palestinian question. A veteran researcher of American and Arab histories, Citino reconstructs the many lives of a generation that “envisioned an Arab future” with “a shared set of widely held concepts” and in “a Middle Eastern and a universal framework” (1). Citino’s methodological aim is, to borrow from a recent piece written by his Rice University colleague, Ussama Makdisi, to “de-exceptionalize” the study of U.S.-Middle East relations.1 Ussama Makdisi, “The Privilege of Acting Upon Others: The Middle Eastern Exception to Anti-Exceptionalist Histories of the U.S. and the World,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, eds. Frank Costigliola and Michael Hogan (Cambridge, UK, 2016), 203–16.