SAMIR KHALAF, Cultural Resistance: Global and Local Encounters in the Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2001). Pp. 326. £35.00 cloth.

Extract

If you have grown wary of “global/local” titles in recent years, because they usually promise more than they deliver, you have found another book to be wary about. Samir Khalaf's collection of previously published or presented articles and essays has much to commend it but little that addresses questions of the local or global—or questions of cultural resistance for that matter. The book's title finds justification only in Chapter 11, “Contesting Space and the Forging of New Cultural Identities.” The remainder of the book deals with decidedly pre-global concerns, such as issues of Lebanon's civil war and sectarian identities, the dialectics of tradition and modernity, and, most prominently, Khalaf's central paradox of a society simultaneously held together and torn apart by communal or familial loyalties. In a slightly different category are four articles about early–18th-century American Protestant missionaries, whose letters, sermons, and missionary activities show them to be pioneers of cultural imperialism in the Middle East. Khalaf's motive for writing most of his articles is a sincere concern about the post–civil-war reconstruction of his country and a steadfast belief that, as an intellectual, he has to play a role in the discourses about reconstruction. His noble intentions make his writing rather compelling, and his essays should be read as fragments of Lebanese history via the travels and travails of a scholar whose ideas were greatly shaped by that history.