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Cities of Salt, by Abdelrahman Munif
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Banned in Saudi Arabia, this is a blistering look at Arab and American hypocrisy following the discovery of oil in a poor oasis community.
- Sales Rank: #66023 in Books
- Brand: Munif, Abdelrahman
- Published on: 1989-07-17
- Released on: 1989-07-17
- Format: International Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.28" w x 5.14" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 640 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Originally published in Beirut in 1984, this multipage epic brings to life many of the political issues that have plagued the Mideast for most of this century. Set in an unnamed gulf country that could be Jordan sometime in the 1930s, the novel relates what happens to the bedouin inhabitants of the small oasis community of Wadi al-Uyoun when oil is discovered by Americans. Seen through the eyes of a large and varied cast of bedouin characters, the upheaval caused by the American colonization is shown in various manifestations, from the first contact with the strange foreigners ("Their smell could kill birds!" observes Miteb al-Hathal, who later leads a rebellion of Arab workers when the village of Harran has been made into an American port city) to confused and suspicious descriptions of the sinister "magic" tools brought by the Americanswhich are in fact bulldozers, automobiles, radios and telephones. The story unfolds at a stately pace over a timespan of many years and provides an endless stream of characters and events, each connected to the next by many threads of plot. Theroux's sensitive translation conveys the subtleties of ambiguity and nuance inherent to the Arab language and culture. Banned in several Mideast countries including Saudi Arabia, this is the first volume of a planned trilogy by a Paris-based Jordanian novelist who holds a law degree from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade. Despite the Lawrence of Arabia setting, Munif writes from a unique vantage point; English-language readers have been given few opportunities before now to look at this situation through native eyes.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Banned in several Middle Eastern countries, this novel records the encounter between Americans and Arabs in an unnamed Gulf emirate in the 1930s. As oil exploration begins, the destruction of an oasis community amounts to "a breaking off, like death, that nothing and no one could ever heal." The promise inherent in the creation of a city divided into Arab and American sectors provides the novel's most striking revelation: here not merely two cultures, but two ages, meetand stand apart. Alternatively amused and bewildered by the Americans and their technological novelties, the Arabs sense in their accommodation to modernity the betrayal of their own traditions. Highly recommended, if only for its cross-cultural insights.L.M. Lewis, Eastern Kentucky Univ., Richmond
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"The only serious work of fiction that tries to show the effect of oil, Americans and the local oligarchy on a Gulf country."--Edward W. Said
Most helpful customer reviews
47 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
Modern Arabic Epic Novel
By Reader in Tokyo
This novel was published in Arabic in 1984 and in English in 1987. It's only the first section of a five-book Arabic-language work that totals some 2,500 pages, covers seven decades and is said to be the longest novel in modern Arabic literature. The second and third sections have been published separately as The Trench and Variations on Night and Day. It appears that the fourth and fifth sections haven't been published yet in English.
This first book covers the period roughly from the 1930s to 1950s. It begins with the pious, poor inhabitants of an oasis in the desert whose peace and social harmony are disrupted by the discovery of oil by American researchers who've been invited into the country. Six hundred pages later, it ends following a mass strike over injustice in the coastal city that's grown up around the pipeline to the interior. In between, it shows the impact of modernization brought about by the development of oil, from the locals' point of view. And the resentment caused by the presence of non-Muslims, the increasing materialism and loss of spiritual and communal values, and a backward, paternalistic local government that ignores the attendant social problems.
The technologically superior Americans, despite their practical competence and good intentions, are depicted in this book ultimately as the real villains, because of their foreignness, utter lack of understanding of the inhabitants' world, and the negative effects of the modernization they've set in motion.
A recurring pattern in the novel is that none of the parties involved comprehend the factors behind events that tie them all together, and none make an effort to understand the other. (One individual who's something of an exception disappears into the desert early in the novel.) For the most part, the locals don't grasp clearly the significance of what the Americans are doing. The latter make no effort to comprehend the locals and their motivations or actions, unless they perceive a threat to the benefits of oil. And the local ruler spends much of his time away from both in his newly constructed palace, obsessed with the workings of dazzling imports like the telescope, stethoscope, radio, automobile and telephone.
The author, who was also an oil economist and political activist, is considered a pioneer of writing that reflected social, economic and political developments in the modern Arab world. A member/associate of the socialist, pan-Arab nationalist Ba'ath Party until the early 1980s, he wrote partly to counter official history, which he believed up to that point had served mainly the interests of the West and the ruling governments and ignored ordinary people's experience.
He based a number of occurrences in the novel on real events in Saudi Arabia, although the country in his novel goes unnamed. There are differences from reality, though: the local ruler in the book is depicted as a buffoon rather than a strong, independent leader in his own right. And there's nothing in the book like a fundamentalist movement that gained power with the state and rising oil revenues, as did the Wahhabis.
I agree with other reviewers that this book is important for showing a widespread point of view in the Arab world concerning relations with the West and the impact of the oil economy on local values. Tragically, this view is characterized mainly by a sense of victimization and religious profanation. In those respects this book, written a quarter-century ago, can be regarded as sounding prophetic themes. Yet the author was committed to socialism, and from this novel alone it doesn't appear that he viewed radicalized religion as the solution.
I wasn't enchanted by the style, which was deliberate in pacing, with lengthy narrations and digressions, said to be influenced by traditional oral storytelling modes, and with an ending full of magic realist visions. Or by the characters, many of whom were stand-ins for various pieties and evils. And I found it difficult to believe the depiction of the paradise on earth that was the oasis before the discovery of oil. In some ways, for example its black-or-white morality and the lack of depth to its character-symbols, this novel reminded me of Soviet proletarian works from the 1930s, with a difference being that its model society seemed placed in the romanticized past rather than the future. How the author reconciled this idealization of the past with his own socialist commitment is maybe something that becomes clear in the later installments of this work.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
A sorrowful repeat of history
By Newton Ooi
Cities of salt is a historical fiction book set in an unnamed Arab country during the first half of the 20th century. It describes the changes in the place, a semi-arid desert, and its local Muslim inhabitants over this time period. Specifically, it shows how the local Arab communities are changed for the worse by the intrusion of Western individuals, Western corporations, and Western society as embodied by the oil corporations.
This society begins as an egalitarian community based on family ties and extended kinships. Everybody knows and trusts each other. Gates, land titles and other ways in which individuals divide up resources do not exist, and all is shared in common. Likewise guns and violence are almost non-existent as conflicts are solved slowly and surely by long and lengthy discussions.
Then Western geologists enter the scene and discover oil. Western oil corporations are quick to follow. To get access to the oilwells, and to ship them out via pipelines requires control of land, which of course is communally owned and used. To solve this dilemma, the corporations try to cajole and bribe the locals to give up rights to these lands. This often did not work, so the corporations resort to a tactic that was used against Native Americans and Africans in the previous four centuries. Specifically, the local tribes had nominal leaders. The corporate representatives would bribe these leaders with modern marvels such as the telephone, repeating guns, television, ice, etc... Slowly these local leaders would switch loyalties from their own tribes to the Westerners. Eventually, these local leaders, and their henchman, would sell out their fellow Arabs, order locals of the land needed by the oil corporations, and back up their orders with their newly acquired guns.
Overall, the egalitarian, communal society that existed was transformed into a dictatorship propped up by Western oil interests. A ruling class was created that was distinct from and unrepresentative of the people at large. Oil, and the control of its acquisition, transportation, and distribution, replaced people and communal consensus as the source of power. And this is how many of the modern Arab nations came into being. All in all this is a great book, probably the best fiction book to read to understand the thinking of Al Qaeda and roots of Arab anger at America. The cloest way to describe it is the Arab world's version of America's Grapes of Wrath; the destruction of a communal and family-based way of life by modern corporations.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Classic of modern Arabic literature
By Ronald Scheer
Published in 1984, this classic of modern Arabic literature describes the early years of oil exploration and development of the petroleum industry in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. It is told from the point of view of the Arabs themselves, the inhabitants of desert settlements whose lives are forever transformed by the appearance of American engineers who bring to an end a way of life they have known for centuries. There are many themes in this 600+ page novel, and prominent among them is the collision of cultures as Munif's unsophisticated and superstitious characters are often appalled by the behavior of the foreigners in their midst and try unsuccessfully to understand them, often finding reason enough to regard them as infidels and any attempt to accommodate them an invitation to possession by demons.
Munif's is a rambling, episodic story with a host of characters, some central to the narrative for a while and then retreating into the background. The main character, if there is one, is the community itself, the men who work for the company or who make a living in the boom town that springs up around it. We also get to know the emir, who takes up residence there and is introduced to the West through mystifying artifacts of its technology: a telescope, a radio, a stethoscope, a telephone (it is the 1930s). While the inhabitants of the town are promised untold wealth in exchange for the surrender of their way of life, what we see in the book is a gradual decline in their quality of living, and key characters disappear into the desert, grow ill and die, or are killed. At the end, one of these deaths precipitates a labor dispute that Munif leaves largely unresolved, as a sign of an Arab-American future marked by continued troubles.
It's a fascinating novel, translated by Peter Theroux, that reveals in fact very little about the crude oil industry itself. Instead, we come to know in considerable detail the values, beliefs, and life experience of its Arab characters and the fabric of daily life that holds them together. Often at odds with each other and struggling in their differences to preserve a sense of identity in a rapidly changing environment, they represent a social world that is Dickensian in its diversity. But besides that one comparison, it is a book almost unlike any other, and well worth reading for the window it opens onto a revealing view of modern Arab history.
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