Really, thsi is the best line...
“(The power of such individual dignity can be seen in Arab streets today.)”
It was a great reward for reading that far in.
Written by a history illeterate without a clue.
"As with people, so with what they have created. The world is modernizing, and so the arabs must. It would be shameful not to do so. Again, no standards are available to measure modernization. Nobody can be quite positive about its alleged but elusive benefits. Nobody can say where, how or why, past honor acquired present shame. Everywhere the Arab heritage, its cities and achievement alike, is either in ruins or monumentally preserved, in a kind of limbo that will neither die nor be reborn: a panorama of medinas, casbahs, souks or markets, mosques and minarets, citadels long since converted to museums. Around ancient cities lke Fez, Algiers, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, spread European-type developments, out into what lately was open country or desert. Like Pendar's conversations, these externals are to be interpreted at several levels.
There are unities, suggestive cultural detail --- neon lights in pink and chemical blues and green, or strings of colored lightbulbs sometimes profiling a mosque; cafes where men assemble at all hours without women. Honor is symbolized architecturally in triumphal arches of plywood blazoned with heroic military slogans; in the larger than life portraits of the country's powerholder in a martial or benevolent pose, his uniform bright with medals and badges, or perhaps all-wise in a civilian suit; in a massively laid out Liberation Square usually adorned with a statuesque but deteriorating tank and arrayed flags fraying in the wind...
...the Westerner steps out of a familiar hotel, around which stand other steel-framed and glass concrete buildings. In Dubai, the Internation Trade Center staged the The World Chess Federation championship in 1986. A National Gallery opened in Jordan in 1980, and a National Museum in Doha. Boy Scouts are to be found as far away as Oman. Kuwait has a skating rink and a stock exchange which notoriously crashed amid spectacular bankruptcies; Tunis has a Horse Racing Club and a National Library; Cairo has learned societies which issue publications in French and English; in Casablanca, a clinic pioneers sex-change operations; and it is possible to play golf in Dubai and Muscat or in Morocco in Rabat and Marrakesh, and to ski at Ifrane. Research councils have been set up in Damascus, Cairo, Riyahd, Beirut. Kuwait invests its petrodollars through an investment office. Saudi Arabia contributes to the International Monetary Fund, and a prize for Science commemorates King Faisal. Soccer was introduced into the Ottoman Empire as long ago as 1908, and the national teams of Algeria and Morocco reached the 1986 finals of the Wold Cup in Mexico City. Back in 1907 the Red Crescent Society was founded as a counterpart to the Red Cross. Inter-Arab organizations exist: such as the Arab League, founded in 1945 and which now has offices abroad and organized lobbies; the Fund for Arab Economic Development; and not least of all, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The official or high-level visitor may hear that from time to time mobs have rioted and burnt down these hotels and casinos, night clubs, bars and cinemas. Are there not underpriviledged and discontented people everywhere, taking the law into their own hands? ...this reveals another level of meaning.The mobs burn down these buildings because they very well understand these symbols for what they are: the buildings have not arisen out of the demands of the society, they are facades, imitating the West in order to ward off the charge of being "backward" and "uncivilized." ... but there is no organic link between these buildings and themselves..."
The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones, 1989, pp 47-48