Lawrence Rosen
Power vs the People
Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East
By Elizabeth F Thompson
Harvard University Press 418pp £29.95 order from our bookshop
‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ Henry Higgins’s complaint in My Fair Lady often translates, in Western perceptions of Middle Eastern politics, into: ‘Why can’t they be more like us?’ George W Bush assumed that if we simply cleared out the old regime a democracy not unlike our own would grow naturally; Tony Blair said democracy isn’t about voting but about changing your way of thinking. But whatever its immediate political consequences, wanting others to be like us almost always entails some distortion of our shared history.
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