Fathers and Sons: The Rise and Fall of Political Dynasty in the Middle East.

• Author: Aslan, Omer
• Position: Book review

Fathers and Sons: The Riyyse and Fall of Political Dynasty in the Middle East

By M.E. McMillan

New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013, 226 pages, ISBN 9781137308115.

A decade after 9/11, the Arab revolts gave a second impetus to scholarly interest in the Middle East. A plethora of books and other academic and popular pieces have been published in the last few years. McMillan's book, Fathers and Sons, gives the reader a fine, bird's eye view account of the Arab world's journey in particular and the Muslim world in general from the time of the Prophet. McMillan's work is a historical narrative of how and why the Arab world inherited a system of dynastic succession that is blatantly un-Islamic and how that path culminated in the Arab revolts. The book, more popular than academic, is unbiased in its perspective towards Muslims/Arabs and is especially easy to read and follow.

McMillan starts his narrative with the method of succession from one Guided Caliph to another. The convening of shura to decide the Caliph in the early period of "Rightly Guided Caliphs" contrasts starkly with the later period, when the method of consultation is abandoned for patrimonial rule. The consequence was that "the caliphate would no longer be a community of the faithful but a kingdom like any other" (p. 23). McMillan traces the history of militaries as the backbone of regimes in the modern Arab world to the period of Umayyad rule as well. It was "army officers wedding themselves to their rulers" that created the authoritarian stability in the region after the 1960s. The author reminds us that "this welding of a loyal army to an elite ruling family [during Muawiya's rule during the Umayyad] became the bedrock of a political model" (p. 26).

The modern period since France's invasion of Egypt not only brought entirely new forms government such as kingdoms, which had never existed in the Arab world (p. 108), but also new ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, and later socialism. The most critical of all was the adoption of the political language of Europe. This novelty forced invention of new Arabic words corresponding to new European concepts such as 'nation' and 'constitutionalism.' For in the classical periods, "theirs [the Arabs] was a world without borders of nationality or language" (p. 151). However, the making of new words was at times done at the expense of distorting the meanings of age-old concepts. The concept of ummah illustrates this point well. Since...