Tim’s Reviews > A History of the Arab Peoples with a New Afterword > Status Update

From Ch. 22 Changing Societies (1940s and 1950s): In Jerusalem, now divided between Israel and Jordan, the Jordanian half, which included the Old City, was almost completely Arab, but a large part of the Arab bourgeoisie of Jerusalem...settled in cities outside...and it was their capital and energy which was the main cause of the rapid growth of Amman.

Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else's power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe, while those who have power can forget it, or can assume that it is part of the natural order of things and invent or adopt ideas which justify their possession of it.

Muslim writers took over the science of dream-interpretation from the Greeks, but added something of their own; it has been said that the Islamic literature of dreams is the richest of all.

The idea of a sisila, a chain of witnesses stretching from the Prophet to the end of the world, and handing on the truth by direct transmission from one generation to another, was of great importance in Islamic culture; in a sense this chain formed the true history of mankind, behind the rise and fall of dynasties and peoples.

In the long centuries of Muslim rule there were some periods of sustained and deliberate persecution of non-Muslims by Muslim rulers...such persecution was not instigated or justified by the spokesmen of Sunni Islam...the ulama were concerned to ensure that non-Muslims did not infringe the laws...but within those limits they upheld the protection which the Shariah granted them.

In the early mystics, the sense of the distance and nearness of God is expressed in the language of love: God is the sole adequate object of human love...