ABSTRACT
The Arabist impact on US policy dates back to the late 1940s, when Washington first got actively involved in the Middle East. The Arabist tradition goes back to 1827 when Eli Smith, an upright Yankee from Yale and the Andover Theological Seminary, took off for the mountains of Lebanon to learn the Arabic language. In bringing the Arabist legacy to light, Kaplan does more than retrieve an obscure aspect of American life. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia bears a heavy responsibility for the disaster. Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban derived their radical ideas mainly from the Wahhabi ideology that rules in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family and perhaps also the government donated large sums of money for years to bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and perhaps arms as well.
